Oliver Kamm: Liberal over-sensitivity to the beliefs of others is undermining freedom of speech, so giving reactionaries an easy ride
... The degeneration of progressive idealism has many roots. But among the most important is the instinct that the ideas of Western liberty are specific to time and place — that they are Eurocentric. Almost coincident with the revolutions of 1989, which testified to the power of the human instinct for liberty, was a far more atavistic political movement.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in February 1989 his fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for writing a novel that satirised Islam.
Western governments, religious leaders and political figures were more embarrassed than appalled. In effect, they acknowledged the offence and took issue only with the sentence. The chief rabbi in Great Britain, Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, remarked: “Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.”
Such ignorant, boorish heedlessness of the principles of a free society and the value of the novelist’s imagination sits easily on the political Right and with religious authority. Yet even then it had its left-wing adherents too. In his invaluable — because so often unintentionally revealing — diaries, Tony Benn records a meeting of the left-wing Campaign Group of Labour MPs in February 1989.
He refers to the late Bernie Grant, who was among Britain’s first black MPs: “Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other cultures. He didn’t agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks, he maintained.”
This was one day after the leader of a foreign theocratic state had sought to procure the murder of a British writer for his ideas. Few then or now would be as openly contemptuous of the life of the mind as Grant.
Yet the notion that freedom of expression is a specifically Western obsession that needs to be balanced against the demands of social cohesion has become commonplace in today’s debates. It is part of the political mainstream; part of supposedly progressive thinking, assuming that the sensibilities of minority groups should be protected.
These impulses littered the controversy about the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad. The offence caused to believers has become a catch-all explanation for religious violence and intimidation.
When, last year, suicide bombers attacked the Danish Embassy in Pakistan, killing six people and wounding more than 20, a Danish journalist writing for The Guardian commented that the attack was “of course, indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath”.
The “of course, but” formulation is worse than a dreary cliché. It indicates a liberalism evacuated of content. Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. ...
Read entire article at Times (UK)
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Iran, issued in February 1989 his fatwa calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie, a British citizen, for writing a novel that satirised Islam.
Western governments, religious leaders and political figures were more embarrassed than appalled. In effect, they acknowledged the offence and took issue only with the sentence. The chief rabbi in Great Britain, Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, remarked: “Both Mr Rushdie and the Ayatollah have abused freedom of speech.”
Such ignorant, boorish heedlessness of the principles of a free society and the value of the novelist’s imagination sits easily on the political Right and with religious authority. Yet even then it had its left-wing adherents too. In his invaluable — because so often unintentionally revealing — diaries, Tony Benn records a meeting of the left-wing Campaign Group of Labour MPs in February 1989.
He refers to the late Bernie Grant, who was among Britain’s first black MPs: “Bernie Grant kept interrupting, saying that the whites wanted to impose their values on the world. The House of Commons should not attack other cultures. He didn’t agree with the Muslims in Iran, but he supported their right to live their own lives. Burning books was not a big issue for blacks, he maintained.”
This was one day after the leader of a foreign theocratic state had sought to procure the murder of a British writer for his ideas. Few then or now would be as openly contemptuous of the life of the mind as Grant.
Yet the notion that freedom of expression is a specifically Western obsession that needs to be balanced against the demands of social cohesion has become commonplace in today’s debates. It is part of the political mainstream; part of supposedly progressive thinking, assuming that the sensibilities of minority groups should be protected.
These impulses littered the controversy about the publication in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2006 of cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad. The offence caused to believers has become a catch-all explanation for religious violence and intimidation.
When, last year, suicide bombers attacked the Danish Embassy in Pakistan, killing six people and wounding more than 20, a Danish journalist writing for The Guardian commented that the attack was “of course, indefensible, but it raises questions about the wisdom of the much-debated cartoons and Danish reactions to Muslim wrath”.
The “of course, but” formulation is worse than a dreary cliché. It indicates a liberalism evacuated of content. Those who prize social unity and order will tend to believe that people’s deepest feelings and beliefs should be accorded respect. ...