"People Know The Consequences"

And if they don't, they should by now.
Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation and not based on people's desires.

Although Muslims may not agree about the idea of freedom of expression, even non-Muslims who espouse it say it comes with responsibilities. In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike....

Within liberal democracies, freedom of expression has curtailments, such as laws against incitement and hatred.

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.

So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

It is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world's population was protected.
Normally I would argue that we don't need a law, since the mores are so strong: although the quantity of mockery is not none, in America it's really very close to none without the bother and expense of legal actions.

This in a culture that produces regular, ongoing mockery and testing of its own core belief system. We invented Heavy Metal music, which was little more than an exercise in blasphemy. We make movies and television shows that mock the religion shared by the vast majority of Americans both living today and historically. So this sensitivity isn't part of a general commitment to anti-blasphemy, it's part of a general commitment to be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims.

Apparently this is not enough, however. And you know the consequences for not submitting.

17 comments:

MikeD said...

In my opinion, Imam Choudary is welcome to take his happy ass back to Pakistan if he is unhappy with British law and culture. He doesn't believe in freedom of expression? Then perhaps rather than hide behind the very freedoms he criticizes, perhaps he should practice what he preaches, and shut the hell up.

E Hines said...

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of whose freedom of movement is being restricted--I'm near to saying, given how vastly intelligent Choudary is, that this is a deliberate distortion (I'll elide the cynically cheap shot about torture). Muslims' movements aren't restricted at all, only those Muslims known or suspected to be terrorists or plotting terrorism.

So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

This is an even more basic...misunderstanding. Far from the citizens' sanctity placed at risk by "allowing" (no Choudary presumption there) expressions of free speech, the French government magnified that sanctity by declining to presume to interfere with a right inherent in every man--to speak his mind publicly.

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

Funny I do not believe in the torture bits. So wanting me to accept the killing journalists for sport bits on that is absurd and obscene.

Grim said...

Well, in combination with "rendition" it's hard to deny the validity of that complaint. Extraordinary rendition did turn people over to governments that applied no-joke tortures to their prisoners on a number of occasions.

I'm of the opinion that America and the UK both do pretty well at balancing a commitment to freedom with a desire not to offend Muslims. We support free expression, but we also restrain ourselves most of the time to not be gratuitously offensive except to Christians. There's a kind of sense that we have a right to be offensive to Christians because America and the UK are both of Christian heritage, so it's not beating up on anyone but ourselves and our own heritage.

But apparently for some, anything except a zero-tolerance policy toward blasphemy from an Islamic perspective is unacceptable. The claim is that God himself intends that you should not blaspheme the prophet. My sense is that, if that is God's will, he can enforce it without your help.

Blasphemy can serve as a useful test of claims of sacredness. I think we find some things in life that are really sacred, and no blasphemer can blaspheme them: the attempt is laughable. We meet mothers who are totally in love with their babies, and there's no way to mock that without making yourself look like a fool.

For that matter, Metal strikes me sometimes as hilariously funny. I don't mind what they do at all, because I think everything really sacred is already beyond their reach. They are just finding the false claims to sacredness, and blowing up those claims is a positive service.

Ymar Sakar said...

Slaves are meant to obey. They didn't obey.

The Left and Islam are in an alliance, however there are certain codes of behavior that Leftists cannot violate. Or else...

Ymar Sakar said...

I'm of the opinion that America and the UK both do pretty well at balancing a commitment to freedom with a desire not to offend Muslims.

A lot of things that offend Muslims, they generally don't talk about, because it has something to do with the Left's sex slave market place. The Muslims don't like it, but their alliance forbids them mentioning some things, if only out of public deception and hiding. But the Arabs know what the imams are talking about when sermons mention America's evil and corruption.

Things like feminism can't even be covered up, at all, when exported or seen by foreigners.

Texan99 said...

It's an odd way of thinking: that people engaging in rude mockery put their lives at risk. To my mind, the risk came from tolerating the presence of people whose response to feeling offended is to commit murder. It's not like this is the first time these jerks hit the law-enforcement radar.

We don't normally tolerate this line of thought: women who persist in being sexually attractive don't "risk" rape; people who keep their savings in banks don't "risk" armed robbery; black people who march for civil rights don't "risk" lynching--no matter how profoundly aware they may have been of the character defects of their enemies.

Anonymous said...

Someone should point out, that if one is allowed to censor things which are offensive, and incite violence. The Koran could easily be one of the first things to get axe.

Grim said...

...people who keep their savings in banks don't "risk" armed robbery...

We don't say that, but that is why banks are insured. The point of insurance is to convert uncertainty into risk. It's uncertain which banks will be robbed this year; but if you buy an insurance policy, you can have a known risk of losing money to robbery (i.e., I know that if I am not robbed, I'll be out the cost of the insurance policy and no more; if I am robbed, I'll be made good by the policy). It's much easier to do business with risk than with uncertainty.

Which is why it's not such bad advice, though it is always regarded as offensive by some, to suggest to women that they should take some means to ensure their safety if they go out drinking, especially at night or in areas that have high rates of crime. Travel in groups, stay out of dark alleys, consider having your designated driver carry a handgun. It's uncertain how many women will be raped tonight, but you can manage the risk with certain measures.

The counterargument -- that we're putting blame on the women who get raped, when 100% of the blame belongs to the rapist -- is flawed because it is based on a kind of equivocation. Of course 100% of the moral blame for the crime belongs to the criminal; but banks still carry insurance, because it is wise.

From my perspective, the cleric is inviting us to see him as a risk to be managed. "You know the consequences" implies that, while it is uncertain how many Westerners shall be murdered for blasphemy, we can be sure there will be some. We naturally will want to convert that uncertainty to a risk we can manage. I think there are several means of management available, from insurance policies to firearms and worse.

If he doesn't like some of those means -- he complains about rendition and torture -- perhaps he should consider whether he wants to be in the category of risks to be managed. That's a choice he gets to make.

Texan99 said...

Right, we expect people to take action to mitigate the risks they're obviously aware of, and if we sympathize with them sufficiently, we participate in the cost and effort of the mitigation ourselves. We don't let that necessity draw us into language that sounds like we're excusing the rapist, robber, or lyncher.

There's a strange difficulty lately separating those two concepts. I lock my house at night so as to increase my security when I'm sleeping. I may resent the bad guy who makes the lock necessary, but I make my own decision about my safety. It doesn't occur to me to think I'm provoking an weak-minded intruder by failing to use a strong enough lock, still less to excuse his intrusion. If I catch him at it, I think he deserves to be shot and killed. That judgment has nothing to do with my sober assessment of risk. But to hear people talk, you'd think the French journalists suckered some poor jihadist into murder by stimulating uncontrollable emotions in him, and they therefore were primarily to blame for "creating a risk." Might they be to blame for being coarse and insulting? Sure. What's that got to do with murder?

Personally, I'd arm French journalists and French police, which seems like the best risk mitigation at present. Then I wouldn't lose any sleep over terrorists who were killed coming through the front door of the magazine office, no matter how provoked their feelings were. I'm not sure how it got to be anyone's job but theirs to figure out how to control their own trigger fingers in the face of emotional uproar. A good place for people who can't learn to do that is prison, if not the grave. They certainly don't belong on the street.

Ymar Sakar said...

The counterargument -- that we're putting blame on the women who get raped, when 100% of the blame belongs to the rapist -- is flawed because it is based on a kind of equivocation. Of course 100% of the moral blame for the crime belongs to the criminal; but banks still carry insurance, because it is wise.

The counter misses the point. The point the Left is making is that these blacks and women belong to the Left. You don't get to decide for these slaves what they should or shouldn't do about crime, only the Left gets to decide. Those women are not responsible or to blame for it, any more than they were when the KKK accused blacks of raping white women. That's because it's a matter of chain of command and ownership, and if you attempt to place responsibility or blame on women, you are elevating women to an independence that is illegal against Leftist authority or anyone who actually owns those women.

There is no counter argument against that, because people are too blind and lazy to realize that this is actually the core of the argument being made originally.

Blacks don't think they are responsible for black on black crime. Why? Cause slaves aren't responsible for such things, only the masters and the owners are responsible. Society is responsible for it. Because society owns those blacks, and the blacks realize this, even if they refuse to say it explicitly.

Do we sue a dog or punish it, when it breaks a public order and cleanness law or do we punish the owner? It would be crazy for society to kill every pet merely because the pet violated some ordinance or property laws. The owner is responsible for the pet's behavior, and if the owner is not punished, then there's little point in punishing the pet. The pet doesn't understand these things.

Which is why it's not such bad advice, though it is always regarded as offensive by some, to suggest to women that they should take some means to ensure their safety if they go out drinking, especially at night or in areas that have high rates of crime.

Of course it is offensive. If anyone wanted to whip you dog, Grim, for it trespassing on their territory instead of dealing with you directly, you would be offended as well, most likely.

People underestimate the Left and think they are arguing based on some common shared Western sense or morality. They do not know what it is they are facing here.

Ymar Sakar said...

But to hear people talk, you'd think the French journalists suckered some poor jihadist into murder by stimulating uncontrollable emotions in him, and they therefore were primarily to blame for "creating a risk." Might they be to blame for being coarse and insulting? Sure. What's that got to do with murder?

Allow me to translate that.

It's basically what this side might call "suicide by cop". You go into an area with beware of dogs sign, then you start hitting the dogs, then you get killed by dogs. That's what they think of the cartoon people baiting Islamic Jihad.

They don't say it. Cause they are Leftists, obviously they would be lying no matter what they said to you.

Texan99 said...

Right. Back to the difference between risk and blame. If I pop a grizzly bear on the nose, I shouldn't be surprised when he eats me. But a grizzly bear is not something I'm prepared to assign moral blame to, so let's use people in our though experiment instead. We could compare these two situations: (1) I said something someone didn't like, and he shot and killed me because he was irritable and entitled; or (2) I threatened a mother's baby, and she shot and killed me in the belief it was the only way to save her baby. I draw a sharp distinction between the morality of the thin-skinned guy and the morality of the mother, even though I may have had equal access to information about how risky my behavior was in both cases.

In other words, in deciding whether the jihadists should be excoriated by all responsible people speaking in public, after which they should be hunted down and killed by the police, I focus on the morality of their decision to respond to a visual insult with murder. I don't focus on whether we already knew they were eelbrains who would kill a bunch of people over a cartoon. Their guilt has little or nothing to do with the tactical decision whether we should have been ready for them with guns at the doors of the magazine office, though of course that decision has everything to do with our safety and survival.

Similarly, I wouldn't normally call something "suicide by cop" if the cop inexplicably and unjustifiably guns someone down out of the blue. I call it "suicide by cop" when the cop responds to what any reasonable person would recognize as a severe threat to life or limb of the cop or an innocent bystander, by killing the bad guy. So I'd contrast, for instance, the 12-year-old kid in Cincinnati with Michael Brown. One died because some cops shot a little kid who was holding a BB gun about 3 seconds after they laid eyes on him. The other died because he tried to wrestle a cop's gun away from him rather than submit to arrest.

Grim said...

Ymar,

The point the Left is making is that these blacks and women belong to the Left. You don't get to decide for these slaves what they should or shouldn't do about crime, only the Left gets to decide.... it's a matter of chain of command and ownership... illegal against Leftist authority or anyone who actually owns those women.

...slaves aren't responsible for such things, only the masters and the owners are responsible. Society is responsible for it. Because society owns those blacks, and the blacks realize this, even if they refuse to say it explicitly.


I have to admit that I rarely read your remarks, since there's little point in discussing anything with you. This, however, is by far the worst thing you've ever written that I've happened to read.

There's no logic to the claim that feminists or black activists -- those most attached to the Left among the whole classes you blithely sweep into slavery -- are slaves merely doing their masters' will. They are plainly pursuing their own interests. Their interests may be right, wrong, bad or foolish, but they are nevertheless theirs. To suggest that this rises out of an unacknowledged admission of slavery, of ownership by 'society,' is an insult even to Al Sharpton, which given his record is damned hard to pull off.

Don't come peddling this around here anymore. Sell it somewhere else.

Grim said...

Tex,

I'm perhaps more inclined to assign moral responsibility to animals than you are -- training horses is just one occasion to realize that they often know perfectly well when they're doing wrong, and are very blameworthy for their efforts in those directions. Grizzly bears have a kind of moral code that I respect, and that I think I even understand: much like John Locke, they assert a sort of property right over the parts of nature they habitually use (and they have habits so reliable that they wear grooves into the ground along their regular tracks), and they will defend this right with whatever force they regard as necessary. If you don't invade their property, they'll almost certainly leave you be; but only because you're a higher animal, unlike the bees or other smaller creatures they'll eat for their subsistence. But even as a higher being, if you intrude in a way that suggests to them that you might steal from them or threaten them, they'll kill you if they think they can do so at a reasonable level of risk to themselves. Indeed, grizzly bears are almost exactly like Locke's vision of human beings in the state of nature; perhaps they are his best argument.

That said, I agree that there are differences in cases. A woman defending her child is due a lot of deference in thinking about what constitutes reasonable force in the face of threats. A man defending his religion... well... how much does God need defending? Reasonably, it seems that God is probably beyond our power; rationally, then, God probably doesn't require much defense.

But of course, this means we have to accept that reason has some role in moral accountability. That proposition has been somewhat in decline of late.

Ymar Sakar said...

There's no logic to the claim that feminists or black activists -- those most attached to the Left among the whole classes you blithely sweep into slavery -- are slaves merely doing their masters' will.

The Left's system of faith is not based on logic. It is based on belief. You have always looked away from them, whether because of their ties to Democrats who you have a history with or for some other reason, but no amount of ignoring them will change what they are.

Your emotions are not strong enough to handle the truth, when will you realize that and stop jumping to conclusions, Grim. You talk to so many filthy Leftists that you think I don't realize it? You tolerate them, yet you refuse to see what they are, by criticizing me. Have fun with that, it's contemptible weakness nonetheless.

Grim said...

I think your contempt is eminently survivable.