Western "Rights" Have Become a Sick Joke

What Happened to the Wagons?

Several days ago a conscientious Muslim attempted to murder Kurt Westergaard, a Dane. He broke into his home armed with an axe and a knife with malice aforethought. That Muslim is now facing charges of attempted murder. Kurt Westergaard is no ordinary Dane. Well, actually he is. He is an ordinary citizen, who is a professional cartoonist. He is the one who drew the cartoons that were allegedly offensive to Muslims several years ago and published in a Danish newspaper.

A fatwa was issued against the newspaper and all involved--including the cartoonist. A fatwa, you recall, is an official Islamic judgment--in this case a death sentence. It is the duty of all conscientious Muslims to carry out the judgment. Hence the attempt on Westergaard's life. The attempted murderer will have won high honour and respect amongst all conscientious Muslims everywhere in the world.

Western Europe has been through this before. About twenty-two years ago, author Salmon Rushdie published The Satanic Verses. We confess we have never read the book, having been warned off by a reviewer who called it dull. But nonetheless its author was deemed by an Islamic judge to have maligned and impugned the honour of Mohammed. Consequently, as a recent editorial in Spiegel Online pointed out

Its publication led the Iranian state and its revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, to issue a "fatwa" against Rushdie and offer a hefty bounty for his murder. This triggered several attacks on the novel's translators and publishers, including the murder of Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi. Millions of Muslims around the world who had never read a single line of the book, and who had never even heard the name Salman Rushdie before, wanted to see the death sentence against the author carried out -- and the sooner the better, so that the stained honor of the prophet could be washed clean again with Rushdie's blood.

The response in the West was palpable: the literatii, the glitterati, the cognoscenti, the educated classes, and the elites to the very last man condemned Islam and its fatwa. They circled the wagons into a defensive laager around Rushdie. Not a few boldly and fearlessly declared the superior way of Western liberalism, with its higher legal traditions of freedom of speech and the most glorious human freedom right to give offence.

Over the ensuing twenty years, however, the threats and dangers to the elites and the cognoscenti in the West had come a little bit closer to home. After all, the chattering classes had observed 9/11, the London bombings, Madrid, Bali, Jakarta, and Djerba and concluded that these Islamic people were actually serious. Moreover, during those two decades the framing and discourse about calls to Muslims to murder people in the West had changed. The reaction of the Islamic world to Western criticism of its religion and its leaders came to be

interpreted as a reaction by the Islamic world to its degradation and humiliation by the West.

Therefore, when the Danish cartoons were published four years ago (there were twelve of them, and they were exceedingly mild) and the fatwas were issued, amazingly and tellingly the wagons in the West no longer circled into a defensive laager. Instead the they raced over to stand with the fatwa, joining the chorus of disapproval. The glitterati, the cognoscenti, and the literati expressed solidarity with the Muslim mobs protesting in major European cities calling for the death of the magazine editors and the cartoonist. Whatever happened to the so-called higher and superior right of free speech?

This time, however, in contrast to the Rushdie case, hardly anyone has showed any solidarity with the threatened Danish cartoonists -- to the contrary. [Novelist Gunter] Grass . . . expressed his understanding for the hurt feelings of the Muslims and the violent reactions that resulted. Grass described them as a "fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act," in the process drawing a moral equivalence between the 12 cartoons and the death threats against the cartoonists. Grass also stated that: "We have lost the right to seek protection under the umbrella of freedom of expression."

"I believe that the republication of these cartoons has been unnecessary, it has been insensitive, it has been disrespectful and it has been wrong," commented then-British Home Secretary Jack Straw, referring to the decision by several European media organizations to republish the caricatures. Meanwhile, Vorwärts, the party organ of Germany's center-left Social Democratic Party -- one of the country's two largest political parties -- defended freedom of expression in general, but gave the opinion that in this special case, the Danes had "abused" the freedom, "not in a legal sense, but in a political and moral one." . . . .

Prominent German psychoanalyst Horst-Eberhard Richter advised: "The West should refrain from any provocations that produce feelings of debasement or humiliation." Of course, Richter left open the question of whether "the West" should also refrain from the wearing of mini skirts, eating pork and the legalization of same-sex partnerships in order to avoid causing any feelings of debasement and humiliation in the Islamic world.

Had the Muhammed cartoons been reprinted by the whole German press, then newspaper readers could have seen for themselves how excessively harmless the 12 cartoons were and how bizarre and pointless the whole debate had become. Instead, the assessment was left to "experts" who had in the past defended every criticism of the pope and the Church as well as every blasphemous piece of art in the name of freedom of opinion, but who, in the case of the Muhammad cartoons, suddenly held the view that one must take other people's religious feelings into consideration.

What the West has shown through this spineless hypocrisy is that its arrogant pretensions about human rights are empty cant. When it comes down to it, these so-called fundamental rights of Western society are not worth dying for. Therefore, they are not worth living for, either. They are mere hypothetical abstractions, to be discarded as soon as it may end up costing the liberal elites something.

But there is another sub-text running through all of this: the nauseating paternalistic condescension amongst the Western elites which sees Muslims as ignorant, backward, and easily offended primitives. Western elites quickly justified to themselves the suspension of the rights of free speech because, by implication, Muslim people are childish and backward and it was unfair to subject them to the robust maturity that free speech requires. Just as a parent has an obligation to curb "free speech" when criticising children for the sake of a child's delicate sensibilities, so the West had a duty to condescend to the feelings of Muslim people. If a child throws a tanty when criticised, a wise and superior parent will withhold criticism--surely.

It has not yet dawned upon these elitist self-indulgent, self-congratulatory clowns in the West that conscientious Muslims do not think of the West and its elites as superiors, and themselves as backward, childish inferiors. In fact, the conscientious Muslim views Mr Jack Straw and Gunter Grass and their ilk as ignorant, perverted, depraved, backward, diabolical, and cursed. And in so many ways they are right. Both the conscientious Muslim and the conscientious Western liberal alike are ignorant, perverted, depraved, etc. Western elites in their vanity and self-absorbed arrogance and conscientious Muslims in their murderous intent are alike in that they both share a common disdain and hatred of the Messiah of God. They are peas in the same pod. Sooner or later, however, the West is going to regret its arrogance and condescension. Its policy of de-escalation will win it nothing.

The only problem is the other side isn't thinking about de-escalation. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie is still in effect, and the attempt to murder Kurt Westergaard last week wasn't the first attempt to carry out a death sentence for an instance in which no crime had been committed. Islam may be the "religion of peace" in theory, but it looks different in practice.

In being confronted with conscientious Islam, Western liberal elites have unfortunately proven the truth of Islam's criticism of the West--that is, that the West consists of nothing more nor less than indulgent, pleasure seeking, self-absorbed sybarites. Poke them, threaten them just a little and they become puppets and tools.