Annie
Diamond Member
- Nov 22, 2003
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I believe it was yesterday that I wrote that it is amazing the things that will tip a crisis into a conflagration. I didn't say it quite that way, something more like:
A group called the Black Hand. A loser from Austria. A few drawings from a newspaper in Denmark.
Well it seems the drawings might indeed be the 'spark.' There are a lot, I mean a LOT of links here. I'm not going to 'bold' his emphasis, it's well worth checking out his site:
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19801/
A group called the Black Hand. A loser from Austria. A few drawings from a newspaper in Denmark.
Well it seems the drawings might indeed be the 'spark.' There are a lot, I mean a LOT of links here. I'm not going to 'bold' his emphasis, it's well worth checking out his site:
http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19801/
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Identity Politics, Free Speech, and the Future of worldwide Liberalism, 2: a follow-up
From Islam Online:
Danish Muslim leaders warned on Saturday, February 4, of grave consequences if copies of the Noble QurÂ’an were burnt in a rally planned by Danish extremists to protest Muslim anger over cartoons mocking Prophet Muhammad (PBUH).
"All hell will break loose, if those extremists burn the QurÂ’an," Raed Halil, the head of the European Committee for Defending Prophet Muhammad, told IslamOnline.net over the phone from the Danish capital Copenhagen.
“A female member of a racist party circulated a message calling for burning copies of the Noble Qur’an in Saturday’s march,” he said.
Halil said the message incited young Danes to burn the Muslim holy book in retaliation for the burning of Danish flags by angry Muslims across the world and the boycotting of Danish products.
The extreme-right grouping Danish Front was to start its own march at 2:00 pm (1300 GMT) in Hilleroed, northeast of Copenhagen.
The 12 cartoons, first published last September by the mass-circulation Jyllands-Posten and then reprinted by several European dailies, have caused an uproar in the Muslim world and drawn a new cultural battle over freedom of speech and respect of religions.
Incensed Muslims have demonstrated against Denmark, burnt its flags and boycotted its products, while several Muslim ambassadors have been recalled in protest.
[all emphases mine]
Note the bolded text, because it draws clear (if to be expected) lines of demarcation between the actions of the rival “protest” groups:
the Danish protesters are “extremists” from the “extreme-right”—many of them members of a “racist party”—while those Muslims outraged by the publishing of the cartoons in the first place (who “protested” by burning flags, firebombing embassies, and—even here, through a spokesman, issuing active threats of “grave consequences” and promises that “All hell will break lose” should counterprotests seek to address “Muslim anger") are mere victims of some minor misunderstanding in the “new cultural battle over freedom of speech and respect of religions.”
That last bit of spin is key, because it not only shows the force of a cynical Islamic identity politics still trying to write itself in strokes that aren’t quite so obvious [update: this story seems to fit well with the thesis that the “outrage” is part of an identity politics strategy]-- but it also highlights the dilemma western proponents of identity politics have (and always will have) to face: namely, the point at which the necessary clash of soft, boutique mulitculturalism and the kernel beliefs of identity politics groups threaten to erupt into something much larger than a minor disagreement that can be fixed with a bit of superficial policy manipulation. Which is why even now you have Kos commenters contorting themselves into positions of self-righteous progressive onanism that are a wonder to behold—suddenly, free speech is not a universal right worthy of the crafting of puppet heads and the defacing of Starbucks’ windows, but instead is a culture-specific gift that needs to be filtered through the religious precepts of the culture of the Other. Unless, of course, that “Other” happens to be, say, Evangelical Christians. In which case, such extremists MUST BE SHOUTED DOWN with free speech.
Pretzel logic, clearly—and the dilemma that is at the root of an incoherent philosophical system that favors the sociology of group identity over the universality of individual rights. Ironically, George Bush, each time he argues that freedom is universal, is acting in a manner far more progressive than self-styled progressive activists.
Again: note the crux of the debate, as framed by the voices for Muslim protest, and take care to listen for the broad-stroked rhetoric—usually more carefully crafted by those who have perfected its vocabulary, cadence, emotional appeals, and key words—of the “tolerance” movement, the justificating force that cynically underpins all identity politics:
"The 12 cartoons ... have caused an uproar in the Muslim world and drawn a new cultural battle over freedom of speech and respect of religions."
Translation: “Free speech is good so long as it tolerates our right, as an identity group, to dictate which free speech is authentic and allowable. Otherwise, y’know, we get to torch shit.”
But of course, freedom of speech—reduced (for purposes of this debate) to its core, animating mandate and protection—is PRECISELY the ability to look religion in its pious face and flip it the bird. Freedom of speech includes the freedom to criticize religion, just as freedom of religion is supposed to protect the rights of the religious not to have their religion established for them by a government—a counterbalancing right that is lacking in theocratic states and in religions where pluralism is denied legitimacy.
But this lack of balance between the freedoms—rather than being exploited by the west to make its case for free speech and its necessity as the guiding principle of liberalism—is instead being exploited by neophyte identity politicians in the Muslim world, who have learned to play the victim card so quickly that our own State Department has bought into their affected outrage at victimization and religious “intolerance."¹
Somehow, it seems to escape those raised on westernized Orientalism that by calling the intolerance of intolerance “intolerant,” they have reduced the concept of tolerance itself to a cruel semantic joke—the idea being that groups formed around cultural similarities, once they have honed their group message and excommunicated the dissenters—own the narrative. Outside criticism is therefore inauthentic—always tainted by the gaze of the Other, and so only to be considered secondarily (if at all) as a valid critique.
From there, it is a short journey to asserting the absolutism of a cultural paradigm—and this happens necessarily where universality (or, for postmodernists, social contracts that rely on the trappings of what is metaphysically untenable) is surrendered to competition between identity groups over primacy of “rights” in the global sense.
This battle over the Danish cartoons highlights all of these philosophical dilemmas (which I have argued previously are the result of certain linguistic misunderstandings that are either cynically or idealistically perpetuated); and so we are brought to the point where this clash of civilizations—which in one important sense is a clash between theocratic Islamism and the west, but in another, more crucial sense, is a clash between the west and its own structural thinking, brought on by years of insinuation into our philosophy of what is, at root, collectivist thought that privileges the interpreter of an action over the necessary primacy of intent and agency and personal responsibility to the communicative chain—could conceivably become manifest over something so seemingly trivial as the right to satirize.
One regret I have is that this battle should have been fought and won in favor of intentionalism and individualism inside our own western universities years ago; instead, the victory went to our progressive academic collectivists, whose fidelity to PC culture, identity politics, free-speech zones, tolerance training courses, et al manifested themselves in a “tolerance” culture that now has the goverment looking inside individuals’ heads (hate speech, hate crime) and effectively chilling all speech by defining tolerance in an Orwellian sense of tolerating only that speech which is so bland and banal that it is unlikely to offend anyone. And now we might be forced to battle with guns and chemical weapons and fissile material rather than with confidence in our own intellectual rigor and rectitude.
The idea of liberal democracy was NEVER about such nonsense—nor was it ever about balkanizing into identity groups who, by asserting a self-defined narrative, could claim an authenticity that put them beyond criticism.
So yes, the clash of civilizations has begun. But, to fall back on a useful clicheÂ’, we have seen the enemy, and he is us (too).
[editorÂ’s note: this post is a follow-up to an earlie and more detailed post on the subject]
(h/t Allah)
related: See Michelle Malkin, Stop the ACLU ("Danish embassy set ablaze"), Danish Cartoons (via the Corner and Craig C), Reason (via Brian T), Wretchard (via Terry Hastings), The Boston Globe, and ABC News (via Craig C)
See also, Rick Moran, “At War with Modernity"; additional thoughts from Dave Price, Neil Stevens, Bill Ardolino, and Jawa Report, whose “Marx, Communism, Totalitarianism; Muhammed, Islam, Terrorism” touches on many key aspects of the debate. An excerpt:
Many of us would like to think that Islam is just another religion. That sentiment comes from a good place. Most Americans want to believe that about our fellow Americans. In fact, I would argue that America has always had a national ecumenical spirit. But such thinking is also ignorant of Islam as it is, and not as it should be. I would like Islam to be just another religion which asks only for the soul of the Muslim and not his political fealty, but that is not the case.
Rusty defends the State Department (and both a pragmatic and practical case can be made for such a defense) while taking several conservative bloggers to task for what he essentially sees as an attitude of strained equivalency that leads to a form of apologia that is, at its heart, precisely what IÂ’ve noted identity politics relies upon.
See also, TacJammer, who writes:
We are in the midst of an ongoing struggle, culture against culture, and there is no guarantee of victory. But fight we must, in big ways and small. Some of us can don a uniform; many of us have done so in the past. Most do other things, making their own individual stands right where they are, not surrendering to the ideologies of fear or tolerance of evil, but by living the lives of free men and women and exercising dearly held freedoms.
Including the freedom of speech.
In this, I donÂ’t care how you vote, nor does it matter what church you attend, or not. I donÂ’t care whether youÂ’re red state or blue, pink or green. If you value your freedom to make choices, to live your life as you see fit, respecting the rights of others, even though you disagree on some or many thingsÂ… if you will not surrender your fundamental liberties merely to save your own skin, and will not submit to dhimmitude, then stand.
****
¹I want to stress here that I am most interested in the structural philosophy underlying this ostensible “clash of civilizations”; I recognize that there are often pragmatic reasons for individual acts of compromise and conciliatory action. But when those acts become a philosophy unto themselves—and it is western liberalism that is modifying or finessing its core beliefs in order to get along—then I think we’ve reached a point of serious concern. As a real world example that doesn’t single out the failures of activist progressivism, I would suggest that foreign policy realism, today most prominent in the entrenched bureaucratic thinking of the State Department, suffers from similar philosophical difficulties
²It is important to distinguish between the pointing out of—and the protesting against—what some may see as needless provocation, and what others might characterize as effective, pointed political speech. Hell, Ted Rall teaches us that every day. Nevertheless, the potential rhetorical force is in the eye of the beholder, which is why we don’t hold back fair criticisms simply out of fear of giving offense. The restrictions we put on free speech arise out of practical concerns, one of which should not be the threat of intentional violence by those who disagree with the substance of a critique that is not meant as an act of instigatory violence. Re: the necessity of provocation, see Christopher Hitchens (h/t IP)
Posted by Jeff Goldstein
