Blasphemy, Freedom of Speech, and the War on Terror

Your mother is a fat, stupid cunt.

I bet you didn't like that, did you? You reacted in a visceral way, no doubt, with a sickening feeling gathering in the pit of your stomach that tells you no one should use ugly words like that, especially not in a public forum like this, and especially not about your mother, whom I don't even know.

Well, fuck yourself, there's a little thing called Freedom of Speech, asshole.

What? You're not buying my defense? You're still upset? You think I shouldn't have said that?

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There is a difference, my friends, between Freedom of Speech and Poor Taste. Freedom of Speech is one of the fundamental pillars of democracy, the recognition that ideas deserve protection from censorship. Our founding fathers put a lot of stock in free speech because they escaped from a world where publicly criticizing the government was a crime, where expressing dissent meant risking your life.

And so in this country we have constitutionally protected free speech, which means you have the right to say absolutely anything you want. However, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

As you are probably aware, there are riots and other forms of violence going on right now in Europe and the middle east over the publication in a Danish newspaper of some cartoons featuring images of the Prophet Mohammed. In Islam, depicting the Prophet in any way is an egregious act of blasphemy. This is common knowledge, in the same vein as the ban on pork in Judaism and on beef in Hinduism.

Here in the west, particularly for those of us of Christian European descent, it might be hard for us to imagine how a picture of Mohammed could possibly be offensive; after all, Christian art abounds with images of Christ, the Virgin, the Saints -- even, in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, the face of God Himself. The idea that a mere image could be offensive is, well, foreign to us.

But it is not for us to judge what someone else gets to be outraged over, or for us to gauge the appropriate level of sensitivity. We have got to understand that in Islam, an image of the Prophet is as horrifying as the words I used at the opening of this post.

But there's more. These were not just cartoons in which Mohammed appeared. Here is a description of the illustrations from the blog Sisyphus Shrugged: "Mohammed with a lit bomb in his turban, Mohammed with devil horns sticking out of his turban, and Mohammed informing terrorists that they had to stop blowing things up because Islam has run out of virgins to reward them with in heaven."

In other words, these were images intended to insult.

The Danish Prime Minister and his right-wing apologists here in the U.S. insist this is purely a matter of free speech; the newspaper didn't do anything wrong, it has a right to express its opinons. Imagine the response over at Little Green Footballs if tomorrow The New York Times published a cartoon of Condoleezza Rice dolled up like Aunt Jemima. There's nothing illegal about it, so how could they object?

Because it's offensive, that's why. As Sisyphus wrote so beautifully, "Free speech means that you have the right to express yourself. You even have the right to be protected by law from people you've offended who want to express their offense in illegal ways. It does not mean that if you act like a dumb [rude anglo-saxon noun] you're really a brave warrior for truth and the rights of man or anything but a really, really dumb [rude anglo-saxon noun]."

This is not to say that I find the response from the Muslim world justified or appropriate. Over at GayPatriot, they've been waiting for a liberal to condemn the violence: "Will the Lefty bloggers and Democratic mainstream disavow this type of statement? I doubt it. There is less and less distance between the American Left/Democrats and our enemies abroad."

No, I condemn the violence in the strongest possible terms. And I concur with Republicans who call for Islamic leadership and middle eastern governments to oppose the violence. The good news is, some of them have: Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora condemned the use of violence in the protests. "This has nothing to do with Islam at all," he told Future television. "Destabilizing security and vandalism give a wrong image of Islam. Prophet Mohammad cannot be defended this way."

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This is why we're losing the War on Terror.

President Bush has long denied it, but this is a religious war. It does not matter whether the U.S. is really waging this war at the behest of Evangelicals trying to empower the Zionists to usher in the return of Christ, because the man on the street in the middle east believes that's exactly what's going on. In politics, perception is truth.

It's a war of ideas. As we marched into Baghdad proclaiming liberation, the Muslim world saw American oppression. Sincere Bush supporters might see our military endeavors as a virtuous attempt to export democracy to a troubled region of the world, but the Islamists see it as part of the grand, global, eternal struggle between Good and Evil. Because they believe they are fighting for God, they will never give up.

Never.

And now we've added this grotesque miscalculation by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, which cynically claims it was making a stand for free speech when in fact it was intentionally baiting the violence which followed.

Until we can somehow convince the average Arab that we are really on their side, that we really want the best for them and their society, that we want to help them escape from oppressive theocracies and move into the modern era for their own benefit and not for America's financial gain, we will continue to lose this war of ideas.

Insulting Mohammed is a step in the wrong direction. A big one.