Slow Societal Suicide
Mark Steyn's column this week in the Orange County Register takes a look at the Western response to the "outrage" over the knighting of Salman Rushdie. He traces the roots of the event back to all the flaccid responses the West has made to islamist outrages of the past.
A year or so after the Ayatollah Khomeini took out an Islamist mob contract on Salman Rushdie in 1989, the novelist appeared, after elaborate security arrangements, on a television arts show in London. His host was Melvyn Bragg, a longtime British telly grandee, and what was striking was how quickly the interview settled down into the usual cozy, literary chit-chat. Lord Bragg took Rushdie back to his earlier pre-fatwa work. "After your first book," drawled Bragg, "which was not particularly well-received."
That's supposed to be the worst a novelist has to endure. His book will be "not particularly well-received" – i.e., some twerp reviewers will be snotty about it in the New Yorker and the Guardian. In the cozy world of English letters, it came as a surprise to find that being "not particularly well-received" meant foreign governments putting a bounty on your head and killing your publishers and translators. Even then, the literary set had difficulty taking it literally. After news footage of British Muslims burning Rushdie's book in the streets of English cities, BBC arts bores sat around on talk-show sofas deploring the "symbolism" of this attack on "ideas."
There was nothing symbolic about it. They burned the book because they couldn't burn Rushdie himself. If his wife and kid had swung by, they'd have gladly burned them, just as the mob was happy to burn to death 37 Turks who'd made the mistake of being in the same hotel in Sivas as one of the novelist's translators. When British Muslims called for Rushdie to be killed, they meant it. From a mosque in Yorkshire, Mohammed Siddiqui wrote to the Independent to endorse the fatwa by citing Sura 5, verses 33-34, from the Quran:
"The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land."
That last sanction apparently wasn't an option……
……This is where we came in two decades ago. We should have learned something by now. In the Muslim world, artistic criticism can be fatal. In 1992, the poet Sadiq Abd al-Karim Milalla also found that his work was "not particularly well-received": he was beheaded by the Saudis for suggesting Muhammad cooked up the Quran by himself. In 1998, the Algerian singer Lounès Matoub described himself as "ni Arabe ni musulman" (neither Arab nor Muslim) and shortly thereafter found himself neither alive nor well. These are not famous men. They don't stand around on Oscar night, congratulating themselves on their "courage" for speaking out against Bush-Rove fascism. But, if we can't do much about freedom of expression in Iran and Saudi Arabia, we could at least do our bit to stop Saudi-Iranian standards embedding themselves in the West.
Many people have noticed the failure of the Western media to publish any criticism of the outrageous behavior of the islamists. They report the fatwas and the death threats as straight news, without a trace of criticism. They have been either intimidated by violence or cowed by an overbearing political correctness. But the media and the Western governments simply will not stand up for free speech if it might generate a well coordinated spate of "spontaneous" outrage from the "Muslim street". (Those spontaneous events always take a few days to get rolling while the proper flags are obtained for ignition and the effigy gets dressed properly. But the media never even questions that. They report it as "spontaneous".) Steyn calls all of this "slow societal suicide".
Unfortunately, he's right.
Media, World news | Gaius Sunday, 24 June , 2007
By Chris, Sunday, 24 June , 2007 @ 3:12 pm
Some time in the near future, if this trend of ignoring Muslim outrage over contrived slights continues, there will be a counter-protest staged alongside a Muslim one. If the police break up the Muslim demonstration (which I doubt will happen), then the balance will shift back towards enforcing Western sensibilities.
Far more likely, however, is the police breaking up the counter-demonstration, or doing nothing, which will lead to the next one being a lot more organized and well-armed. This clash of civilizations, if that is what Muslim demonstrators insist upon, will happen, one way or another.