Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid... But This Is Not One Of Them

The most recent media Outrage Of The Week concerns a Danish newspaper which ran cartoons portraying Mohammed as a terrorist. Sharia (Islamic law) forbids portraying Mohammed at all, but I'm willing to bet that a flattering portrait gets a lot more slack than this one:

Now that I've risked becoming the subject of a fatwa, let me say that a) if someone didn't tell me that was Mohammed, I'd never have known and assumed the guy with a beard in a turban was some generic Arabic man; and b) the cartoon isn't really all that good, all that funny, nor all that provocative to Western sensibilities.

But Western sensibilities are not at issue; Muslim sensibilities are. Specifically, Middle-Eastern fundamentalist Muslim sensibilities. These are the same folks who recently gave the world its model of an ideal government in the Taliban, cut from the same cloth as the iconoclasts of the early Orthodox Church and the Protestants and Reformation Catholics who took greater joy in burning one another at stakes all over Europe than they did in fighting back the Turks who had invaded as far as Vienna and Paris.

In response to protests from outraged Muslims in Copenhagen, French and Belgian papers also ran the cartoons, defiantly claiming that they would not be intimidated. When more outraged Muslims protested their offices, issued death and bomb threats, and even-more-leftist elements of the European press tut-tutted these papers for offending the Muslim community, their principles suddenly reversed and some of them issued apologies. Others (the more right-wing papers) demonstrated the possession of gonads and went on about their business as if nothing had happened.

I was inspired to write this post after hearing a commentary by Daniel Schorr on NPR, first saying that freedom of speech is not absolute and that good judgment is a duty of those who would exercise free speech, and concluding that it would have been better for these newspapers to have described, rather than printed, the offending cartoon. Well, surprise surprise surprise -- I don't agree with Daniel Schorr. Describing what something looks like and actually seeing it are two remarkably different things. Consider: "Robert Mappelthorpe's photographs are stark, powerful, homoerotic, in black-and-white with high contrast and shocking subject matter." Anyone who has seen a Mappelthorpe would have to agree with that description, but actually seeing the photograph produces a more powerful, visceral, emotional response in the viewer than seeing the photograph.

Now, here's a piece of trivia you won't find in a lot of U.S. press coverage over the cartoon Mohammed issue. The cartoons originally ran in December, and only recently have become an outrage to Muslims. (At least, to those Muslims who get outraged over that sort of thing.) I recently heard a theory that the press flap is the result of Iranian spin doctors trying to divert attention from the increasingly Kim Jong-Il-like rantings of Iran's recently-elected President.

I can understand Muslims not liking to see their religion and their holy figures portrayed as terrorists and perpetrators of violence. I can understand Muslims wanting to demonstrate the peaceful, forgiving, neighbor-loving dimensions of their religion -- and those aspects of the religion are real. But so are the violent ones. With props to Evangelical Atheist, whose blog provided the original research, note that the Koran includes some choice passages:

Strive against the disbelievers and the hypocrites! Be harsh with them. Their ultimate abode is hell, a hapless journey’s end. ... O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty (unto Him). Sura 9:73, 123

Slay [infidels] wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you (there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. But if they desist, then lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful. And fight them until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let there be no hostility except against wrong-doers. ... Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing which is good for you, and it may happen that ye love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye know not. Sura 2:191-193, 216

So it seems to me that Muslims protesting against portrayal of some Arab guy as a terrorist are flying in the face of reality -- in that it is mainly Arabs, mainly fundamentalist Muslims, who are perpetrating acts of terror, in the U.S., Europe, Israel, Iraq, and even in Bali. It also ignores another, perhaps less palatable but still significant, facet of Islam, which is that portions of the Koran command Muslims to fight, conquer, and forcibly convert infidels.

Not that the Judeo-Christian deity is an unalloyed god of peace and love, either. Exodus 15:3 reminds us that “The Lord is a god of war.” God does not love everyone: “The Lord trieth the righteous, but the wicked and and he that loves violence his soul hateth.” Psalm 11:5. Jehovah demonstrates his attitude towards the enemies of the Hebrews at Numbers 31:1-18, where God demands an act of genocide. Genocide, you say? Surely not; that would be a supreme irony. But dig this:

When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son. For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods: so will the anger of the LORD be kindled against you, and destroy thee suddenly. But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. Deuteronomy 7:1-5.

A Gentile observing a Hebrew ritual is to be put to death, according to Numbers 3:38. God also demands blood for sexual improprieties: “If a man is caught lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman as well as the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel. If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall bring both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help in the town and the man because he violated his neighbor’s wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst.” Deuteronomy 22:22-24, which goes on to tell us that if a man rapes a virgin, he can pay 50 shekels to the girl’s father and marry her, and if this happens, then no crime has been committed. And of course, homosexuality is punishable by death, according to Leviticus 20:13, which was affirmed in the New Testament at Romans 1:26-27.

Jehovah is also not very fond of domestic disputes, which are also dealt with by capital punishment: “For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.” Leviticus 20:9; see also Exodus 21:15 and Leviticus 20:09.

Now, I anticipate an objection that this is all “Old Testament stuff,” but let's remember that Jesus affirmed the Old Testament in toto, at Luke 12:51. Jesus reminds us that he follows the teachings of a warrior god at Matthew 10:34, and asks that his followers get weapons even at the expense of clothing themselves, Luke 22:36. People who do not accept the teachings of Jesus may expect violence visited upon them by God, according to Mark 6:11. After Jesus leaves the scene, his followers continue his tradition of intolerance, forced conversions, and killings, at Acts 3:23 and 5:1-5.

None of this is particularly surprising, when one considers the roots of these religions. Judaism in its first recognizable form evolved while the Hebrews were on their Exodus from Egypt, wandering about the Fertile Crescent and trying to stay alive as immigrants to an already-settled land whose existing occupants did not take kindly to the Hebrews (who were, from their perspective, more properly called "invaders") and tried to kill them all. The Christians began their existence as a splinter sect of Judaism, persecuted by both the Jewish religious establishment and the Roman political and military authorities. Even during Jesus' ministry, there was danger from both of those sources and Jesus himself was betrayed from within his group of followers to the authorities, who promptly had him publicly executed. Islam began when Mohammed organized a group of followers and earned the enimity of the local emir, and to this day the highest holiday in Islam celebrates Mohammed's flight and eventual conquest of the west coast of the Arabian penninsula.

All of these religions evolved in very warlike societies in which strength of arms was essential to survival. Given that offensive military behavior tends to produce greater security than defensive military behavior, and given that the holy texts of these societies were also the equivalent of their civic constitutions, it seems nearly inevitable that the authors of those texts tried to embody a healthy streak of militarism and expansiveness to ensure the long-term health and survival of these new communities. To ignore this aspect of these religions is to deny their origins.

It is simply a truth that all of the monotheistic religions preach intolerance, exclusivity, and violence to the outside world to some degree. Some sects of the various religions emphasize the more pacifistic and humanistic aspects of their holy texts and teachings, and to their credit both Christianity and Judaism seem to have "outgrown" their Taliban-like phases. Yet there are still fundamentalist Christians and even fundamentalist Jews, just as there are fundamentalist Muslims. While there may be proportionally fewer violent fundamentlist Christians than Muslims, they are out there, bombing abortion clinics and killing the cats of innocent Wiccans. There are many "moderate" Muslims who peacefully coexist with their non-Muslim neighbors, and in fact it seems that this describes the vast majority of Muslims on Earth today.

Fundamentalism -- the reliance on the literal truth of a holy text despite its incongruity with the modern world -- seems to inevitably encourage reliance on the bloody foundations upon which the religions have been built. And it inevitably discourages enlightened discourse, mutual tolerance, compromise, and ultimately even civility, while encouraging censorship, restriction of education and knowledge, and sponsoring violence. Fundamentalist religionists seem preternaturally obsessed with incorporating their religious beliefs into the civil laws of whatever country they happen to be citizens, and with obtaining political power with which to do so. I've said it before and it bears repeating: remember the Taliban, and remember that we are not immune from that.

While I may not have a religious belief myself, and I try hard to respect those who do, I have a much more difficult time respecting those whose beliefs are fundamentalist in nature. The sort of person who would be deeply emotionally offended by the lame cartoon above, or its cognate for their own religion, is the sort of person who will be moved to violence.

It is fundamentalism that turns a religion, any religion, dangerous.