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Faith, fervour and free speech

By Moira Clarke - posted Tuesday, 25 September 2012


In October 2006 the Sydney Imam, Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilali, delivered a Ramadam sermon in which he excused the convicted gang rapist, Bilal Skaf, declaring him innocent. Hilaly said that the true responsibility for such crimes lay with women, those who did not keep themselves veiled and, preferably, hidden away from the public eye.

Throughout the ensuing uproar, the imam’s supporters claimed that his remarks had been taken out of context. I wondered whether this was true, so I googled for the transcript, found it, read it, and was horrified.

Hilaly had compared women to cat meat. If such meat was left uncovered and the cat came along and ate it, whose fault was it, the cat’s or the uncovered meat’s?

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It had never before occurred to me that someone in Australia, a community leader, a teacher commanding moral authority would be ‘allowed’ to say such things. Surely we had anti-discrimination laws; were they not in effect here? I was distressed. I couldn’t sleep. I dreaded to imagine what the victims and their families would be going through – the sheik and his cat meat were top of the news for days, so there would be little chance of escape.

Now that the national spotlight was on Hilaly it became apparent that he was in the habit of making controversial comments. These included assertions that the Holocaust was exaggerated, Muslims had more right to Australia than dishonest ‘convicts’, and 9/11 was God’s work against oppressors.

I turned to the BBC’s online coverage of the story and worked through hundreds of comments from members of the public. These were disappointing. Many of Hilaly’s supporters claimed that, due to that most cherished of liberties, free speech, the imam had a right to say these things and therefore should not be criticised. There was a profound, almost wilful misunderstanding here. Fortunately there were plenty on board to point out the bleeding obvious, that free speech is a two-way street, and Hilaly had set himself up for as much criticism as could be mustered.

Those demanding free speech — true free speech, as a two-way discourse — won me over. I realised that no matter how much we might loathe Hilaly’s words, if we really want to live in a society where we can be aware of unpalatable points of view, discuss them and explain why they are wrong, we must let him speak.

Which brings us to recent events.

You’d have to be living in an underground bunker to be unaware of the riots, violence and murders perpetrated in various parts of the world over the past couple of weeks, all because of a sordid, low-grade film, ‘Innocence of Muslims’. The death toll, as I write, has reached 49. Of concern, too, is the fact that these events will play into the hands of certain Australian shock-jocks, and right-wing extremists such as Geert Wilders, currently awaiting visa approval for a visit to Australia. Moderate Muslims are well aware of this; we’ve seen a deluge of commentary, much of it highlighting the non-violent nature of the greater Muslim community, some of it focused on attempts to understand the Sydney demonstrators in particular. We’ve heard differing viewpoints, the most popular being that it’s not ‘about the film’, but more an expression of disempowered Muslim youth, lacking identity, frustrated with perceived western contempt and an undeniable element of local racism.

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Apart from the patronising tone some of these analyses, they do not quite add up. If western contempt were the main problem, we would be witnessing demonstrations against continuing Israeli incursions into Palestinian lands, we’d find Muslims marching in the streets against questionable US foreign policy, we’d hear much greater condemnation every time Sunnis murder scores of Shiites, or Shiites murder Sunnis, acts which now occur with such depressing regularity that they struggle for the status of ‘newsworthy’. Where are the public protests over the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrian men, women and children, victims of sectarian violence at the hands of their own government? Where are the wide-scale demonstrations when shocking images like those that came out of Abu Ghraib are splashed across newspapers worldwide?

Instead, such outrage is reserved for a novel, a set of cartoons, or for a puerile and amateurish video ridiculing a religious military leader who died in the late seventh century.

Add to that the nature of many of the placards, and we should conclude that the protests were, to at least some degree, a result of religious offence, and that it was, indeed, ‘about the film’.

Which begs the question: if it is so easy to press the buttons of thousands of believers around the world, that even a mischievous schoolboy could accomplish pandemonium, shouldn’t we, as a responsible society, silence the provocateurs?

Politicians in both the US and Australia have approached Google with requests or encouragement to remove the video, resulting in YouTube bypassing its own policies to block viewing in certain Middle Eastern countries. These are short-term, short-sighted political responses to the situation. They do no good once the material has gone viral, and will serve only to ensure similar violence on the next and inevitable instance of religious offence, in addition to providing legitimacy for such reactions.

If we do not censor for security reasons, should we do so – as best we can, given the constraints of the internet – on the basis of material that could be categorised as hate speech?

The term ‘hate speech’ has become a convenient label of late, but I see few attempts in the media to define what it is. Hate propaganda has been used throughout history to enable human beings to overcome instinctive taboos against killing each other. It involves lies and manipulation to dehumanise the target individual or group and to instil fear or repugnance for that group in the wider community. Thus Nazi propaganda described Jews as ‘beasts of prey’, literally depicting them as vermin or swarming rats, while Rwandan Hutus referred to Tutsis as parasites, cockroaches. Hilaly’s description of women as ‘cat meat’ could well fall into this category.

There are two key points to be made here. The first is that hate speech incites violence against the group, rather than by the group. The second is the distinction between commentary assigning negative attributes to people, and that directed at ideas. People are not ideas. People have ideas, change their minds about ideas, reject ideas. A society that embraces the free competition of ideas is a society that is capable of change; if this were not so we would still be stuck with a White Australia Policy. Religious beliefs are ideas, and like all ideologies are subject to any form of criticism, including satire and mockery; they cannot claim exemption simply because those beliefs are deeply held. Religious offence, or blasphemy, is not hate speech, however hurtful it may be.

Religious ideas are not only personal convictions; they also have a nasty habit of crossing over into the political sphere. Some religions, in particular the three great Abrahamic faiths, are political systems as much as they are religions, due not only to the fact that many proponents cannot accept any rule of law over and above that of scriptures. In today’s world we have theocracies, ranging from the Vatican State to Iran. We see the tragic consequences of blasphemy laws in Pakistan, we see extreme religious positions of Republican Party leaders in the US, and even in Australia we see religious incursions into politics and legislation. Blasphemy laws therefore become not only undesirable, but dangerous.

In the case of ‘Innocence of Muslims’, the alleged writer and producer, however disreputable his background and unsavoury his tactics, is an Egyptian-born Coptic Christian. In this light, there could well be a political context to the film. Had he produced, instead, a sober and well-researched critique of Islam, it could have achieved similar levels of violence, as evidenced by the threatening reactions to UK-based Tom Holland’s historical documentary.

There is also an argument that suppression of free discourse will fail to have the intended effect. In the case of Nazi Germany and to a lesser extent the Weimar Republic, the anti-Jewish propaganda flourished in an environment of extreme censorship, where voices that would have condemned the bigotry were muzzled. Furthermore, as Russell Blackford points out in Freedom of religion and the secular state, ‘Laws relating to hate speech or vilification can vary widely between jurisdictions, defy legal interpretation, lead to tortuous and expensive litigation, and prove counterproductive in promoting mutual tolerance.’

It is unfortunate that some people find reasons to mock the beliefs of others. It is even more unfortunate that certain religious leaders find it necessary to make racist, misogynous or homophobic pronouncements to their followers. In some parts of the world and at former times in history they are/were free to put such ideas into practice. Here and now in Australia they are criticised, but are still free to speak. When religion itself is the subject of criticism or parody, the same must hold true.

Most unfortunately, it seems there is a renewed push within the United Nations to capitulate to the demands of violence, and to reintroduce blasphemy laws at the international level. For the sake of us all, I hope these attempts fail. Freedom is a two-way street, otherwise it is not freedom at all.

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About the Author

Moira Clarke is a software engineer and is also on the committee of the Secular Party of Australia. Her main interest is human rights.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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