Please consider the following news
stories;
At the Jaipur literary festival, Sir
Salman Rushdie was due to speak, an opportunity for the people at the
festival to hear one of the most important voices in the world of
literature. This sadly was not to be the case. A handful of angry
Islamic fundamentalists decided to kick up a storm over the issue.
Fearing hurting the feelings of a set of religious nutters, the local
government decided to not to let the great author speak. Nick Cohen
(a man I disagree with on about as many issues as I agree with him
on), has written up what is probably the best overview of the whole travesty. Effectively a spineless local government decided that
appealing to a few vocal sections of the community (perhaps to
prevent violence as they claim, perhaps to improve their standing
amongst said community), is far more important than to defend free
speech, art and culture. This is a dark time for the “secular
democracy” that is India, instead revealing a darker side, one of
barbarism, savagery and fear.
If that sort of thing could happen in a
“liberal” country, one can rightly imagine that the situation is
far worse in less liberal places. A journalist, Hamza Kashgari, has
recently been deported from Malaysia to Saudi Arabia, where he risks
facing the death penalty. His crime? A tweet considered offensiveabout the prophet Mohammed. This is of course only the latest, in an
almost endless list of horrific actions taken by the Saudi regime. I
know it is easy become desensitised to the actions of the regime
given the countless stories we hear of the unspeakable actions, but
just think, a tweet, 140 characters of text could cost a person his life.
Its nice to think that the
“enlightened” west is beyond such small minded bullying, except
of course it isn't. A few weeks ago a 16 year old American girl by
the name of Jessica Ahlquist found herself inundated with abuse andthreats, including some against her life. What crime could she have
done to warrant such treatment in the liberal, secular, tolerant
United States of America. Arson? Vandalism? Burning something down
after vandalising it? Well...Asking for a large overtly Christian
prayer banner to be removed from school auditorium (and she was not
the first person to object to the banner). Her campaign eventually
led to a Judge ordering the banner taken down. The reasons for this
should be obvious, a Christian prayer in the auditorium sends a clear
message to those students who are not Christian: “This school has a
Christian identity, it is superior to your faith or lack thereof”
(A clear violation of America's many rules on the separation of
church and state). Undoubtedly such a stance would have opponents,
yet instead of a sensible debate and discussion of the issue followed
by acceptance of a court ruling, what has instead followed was a
barbaric display of bullying and intimidation. As with the banner, a
clear message is being put forward: “Do not challenge us, or you
will be tormented into silence”. And so that's how it is, instead
of celebrating someone courageously standing up for the rights of
minorities, people from without the community are doing what they can
to destroy her. As an illustration of the level of cruelty being
unleashed towards an innocent teenager, the Wisconsin State Journal
reports that florists are no longer willing to deliver to her.
At least such things couldn't happen in
Britain right? Wrong! Consider the case of University College
London, a bastion of free thought and expression. Well when their
atheist, secularist and humanist society had an issue of the popular
webcomic; Jesus and Mo on their website, the University Student Union threw a massive strop and began strong-arming them to remove it.
Rather than siding with freedom of expression, something that is
supposedly sacred in academia, the union instead supported
censorship, on the grounds that some Muslim students were offended by
it (I'm going to go out on a limb and assume Christian students
weren't too hot on it either). Do religious people have a right to be
offended by webcomics or other publications that are critical towards
them? Of course they do. That is the sort of debate that and
discussion a student union should encourage. But trying to force a
society to take down a popular webcomic link because some group
weren't happy about what it said about their beliefs (as opposed to
saying anything about them as individuals), is unbelievably craven.
This case is important to note because, while the humanist society
have faced harassment over a simple webcomic that criticised
religion, religious societies have almost free reign to do as they
please. There have been cases of religious societies at UCL bringing
speakers who take genuinely homophobic, misogynistic and hateful viewpoints. Yet these speakers are welcomed with open arms and indeed
criticism of them is condemned as an attack on religion. It is quite
clear that in terms of freedom of speech, secularists are largely
maligned against, at UCL (and quite possibly in the wider academic
world as well).
These are only a few examples, yet
there are hundred if not thousands of similar stories from around the
world. Looking at the news over the past few weeks and months from
around the world it is hard not to see a worrying trend developing.
Specifically the almost relentless assault against secularism,
liberalism and freedom of speech. These attacks stem exclusively from
religious hardliners (for theirs is a thin-skinned god with some
notable self esteem issues). But perhaps what is most worrying is the
eagerness with which supposedly non-religious organisations or
individuals enable of even encourage them.
It would be easy enough to dismiss this
as simply a right wing phenomenon but that is simply not the case.
While many of those with fundamentalist views do find themselves on
the right, they have always had more than their fair share of those
on the left playing the role of useful idiot. Whether it is the so
called liberals currently defending the misogynistic racist
fundamentalist Ron Paul (Something Megan Carpentier covered excellently) to Ken Livingstone having embraced the homophobic,
anti-Semitic hate preacher Yusuf al-Qaradawi a few years back.
All fairly grim news, but in spite of this I do remain hopeful. Rather than seeing this as religious extremists winning I see this as their last desperate acts to retain power, a proverbial hail Mary pass. As science and reason challenge the more outlandish claims made by religion that fundamentalists rely on to justify their extreme views. Their time is nearly up and they know it, but that doesn't mean that they intend to give up easily.
