It is a moral good to blaspheme the sanctities of fascists
In the wake of the deaths of Lars Vilks and Kurt Westergård, and in belated memory of Stéphane Charbonnier and the rest of the fallen at Charlie Hebdo.
Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the Charlie Hebdo martyrs who actively thumbed his nose at the pieties of Muslim fascists. Brave man.
CONTENT NOTE for very contentious political argumentation. Also, some of the Islamic theological material whose details I discuss midway through this one depicts Prophet Muhammad engaging in deeply morally unsavoury acts, and I’m very frank about what they are. So please tread carefully.
One of the matters that has been on my mind in the most detail and at the most length in recent years has been the question of how non-Muslim societies, principally but not solely those which comprise the historic homeland (but not the exclusive province!) of Western civilization, should deal with the attempt by many conservative Muslims to impose blasphemy restrictions which forbid the criticism, or even the depiction, of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alaihi wasalaam. As of right now, I’m pretty firmly committed to the opinion that there should be no legal or social consequences for drawing images of Him or for criticizing Islam in general, and I think it might make sense for me to make the case as to why this is so, especially in light of the fact that the Swedish Muhammad cartoonist Lars Vilks recently died, and also because of the murder of Samuel Paty (a French teacher who was slaughtered in the street by a Chechen Muslim fascist because he had shown a class of his some Muhammad cartoons) and the disgraceful Batley Grammar School controversy (which saw another teacher’s life ruined, this time in Britain, after he showed the Muhammad cartoons in a class discussion on free speech – he specifically exempted the Muslim students from the obligation to participate, but Muslim mobs threatened to murder him anyway.) There’s also the fact that January of 2021 marked the sixth anniversary of the slaughter of the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo. The brave Kurt Westergård recently died, too. In short, the confrontation with Muslim supremacists and fascists who want to impose Islamic blasphemy laws, and eventually the whole totalitarian superstructure of Islamic law (sharí’ah), on the non-Muslim world is ongoing. It occurs to me that these satirists and social critics are worth memorializing, and that their dedication to standing for the right of free speech and expression, including the right to blaspheme the mores, pieties, and sanctities of Muslim fascists, are worth remembering, even lionizing. I think that the people who disagree with that understanding, including people as intelligent as the great Teju Cole (to name only one example), are firmly wrong and should be shown to be. I’ve been very firmly on the side of the idea that it should be permissible to print Muhammad cartoons since the initial Danish controversy at Jyllands-Posten in the year 2007, and I’ve written about the matter at length before, but probably the most salient thing I’ve ever written about the matter was this comment I wrote in a Facebook thread from 2015 in which the matter was being discussed. Some friends of mine who are significantly further to my Left were arguing that although it was not good that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had been murdered, good people should not mourn them. The reason why my Leftist friends were arguing this was because they believed that for white Western non-Muslims to draw Muhammad is inherently racist, an actively Islamophobic provocation that does not merit defence or protection. I reacted to this argument with some degree of splenetic pique, and I still stand by most of what I said, although I would revise it to a certain degree now. Here is an almost completely unfiltered version of what I said at the time:
“This is the fucking Rushdie fatwa scenario, y’all. It is not for us to say that the taboos held sacred by sickeningly cruel, virulently supremacist totalitarian shitstains are not to be broken merely because the racialized group to which the shitstains belong is the same as that of a bunch of lovely ordinary folks who would also be slightly pissed off and who don't deserve to have their feelings hurt. I think the error of judgement being made by people who regard it as contemptible for non-Muslims to violate traditional Islamic blasphemy laws if they see fit, and who call for polite society to shun the people who take that risk, is catastrophic, and wildly dangerous, and ill-befits the honourable legacy of the Left, to which virtually all the votaries of this position belong. This whole argument is a goddamn disgrace to the cause of social justice, and it rends my heart in half that so many people I love, respect, value don't see it, or, more often, choose not to see it out of drastically misconceived soi-disant “antiracist” piety. STOP INFANTILIZING THE FUCKING BROWN PEOPLE! THEY ARE HUMAN BEINGS!
And quite frankly, these particular people – the frothing thought-policing KKK jackals who happen to prefer Yusuf Al-Qaradawi or Safwat Hegazy or Wagdy Ghoneim or Muhammad Hussein Yacoub or whoever to Stalin or Nathan Bedford Forrest – are the LAST people we should take our marching orders from as to whose feelings it's okay to hurt! These dudes are Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine and Richard Spencer! STOP ACTING LIKE WE CAN'T HATE THEM OR PISS THEM OFF BECAUSE THEY'RE BROWN! JESUS TITTYFUCKING CHRIST!
Sorry to wyle out, but I actually think that the mildly impolitic jokesters of Charlie Hebdo – and Flemming Rose, and Molly Norris, and Ali Rizvi, and all the others, people of colour and white people alike (including Black people like Christine Douglass-Williams, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John Heflin, Dumisani Washington, Larry Elder, Simon Deng, and Carol Swain), who shit on these people and their life-denying Muslim-privilege live-as-we'd-have-you-live-or-else bullshit are doing something noble. A cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad, salallahu alaihi wasalaam, crying and bein’ like, “Why are so many of my followers jerkwads?!” is noble. Even if a white guy drew it. I don't care if he's a fiftysomething Texan Pentecostal who, as a matter of his free conscience, thinks Islam sucks and says so. I hold to this view even if that fiftysomething Texan Pentecostal is a disagreeable sort who holds a variety of other contemptible opinions. As a matter of fact, I’m aware that at least one Charlie Hebdo cartoon really was racist – they had one comparing the innocent little girls captured by Boko Haram to Black French welfare recipients, and that was reprehensible! But I don’t think that changes the truth of this matter enough that it no longer makes sense to hold to the view I’m expressing here!
And even if it can be argued that the dead Charlie Hebdo people were meaningfully flawed, or that things like content notes and trigger warnings should be in use so that Muslims who don’t want to see cartoons of their beloved Prophet shouldn’t have to, and even if we take special care to honour the sacrifice of the Muslim cop Ahmed Merabet (who died for the right of the white laïc schmucks and their Maghrebin allies to blaspheme his faith), it still follows that suppression of impolite speech is Stasi shit. COINTELPRO shit. The bottom line is that if there are nonviolent things that fascists will attempt to kill you for doing, you either do them (or at least organize your society in such a fashion as to make it socially permissible to), as a symbol of your refusal to submit to violent intimidation and thuggery, or you submit. I take this position so seriously that I myself have considered drawing Prophet Muhammad, even though as a Bahá’í I am ostensibly supposed to revere Him and even though Bahá’í aniconism means that to draw Him is probably a violation of Bahá’í law. So I think the Charlie Hebdo people were on the right side of the line. To be really really real, I don't even think the characterization of speech critical of Islam as necessarily racist is okay. It ain't. Islam is a religion believed in by, and the fascist iterations thereof are ideologies held to by, people of every extant race, so the institutional orthodox Left’s argument that the depredations of the War on Terror and its disproportionate negative impact on Brown and Black Muslims mean it’s a hate crime to criticize Brown and Black Muslim fascists and hold them responsible for choosing to do evil in accord with their religious convictions is a gargantuan crock of shit. In fact, the intersectional feminist orthodox Left already knows that that argument is bullshit, because it doesn’t take the protestations of many Jews that severe criticism of Israel and Zionism are hateful seriously for even two seconds – it knows full well that the human rights catastrophes for which the Israeli government and military are responsible in Palestine, and for which they frequently blame Zionism as such, are so grave that it’s important to poke Zionists in the eye sometimes in defence of Palestinian human rights, which means their take on this reeks of ugly hypocrisy. In short, the Left spends 100% of its time preening as though it’s way, way better than all of this.
Look, this is tl;dr by a long shot, and I know some folks think white dudes talking for a long time in a mixed-company thread is phallocentric, and I apologize for that from the bottom of my heart, but the things I’m gonna say are true, and I think they need to be said, and I'm angry, and I'm not sorry.
Comparing Muslim supremacist fuckbags to the Ku Klux Klan is not a false equivalency, and I want to suggest that if any observer who fancies themselves thoughtful and intelligent doesn’t know that, has chosen not to know that, there’s a very crucial aspect of the present international conflict to which they just fucking haven’t been paying attention.
THESE PEOPLE ARE KLAN. Why? Because their power in the West is equivalent to that of white supremacy at the height of Jim Crow? No. But because you bet your ass it is in the Muslim-majority world! And because their intentions for the West are exactly the same! These people actually want to impose a system of privilege and oppression that rivals white supremacy! They are not the victims of white arrogance – they are its rivals and heirs! They’ve already done it to literally dozens of different people groups across majority-Muslim environments: in the Middle East (ask the Assyrians, the Maronites, the Amazigh, the Yezidis, the Yarsanis, the Shabaks, the Mandaeans, the Copts); on the Subcontinent (to the tune of the long-ago massacre of 60 million Hindus and Sikhs and Jains, and the current shitty conditions for Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, plus the Buddhists in the Chittagong Hills); in Iran (where the few remaining Bahá’ís, Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Zoroastrians are fucked); all over Africa (we all know about Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram and the Biafra war and the reason why there's a South Sudan); in Thailand, where a pissed-off Hamas-lite murders Buddhist tea-sellers and humane liberal anti-supremacist imams for shits and giggles; even in Israel, where the combination of the blood-soaked genocidal champion assholes Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (and, over in Lebanon, Hezbollah) and the champion Jewish fascist occupier assholes is never gonna end because neither of these goddamn shithead peoples will ever get a fucking clue ever. It’s everywhere, man. Truest shit I ever spoke. Realest shit on Earth.
People like the Kouachi brothers, who murdered 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo offices, want that to come to France, and Germany, and the United Kingdom, and Australia, and Canada, and Sweden, and Norway, and Finland, and Denmark, and Belgium, and Spain, and the United States of America, and everywhere else. And now they're bringing it there, bit by bit.
Is that the nature of “Islam” as such? Fuck no! Islam is a multifaceted thing. Religion is like that. Praying to Allah subhana wa ta’ala says fuck-all about who you are as a person or what you make of your relationship to God! Knowing that somebody is a Muslim is no better a reason to suspect them of being a Daesh or Al-Qaeda or Muslim Brotherhood dickhole than we should suspect every Christian of being Jerry Falwell! I go to a queer-affirming, gender-egalitarian mosque to pray on Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha almost every year; I’d rather eat my eyes than tell those people that their faith, as such, is monstrous, or see them subjected to cruelty.
But that’s not who the Charlie Hebdo folks were targeting. They were after the way-too-numerous Daesh and Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood dickholes who kill or try to silence anyone who hurts their loud angry Muslim manboy feelings. And because virtually (but not absolutely) all of these manboys are people of colour, we assume that letting the jackanapes white laïc schmuck speak his conscience and say “Islamic supremacism sucks!”, and defend his right to say his clumsily articulated whatever and, God forfuckinbid, celebrate it as satire, is gonna lead to Auschwitz. So we worry more about the fascist Muslim manboys’ fee-fees than about fucking calling the fascist Muslim manboys on their shit. And it ain’t cool.
And even when we do call them on their shit, as cranky Foghorn Leghorn blowhard conservative types occasionally try to do, we’re too scared to go to the Qur’án and Sunnah, learn about the dangerous, life-destroying interpretations thereof that give rise to all the sexism and homophobia and Jew-murdering and Buddhist-decapitating and all the rest of it, and do anything about it. Everyone is too chickenshit. So all this shit keeps happening, and we keep acting like we’re on the side of evil whiteboy Bull Connor colonialist hegemony for letting anybody critique it.
And no one’s like, “Hey, let’s work to change this!” 97% of Muslim spokespeople and activists, from Reza Aslan and Mehdi Hasan to Linda Sarsour and Zahra Billoo to Yousef Munayyer and Noura Erakat to Hussam Ayloush and Ibrahim Hooper to Mo Ansar and Ayesha Siddiqi to Umar Al-Qadri and Salam Al-Marayati to Amer Zahr and Dean Obeidallah to Hussein Ibish and Muqtedar Khan to Dalia Mogahed and Jamal Badawi to even the Ahmadi Muslims Kashif Chaudhury, Harris Zafar, and Qasim Rashid, plus their Occidentalist non-Muslim enablers like Judith Butler and Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald and John Esposito and and Karen Armstrong and Steven Salaita and Juan Cole and Jasbir Puar and Betty McCollum and the Reverend Stephen Sizer and the late Edward Saïd and at least 50 notable others, are just like, “This problematic shit’s not really in any interpretations of the relevant Islamic texts that have ever been taken seriously! Fuck your Islamophobia! Don’t ask us to work against the beliefs of the people responsible for the piles upon piles of dead bodies stacked up in our name—that’s racist!”
And then they expect us all to accept that, except we can’t. And shouldn’t. Because the idea that Islamic supremacism can’t be justified according to interpretations of the relevant legal, scriptural, traditional, and theological material that can be convincingly represented as having been orthodox and normative for more than a millennium, according to exegetical principles that have never been decisively or permanently changed, is a dirty fucking lie! And millions of people have already died because of this gross, disgusting ideology, across more than a thousand years, and we should try to stop it from happening again!
You know who actually is doing that work? I am, goddamnit! And the people around me are. Raheel Raza. Tahir Aslam Gora. Salim Mansur. Maajid Nawaz. Zuhdi Jasser. Tarek Fatah. Tawfik Hamid. Raquel Evita Saraswati. Zainab Zeb Khan. Saïd Djabelkhir. Qanta Ahmed. Asra Nomani. Jamal Hasan. Ahmed Vanya. Jalal Zuberi. Muhammad Al-Kabour. Omar Qudrat. Husain Haqqani. Irshad Manji. Hisham Kabbani. Ahmed Subhy Mansour. Oubai Shahbandar. Thomas Haidon. Farid Ghadry. Munir Pervaiz Saami. Sherkoh Abbas. Hasan Mahmud. Tehmina Kazi. Farahnaz Ispahani. Zeba Khan. Ibn Warraq, the towering atheist scholar who's kept it real on this stuff for 20 years. Soheib Bencheikh and Hassen Chalghoumi, the liberal imams who do yeoman's work out in France. Amna Farooqi, the brave Pakistani-American left-wing Zionist who has been fighting hard for a just “two states for two peoples” peace for years now. Ahmad Al-Adwan and Abdullah Saad Al-Hadlaq, who risk their very lives to call for amity between not just Muslims and all non-Muslims, but also specifically between Muslims and Zionists, while operating from Jordan and Kuwait respectively. Bassam Tawil and Khaled Abu Toameh and Rami Aman and Bassem Eid in Palestine. Uzay Bulut and Burak Bekdil in Turkey. Abdirizak Bihi in Minneapolis. Mohammad Tawhidi in Australia. Bassam Tibi in Germany. Ahmed Assid in Morocco. The great and humane Salafi Muslim Zionists Noor Dahri and Mufti Abu Layth in the UK. Mithal al-Alusi in Iraq. Tufail Ahmad in India. Naser Khader in Denmark. Abdul Hadi Palazzi in Italy. Ahmed Aboutaleb in Holland. Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury in Bangladesh. Non-Muslims or ex-Muslims from Muslim milieus, such as Maikel Nabil Sanad, Yasmine Mohammed, Ali A. Rizvi, Alishba Zarmeen, Noha Hashad, Aki Muthali, Nemat Sadat, Ehsan Jami, Amir Taheri, Amil Imani, Wafa Sultan, Kasim Hafeez, et alia. And their decent, sensible Western anti-supremacist allies, some of whom are white, and who are out here actually doing this shit along with them. I'm a relative nonentity in this context, but I've given speeches at rallies for Muslims Facing Tomorrow and the Progressive Muslim Institute of Canada, and written for their publications, and I ain't gon' stop. The late likes of Tashbih Sayyed and Mahmoud Muhammad Taha and Courtney Lonergan and Farag Foda and Abdurrahman Wahid and Rashad Khalifa and Naguib Mahfouz and Abdalla Mwidau and Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, God rest ‘em all, were braver than any of us.
You folks don’t GET to gainsay the informed, conscientious Muslim and Muslim-born folks of colour who are fed up with this bullshit and are working to change it, or their white allies like me. The rest of you are welcome to whine about how horrible it is that some annoying, entitled white Frenchmen who hate this system of dominance and oppression — the mirror image of white supremacy – and understand that it does threaten them, that it threatens everybody (in the West and in the Global South), made some folks feel bad by talking about it. Speech is not violence. SPEECH IS NOT VIOLENCE! A placard reading “Forced marriage sucks!” or “Permitting the beating of one’s wife in accord with the literal words of sura 4 ayah 34 sucks!” or “Killing a convert away from Islam in accord with saheeh hadith (authentic Prophetic tradition) #4294 sucks!” or whatever does not lead to a new Auschwitz!
Look. I’m not just a pissed-off whiteboy. I’m a Bahá’í, goddamnit! I’m a religious universalist, and I'm duty-bound by order of God Himself to believe that Muhammad salallahu alaihi wasalaam was a good man and that Islam, properly understood, is humane and great for the world. And I believe that! I really do!
But the truth is this. In murdering these cartoonists, these Muslim supremacists were enforcing traditional Muslim laws requiring the severe punishment of anyone who says something “impermissible” (note, not false) about the Prophet Muhammad or the Qur’án or Islam in general. (That’s in a manual of Islamic law called Reliance of the Traveller that’s been certified as authoritative for 30 full years as of 2021; its roots are ancient.) The working definitions of blasphemy and slander in the schools of law that these people consider authoritative in interpreting the Qur’án and the Sunnah, Islamic tradition, mandate that if a non-Muslim says something about Islam that offends Muslim sensibilities, it’s totally cool to kill them. These people want (may not in every respect have, but want) Muslim privilege. They are working to impose a vision of society and governance that puts them at the top of the totem pole and makes them the hegemonic force in society. That they haven’t the numbers to pull it off in the West just yet doesn’t mean that's not what they're doing.
It is true that Islam does not occupy in Europe the privileged social position that whiteness and Christianity and, latterly, comfortable bourgeois laïcité now do. I would not for two seconds deny the reality of anti-Muslim bigotry, nor defend it! But there’s something important to remember. Islam is the second major Abrahamic religion, and like Christianity (and the institution of whiteness which in the West has largely subsumed it), its history is replete with violence, supremacism, imperialism, and cruelty, routinely justified by reference to its scriptures, legal codes, canonical myths. The people who murdered the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo are exponents of, ambassadors for, that imperialism and supremacism. I hate such people, not for being Brown or for being Muslim as such but for being illiberal jackbooted fucking fascists. I think it is a GREAT idea to hate illiberal jackbooted fucking fascists, and to make fun of them, mercilessly. Most Leftists, feminists, social justice-oriented people I’m aware of seem to block all this stuff out, or filter it through a bullshit Saïdist Occidentalist lens where if they can’t blame the white Westerners (or pro-Western people of colour like my homies above, or just the Jews) for it, it must not be real; that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening. Find the Pakistani Christian community in your town and ask the people you meet in it what’s happening and why, for fuck’s sake. Learn what happened to Shahbaz Bhatti and Meriam Ibrahim and Salman Taseer and Hector Aleem and Abdul Rahman and Saeed Abedini and the former Muhammad Hegazy. Learn why they killed Mahmoud Muhammad Taha. Open your eyes. Read. Study. Learn. ‘Cause I’ve been following this shit since 9/11, or even shortly before then, and I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of seeing the non-Muslims who stand in the way of the shrieking fascist Muslim manboys get blamed for their own suffering, their own deaths. Resistance to Islamic supremacism is an act of love and courage and decency, and even jackanapes dickhead satirists have a right to participate. I’m sure my views look like screamy-privilege splenetic whiteboy rage to the great majority of the orthodox Left, and I don’t care. It’s all true. All of it. Everything. And the vast majority of Leftists already know this, deep in their hearts, and would do well to admit it to themselves, because this spectacle I’m seeing in its place is fuckin’ sickening.”
The above is a very slightly edited version of my original post from 2015. Here is some commentary to follow up. One of my interlocutors remarked with an obnoxious degree of snideness that he felt he could see right through my argument because I let it be known that my interest in this issue had begun on 9/11. Here’s what I said to him:
“There will doubtless be some observers who assume that caring about 9/11, and understanding it as an act of imperialism, which it was, instead of a Fanonist cri de coeur or America's chickens coming home to roost or some bullshit, is somehow problematic or damning of my analysis. And yes, of course, Islam is not always and everywhere malign – I wish not only no harm, but joy and well-being, upon the millions of ordinary decent Muslim folks. And of course whiteness and white supremacy exist and are monstrous and urgently necessary to dismantle! An attack by a white satirist on evil, deluded Brown or Black fascists, even one that pokes fun at things they hold sacred in common with nice Brown or Black people who don't deserve to be targeted for offense, is not white supremacy crushing folks of colour under its boot for kicks – it's anti-fascist resistance! To conflate acts like these, even rude ones, with hate crimes and acts of genuine othering is to essentialize about who Muslims are as human beings and to infantilize them on an almost comical level. Shit reads as borderline noble-savage paternalistic to me!
It would behoove those of you who may be inclined to gainsay my analysis to pay close attention to the history of the very real ideology I'm talking about, the ideology of establishing straight cisgender Muslim male “suzerainty” (in the Pakistani extremist Syed Abul Ala Maududi's phrase) over all others, to which innocent lives, including Muslim lives (especially dissidents and liberals like the Ahmadis, Bektashis, Ismailis, Rifais, Mevlevis, Inayatis, Mouridis, and Alevis), are being lost every day of our lives!
Large numbers of people seem convinced that Western foreign policy, particularly the support of the USA for Israel, is the root cause of attacks like the one on Charlie Hebdo, but this is a wild and dangerous falsehood. It would be wrong to say that everything the West does to and in the Muslim-majority world is decent or just, but the problem of supremacist Islam existed before the United States of America did, let alone before Israel was founded, because it’s rooted in specific exegetical understandings of the literal words of the Qur’án and the contents of Muslim theology, history, jurisprudence, and tradition which rely heavily on the most ancient available source texts, especially the biography of Prophet Muhammad alaihi salaam that was written by Ibn Ishaq and preserved by Ibn Hisham, in which He is depicted as suborning the murder of the poets Ka’b bin al-Ashraf and Asma bint Marwan (for the crime of mocking Him verbally), breaking a truce with an enemy tribe just because He felt like it (which Yasser Arafat went on record in Johannesburg in 1994 as saying had inspired him to negotiate with the Israelis exclusively in bad faith), raping His nine-year-old wife ‘Aisha, delighting in the decapitation of about 600 Jewish captives who had previously been inoffensive farmers and hadn’t done shit to Him, and much else.
This is all just the plain truth! And there’s something else that’s important to consider as well. To assume a priori that a supremacist war in favour of Muslim privilege isn't or couldn't be happening, that this shit has to be our fault, Western civilization’s fault, the whiteboys' fault, and couldn't possibly be occurring on behalf of an ideology that Muslim extremists chose on their own as conscious moral agents as part of how they interpret their responsibility before the only true and supreme God, is some weapons-grade ethnocentric horseshit.
And fuck the wars; the right answer ain’t bombs or drones. It's supporting the Muslim liberals, feminists, apostates, LGBTQ+ people, and embattled non-Muslim minorities to the hilt (including letting them immigrate to the West in large numbers), energetically supporting the freedom of speech and conscience, screamin’ on genuinely Islamophobic non-Muslim extremists in places like Israel, Myanmar, China, and India hard (so as to uphold a universal standard of human rights, in accord with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights), and riding it out.
But if you think it's not a war of choice by fanatics? That's a lotta dead Thai Buddhists and Bahá'ís and Pakistani Christians and Westerners and others you're flipping off. It ain’t a good look, and neither is the grotesque argument comparing Charlie Hebdo to Nazi propaganda or racist caricatures of Black people as monkeys (as Joe Sacco was stupid enough to do) or what have you. It's false, and it sucks.
I apologize if my tone comes across as arrogant! I don't have the patience to modulate my tone to appear less pompous and sure of myself right now, and I apologize for that. But I think what I'm saying is up-down boldface all-caps true. I also apologize if it looks like I'm happy that innocent Muslims' feelings were hurt. I'm not! It's never cool! Actual hatred of Muslims is never cool! But this isn't it, and I think y'all know that, and I also think that a free society has an obligation to be messy that way sometimes. The answer to bad speech is more and better speech! If we ostracize the Charlie Hebdo jabronis and pull the university fire alarm or the shout-over-the-lecture stunts on the Bill Mahers and Ann Coulters and Janice Fiamengos and Rebecca Reilly-Coopers and Christina Hoff Sommerses et alia, we've got no right to protest if and when the same shit gets done to us. I really believe that. I feel obliged to believe it. I think it's the most sensible way of looking at the situation, and it disappoints me as someone trying (and maybe failing by some lights?) to be a movement feminist, and a participant in the social justice politics of the Left, to see that point of view assailed by the soi-disant social justice crowd so consistently.
I admit that I have a great deal of respect for the compassionate impulse to be good to people who are in danger, which motivates so much Leftist opposition to the Muhammad cartooons, and to (real or perceived) Islamophobia in general! I also admit that I don't know all there is to know re: the real extent of Islam-hatred (not that I think any blanket hatred of Islam is decent or just), and that my statements, understandings, and convictions are fallible. But I've been accused of an unhealthy blind spot re: Islam before, and I gotta say, I think the approach I'm taking is more sensible and more just than the mainstream Leftist one, and I don't have very much respect for any others. At least not right now. It is healthy for a free society to offend the sensibilities of its least humane, bloodiest-minded participants, the ones who want to assert hegemony. And those innocent ordinary Muslims who may not like having to endure criticism like that issued by people like Charlie Hebdo would be best off simply learning to put up with having their sensibilities offended occasionally! Which is what we all have to do in order to participate in a free society in which human beings who are one another’s equals on the level of rights and dignity do not necessarily agree on questions of truth, beauty, the good, or other fundamental matters of life! The Left is routinely contemptuous of the Right, as well as of Zionists, for not being forbearing in this way in various contexts – the sooner it recognizes its hypocrisy and corrects course, the healthier a place the global body politic will be in, especially since, as Douglas Murray has so aptly put it, “A society in which even one’s deepest feelings can be trodden upon is the only sort of society worth living in!”
It’s also worth noting that due to the brutality of the supremacist ideology I’m condemning, criticism thereof is “punching up”, by definition, even though the red herring of skin pigmentation often confuses that. If the martyrs of Charlie Hebdo are racist provocateurs, so are my friends and colleagues like Zuhdi Jasser and Raheel Raza and Salim Mansur and Ali Rizvi and Tahir Aslam Gora. And to consider any acts of self-defence against this evil fascist ideology on the part of the West or the wider non-Muslim world to be a species of hatred is so grotesque a bastardization of the reality of what’s going on as to constitute a moral abomination!”