28 years of 'business as usual'

In February 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death sentence -or fatwa- against the British author Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s crime was to have written a book -The Satanic Verses- that was perceived to have been overly critical of Islam. As a result, he had to be given round-the-clock police protection and was forced to go into hiding. He currently lives in North America, but the fatwa has been re-affirmed several times and, as recently as 2016, more money was added to the bounty on offer for killing him. 

At the height of the book burnings and riots, some commentators felt that a vigorous response from the western authorities would have been not just appropriate, but necessary. Instead of apologising for this author’s ‘blasphemy’ and waiting for the heat to die down, I thought that we should have printed thousands of copies of The Satanic Verses (a rather dreary book, it has to be said) and distributed them free in schools, libraries and health centre waiting rooms. We should have filled huge skips with the offending books and left them in every town centre, just to make a point. We should, at the very least, have been confident and assertive enough to have made it clear that intellectual freedom was the bedrock of our civilisation. We should, at the very least, have given this message to the medievalists: Feel free to practise whichever religion you want, believe whichever ancient fairy stories you like, but do it in peace; do not seek to impose your rules on people who do not share your beliefs. If we’d made our position clear at the time, we might have saved ourselves a whole heap of trouble.

The fact that our political and cultural leaders have continually shirked from their responsibilities to protect ideals we’re supposed to hold dear is not the fault of crazy fundamentalists like the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi. Contrary to what some people appear to believe, crazy fundamentalists have been around for centuries; Islamists were at it long before there was any such thing as British and American foreign policy to be outraged by, long before there was any such thing as the United States of America. In a world in which history books are readily available, it is, therefore, puzzling to explain the desire to interpret the actions of murderous Islamists as anything other than what they are. Some folk will use anything -literally anything- as a stick with which to beat the capitalist world; others may be in denial about their fear, preferring to disguise it as social conscience. There is too, somewhere in this unholy mix, a generous dollop of good old-fashioned condescension of the kind that denies agency to the terrorists. To claim that we don’t know why they do such things is to ignore the fact that they always tell us exactly why they do such things. Instead of imagining and ascribing a range of politically palatable motives, we should perhaps accept the obvious ones: That they want to kill us because they hate us and our way of life; that they want to kill us because they are members of a barbaric medieval death cult.  

But for all their shortcomings, crazy fundamentalists do tend to notice when people cave in to pressure and they will have noticed that, since 1989, we have been doing quite a lot of caving in. In the post-‘Satanic Verses’ landscape, who knows how many authors and journalists have excised characters, themes or lines from their stories and articles because they feared reprisals from Islamists? You might argue that it is impossible to quantify things that only might have existed, but we have clear evidence that our cultural landscape has been altered to accommodate certain cultural ‘sensitivities’. In the world that existed on the day before the fatwa was issued against Rushdie, it would not have been considered controversial or dangerous for a British citizen to have, say, published an image of the prophet Mohammed. But in 2017, how many mainstream newspapers or TV stations would publish or broadcast a cartoon of the prophet? That’s not a difficult question to answer, because it was revealed to us two years ago, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, when nobody had the guts to publish some cartoons and say: ’This is what all the fuss is about’. Of course, lots of folk composed eloquent editorials declaring their abhorrence of intimidation and violence and their ‘unshakeable belief’ in our rights to freedom of speech, but -for the sake of not offending sensibilities- they decided against publishing the cartoons. David Dimbleby revealed that it was official BBC policy that: “the prophet Mohammed should not be represented in any shape or form” and even a right-leaning newspaper like The Telegraph only printed a pixelated image of one cartoon in order to avoid causing offence. 

Consider, therefore, the enormity of the cultural shift that has taken place since 1989: In the 21^st century, western atheists now choose to adhere to rules previously only imposed upon folk who, through an accident of birth, are guided by the revelations of a man who (according to legend) was visited by an angel in his cave in the desert some 1400 years ago. If western atheists can’t bring themselves to blaspheme, what hope is there for those in the Muslim community who believe that Islam’s reformation is long overdue? Wouldn’t just a modicum of bravery on our part light a torch for those who hope to reform that religion from within? 

But instead of showing bravery, we’ve been busy drawing and re-drawing our lines in the sand. Having first got ourselves acclimatised to the idea that a British author might have to go into hiding because of the ‘actions’ of one of his fictional characters, we then got acclimatised to the reality that a secular European film maker (Theo van Gogh) could be murdered for making a film critical of the treatment of women within Islam. But don’t worry, we were told. The terrorists won’t win; we’ll get on with business as usual. And when some French journalists got slaughtered, we got acclimatised to the notion that we shouldn’t publish ‘offensive’ cartoons. But don’t worry, we were told. The terrorists won’t win; we’ll get on with business as usual. Now we’re acclimatising to the idea (recently articulated by the Mayor of London) that terrorist attacks are just a part of modern life. But don’t worry. The terrorists won’t win; we’ll get on with business as usual. 

Then, sooner or later, we’ll hear the initial reports of ‘an incident’ and we’ll know in our gut exactly what is going on and who will be responsible. Details will be sketchy and the official news sources won’t want us jumping to conclusions, but –gradually- the bloody details will begin to emerge. Until the moment of awful confirmation, we’ll pray that the body count won’t be that high. Then, once it has become impossible to deny that it is what we knew it would be, the all-too-familiar dance will begin. We’ll pretend once more to speculate about the motives. Did the assailant act alone? Did he have links to any known terrorist groups?  Was he part of a bigger network? What could have driven him to this? And before they have even finished scraping up the body parts, some commentators will issue warnings about how this ‘might provoke a backlash’, fantasising about imagined nastiness as opposed to absorbing the actual reality of murder. The ‘might provoke a backlash’ commentators will believe, contrary to the available evidence, that we are pitchfork-wielding savages, ready to burn stuff down and string people up at the drop of a hat; in these circumstances, we are told, we shouldn’t get angry, because that’s what the terrorists want. Yes, how terribly unsophisticated we must be to get angry about, for example, a bunch of silly teenagers getting blown up at a pop concert. 

Then we'll go to our candlelit vigils, we’ll have our observed silences, we’ll change our avatars and hashtags and we’ll do a bit of community singing (and maybe that guy with the blue piano will be there to play ‘Imagine’). And while all of this is going on, some people will get more worked up about a professional polemicist like Katie Hopkins than they will about bodies being scraped off a pavement.

And our leaders will say: Don’t worry. We’ll get on with business as usual. The terrorists won’t win. 

But to people like Salman Abedi, what exactly is there to be won? And what does winning look like? 

That's easy: it looks like business as usual.

The age of self-censorship

I’ve nothing against the various displays of 'solidarity' with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. I’m sure the folk at the demonstrations mean well, but all of that #jesuischarlie and candlelit vigil stuff won’t amount to a hill of beans. If the demonstrators think they are protecting freedom of speech, I’m afraid they’re a bit late. We gave that up when we embarked upon the age of self-censorship. 

Historians might quibble about the date, but I reckon the age of self-censorship started in 1989 when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie. Some of us jumped up and down at the time and demanded a vigorous response from the authorities. Instead of lying low and apologising for Rushdie’s ‘offence’, I thought we should have printed hundreds of thousands of copies of ‘Midnight’s Children’ and distributed them free in schools, libraries and health centre waiting rooms. I thought we should have filled huge skips full of these books and left them in every town centre, just to make a point. We should have done something like that because the point was worth making. The bedrock of our civilisation is intellectual freedom and we should have been confident enough to send a clear message to the medievalists: Feel free to practice whichever religion you want, believe whichever ancient fairy stories you like, but do it in peace. Do not seek to impose your views and your rules on people who do not follow your beliefs. It’s really as simple as that. If we’d made our position clear at the time, we might have saved ourselves a whole heap of trouble. Instead, we’ve seen our political and cultural leaders retreat from their responsibilities to protect the ideals they’re supposed to hold dear. 

I don’t blame the fundamentalist nut-jobs for this state of affairs, because fundamentalist nut-jobs have being doing fundamentalist nut-job things for centuries and will no doubt continue to do those things. There will, alas, always be a tiny but violent minority of fundamentalist nut-jobs and one of the things about that tiny but violent minority is that they tend to notice when people cave in to pressure. And we have, since 1989, been doing a lot of caving in. In the years since the Rushdie fatwa, who knows how many authors and journalists have excised characters, themes or lines from their stories and articles because they feared reprisals from fundamentalists? 

Of course, it’s impossible to quantify things that only might have existed, but it is possible to judge things that have happened. Only a couple of years ago, the Obama administration asked YouTube to remove a video that had (allegedly) set off attacks on the American embassy in Benghazi. Then, to compound this craven stupidity, the de facto leader of the western world made a speech to the UN in which he said that “the future must not belong to the slanderers of the Prophet Mohammed”. Really? Imagine, if you will, how folk would have reacted had George W. Bush said “the future must not belong to the slanderers of the Lord Jesus Christ.”   

As long as we keep re-drawing our line in the sand, we’re heading for our date with destiny: the point at which there will be no-one willing or able to stand up to the fundamentalist nut-jobs. And, as we re-draw that line, we become acclimatised to the idea that a British author might have to go into hiding because of the ‘actions’ of one of his fictional characters; we become acclimatised to the idea that a Dutch film maker can be murdered because he makes a film critical of a certain religion; we become acclimatised to the idea that the headquarters of a Danish magazine can be fire bombed because it prints some cartoons; we become acclimatised to the idea of not publishing ‘offensive’ cartoons; we become acclimatised to the idea that police officers, civil servants and journalists will suppress factual accounts of grooming and gang rape for fear of ‘causing offence’.  

When the ‘blasphemous’ publication of cartoons led to the attack on that obscure little Danish magazine in 2005, not a single British newspaper or magazine acted in solidarity with their fellow journalists. Not one editor had the guts to publish the cartoons and say: ’This is what all the fuss is about’. Of course, they all composed editorials declaring their abhorrence of intimidation and violence and their unshakeable belief in our rights to freedom of speech, but -for the sake of not offending sensibilities- they decided against publishing the cartoons. Not one of them would do it.

  

And here we are again, pretending to show solidarity in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo outrage. Except, when The Telegraph published an article on the massacre, the cartoon image of Mohammed was pixelated in order to obscure the view and avoid causing offence. The BBC website invited historian Tom Holland to write an article on Islam, but refused his request to publish the cartoon. As David Dimbleby revealed the other night on ‘Question Time’, it is official BBC policy that: “the prophet Mohammed should not be represented in any shape or form”.  
Amol Ragan, editor of The Independent stated that his “every instinct” was to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, but he decided that it was “too much of a risk”. He admitted that he was “very uncomfortable” with this. One is tempted to point out that so he should be, because he’s supposed to be a journalist. 

As the blogger David Budge put it:
'I get why journalists are scared of offending Muslims. I just don’t get why they’re journalists'.

So, good people, go to your demonstrations and your candlelit vigils. Tweet your hashtags and put your Je suis Charlie badges up on facebook. Feel free to live in the hope that it will make some difference. But if any of those murderous thugs are watching, the stupid folk who think it’s their duty to slaughter the infidel, how much notice do you think they’re going to take?    

What we need to do is to re-draw our line in the sand, but let’s move it a little bit in the other direction. Let’s do something that makes a positive, celebratory statement about how much we value freedom of speech. Something that will tell the medievalists that, instead of picking on little magazines, they will have to take on every publication in the land. Let’s do something that really does say: "We are all Charlie Hendo."

   

I make this appeal to all newspaper and magazine editors: Please, print an image of the prophet Mohammed. Do it on your front page and explain why you are doing it. Do it to make a point about freedom of speech. Do it to express the right of those with no religious affiliations not to be bound by the rules that believers are bound by. Do it, not to offend anyone’s sensibilities, but to celebrate a sensibility that has evolved over several hundred years of conflict and socio-political development throughout a continent. It’s the sensibility that embraces the most important diversity of all: intellectual diversity. Do it, if you think that value is worth sticking up for.   

But if you can’t do that, please stop insulting our intelligence by pretending that your actions are informed by ‘respect’. At least be brave enough to call your reluctance to publish exactly what it is: fear. There’s nothing wrong with being frightened; being frightened in the face of intimidation is part of our survival mechanism. But if we don’t republish those cartoons, all we’re doing is letting those poor French journalists take the bullets on our behalf. So if you can’t at least honour their bravery by republishing the work that got them killed, please don’t write about showing 'solidarity' with the massacre victims. Please don’t come out with any more fatuous pieties about how we’re all going to live together in perfect harmony. Please don’t patronise us with more rubbish about your staunch support for freedom of speech, because all you’re doing is redrawing that line in the sand, that line we’ve been moving since 1989.   

So please … print a cartoon. 

Or just shut up and admit that we are now in the age of self-censorship and that the bad men with the guns have already won.