The notion that someone should curb her opinions even when they are not personally insulting, slanderous or threatening in order to spare the feelings of other people is noxious. It is doubly noxious when done in the name of religion. One cannot imagine such a debate going on between, for example, an omnivore and a vegetarian over the right of an individual to choose what she will or will not eat. In many liberal circles today, vegetarians are in attack mode against those who eat meat because of their own personal choice to avoid it, usually for moral reasons (though there are good ecological arguments for not eating it).
There is a growing circle of Moral Majoritarians who have designated themselves as the moral guides and dictators of human behavior and they learned their lessons well….from Stalin, Hitler, Mao and others. This New Totalitarianism needs to be outed and resisted with all our strength. The stakes are nothing less than secular democracy and civilization. But the NT followers will do all they can to pretend that religion has no role in terrorism, because this would completely annihilate their m.o, that US “imperialism” and poverty are at the root of Islamic violence. This is of course the message our own president is now broadcasting, whether out of plain fear or out of sincerity. Either way it is distasteful and dangerous.
It is important to note that those who criticize Islam are NOT indulging in ad hominem attacks against individual Muslims any more than those who criticize Roman Catholicism for clerical sexual abuse of minors are criticizing individual practicing Catholics. Muslims like the one below seem intellectually unable to distinguish between attacks on radical Islam for its quite demonstrable crimes against human rights and attacks on individual Muslims, which are nonexistent. Muslims have been so brainwashed by their authoritarian religion and by their lack of experience living in a society where the secular state is separate from religion that they are unable to comprehend the difference between attacks on ideas and attacks on individuals. It is this mental paralysis that makes it impossible to hold any kind of rational logical dialogue with an observant Muslim.
Accordingly, Muslims will continue to demand as their right the conformity of all nonMuslims and secular states to Muslim sensibilities and traditions. There is no compromise possible on the part of Muslims, or at least the more conservative traditional ones that strictly adhere to the qu-ran and the hadith. This is not even a case of bad manners being confused with hate speech. It is not bad manners to criticize Islam or Mohammed (or any other religion or god). It is bad manners if you confront a Muslim and tell him that he is an abusive violent sexist……even when he IS. You might not want to provoke Muslim wrath, however, so it is doubtful whether this confrontation will occur every often.
However, if you attack Islam, you will provoke even more wrath. But that’s par for the course and not avoidable. Until and less Muslims acknowledge the validity of dissent, there is nothing more to do. And there is certainly no compulsion to soften one’s speech or opinions just to sooth the savage Muslim breast/beast. Unfortunately this often results in acts of violence against the dissenter, as we have seen in Paris, Denmark, and just about everywhere else. And these victims are not alone. The murder of Muslims for belonging to a different sect or branch of Islam has been customary for millennia and shows no sign of easing up. In effect Muslims have issued a global blanket blackmail: curb your freedoms, conform to our religious precepts, or we will kill you. Liberals and the left have chosen the former without hesitation, and in so doing have become enemies of democracy alongside Islam.
Our biggest enemies in this battle are not Muslims but apologetic liberals and leftists. They may not like Islam themselves but they hate the US and secularism and the latitude granted free speech more. There would be far fewer attacks on atheism and secularism from the liberals and the left were the latter not already in the forefront of the Hate America movement, a movement generated by Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald, Juan Cole, Chris Hedeges and others which has now sided with religion and by inference radical Islam by charging “rational atheists” with being “in the service of state power..”(Greenwald, The Guardian,April 2008). While these politically addled individuals make routine use of our freedom of speech, they see no contradiction in supporting foreign countries and religions that have explicitly set out to abolish those freedoms. Maybe Chomsky and Greenwald et al are just the first in the line of attack, to be followed by other slavish liberals desperate to prove themselves as free of religious and racial prejudice….so desperate that they are compromising and submitting to Islam without a word of protest.
- Lorna Salzman
