Aaron D. Wolf writes:
A handful of Muslims brutally murdered some French cartoonists for blaspheming their holy man. Have we learned something new from this?
Yes, it turns out Muslims (well, the fundamentalist
types, not many, but more than you’d think, although not the majority, but a
significant number, in no way “all,” but in some sense “all”) don’t believe in
free speech, although we Westerners know that God wrote “free speech” on
tablets of stone, and emblazoned a desire for it onto all human hearts.
And free speech is, of course, the cornerstone of Western society (whatever
that now is). Ergo, the Muslims (some, not all, but a lot, though not too
many) are attempting to destroy Western society, blasting away at the very
foundation by silencing “journalists.”
With that in mind, it is not enough for us to denounce
the evil that is the coldblooded murder of mortal men, no matter what their
line of work, by Muslim terrorists.
No, the nature of the crime behooves
us to identify with the pornographers at the now-understaffed French smut
magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Conservatives naturally begin with the caveat that we may find some of the
products of their free speech—the ones that depict incest among the Holy
Trinity, for example, an image I refuse to insert here—to be distasteful.
(The pornographic depictions of Muhammad, on the other hand, we may qualify as
“insults real or perceived.”)
Yet even if you
happen to find some of the journalistic enterprise of Charlie Hebdo to be distasteful, you must
nonetheless stand with Charlie
Hebdo and say “I am Charlie
Hebdo” in French, or at least “you can and should be in solidarity with those dead journalists . . ."
Ultimately, we are being told that the Charlie Hebdo massacre teaches us the vital
importance of pornographic insults, both to the Muslim god and to ours.
Celebrating shockingly dirty, blasphemous magazines is our way of standing fast
in the liberty wherewith the Enlightenment has made us free.
How can we
not identify personally with French cartoonists who depicted our Savior as a
ravening sodomizer of His (and our) Heavenly Father?
To do otherwise
would be to undercut the very foundation of a free society, would it not?
(One pauses to reflect on what it was that motivated David to take up his
sling.)
The killers of the staff of Charlie Hebdo did not plan their mini-jihad because they hate “our way of
life.” They murdered because of insults, obscene and other, to
Muhammad.
Yet American conservatives cannot but think that this violence
resulted from Muslims’ abstract dislike for “free speech.” Indeed, they
insist, it is because of their illiberality that Muslims are fingered as the
current Big Threat to Western civilization.
[T]here is a very simple and obvious way to [respond]:
Newspapers, magazines, webzines, blogs, and visual media should all publish not
only the cartoons that originally appeared in Charlie Hebdo, but also
those that appeared in Jyllands-Posten.
In other words, the murderers of today would achieve the opposite of their
intention: They would resurrect the earlier “blasphemies” they believed they
had effectively killed.
More of this sort of free speech will somehow cure the
jihadists’ feverish bloodlust? Or protect and keep safe the citizens of
Western countries with large Muslim populations?
Or may we ignore these
unpleasant realities, so long as "free speech" is fĂȘted? This is insanity.
It’s
insane because it postulates that the only free society is one in which the
people's deepest-held convictions are publicly trampled:
Not that we favor blasphemy and promiscuous
offense-giving (we abhor both in most circumstances), but they are essential as
rights against other people’s certainties—and that in both directions. The
right to be offended is a guarantee of intellectual challenge and a promise of
liberation from the prison of unconsidered opinion. Paradoxical though it may
sound, blasphemous or offensive speech is a God-given right.
Charlie Hebdo, you see, is like Socrates, Augustine, and Luther all rolled into one.
T.S. Eliot, in Notes
Towards the Definition of Culture, asks “whether any culture could come
into being, or maintain itself, without a religious basis.”
Our civilization has rejected Christianity and now finds such things as “blasphemous or offensive speech” to be sacred. This is the illogical ideology of Western liberalism.
Today, the false religion of Western liberalism is clashing with another false religion called Islam, because their people wish to occupy the same spaces.
Neither is tolerant of the other, and both are intolerant of Christianity. One has Pussy Riot to desecrate churches, and the other has imams who preach murder in the name of Allah.
But Western liberalism is not only a false- but a pseudo-religion. Its platitudes derive not from divine revelations real or imagined but from denatured Christian morality.
No culture can "maintain itself" on the basis of Western liberalism.
Instead, the very ideology that demands abstract “free speech” with no divine revelation, even vestigially, to restrain it is the same ideology that cannot say no to Muslim invaders who wish to kill the purveyors of the sickest incarnations of “free speech.”
We have sown the wind, and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
Our civilization has rejected Christianity and now finds such things as “blasphemous or offensive speech” to be sacred. This is the illogical ideology of Western liberalism.
Today, the false religion of Western liberalism is clashing with another false religion called Islam, because their people wish to occupy the same spaces.
Neither is tolerant of the other, and both are intolerant of Christianity. One has Pussy Riot to desecrate churches, and the other has imams who preach murder in the name of Allah.
But Western liberalism is not only a false- but a pseudo-religion. Its platitudes derive not from divine revelations real or imagined but from denatured Christian morality.
No culture can "maintain itself" on the basis of Western liberalism.
Instead, the very ideology that demands abstract “free speech” with no divine revelation, even vestigially, to restrain it is the same ideology that cannot say no to Muslim invaders who wish to kill the purveyors of the sickest incarnations of “free speech.”
We have sown the wind, and now we are reaping the whirlwind.
Today’s Charlie
Hebdo episode is yesterday’s The People Vs. Larry Flynt,
Western liberalism’s celebration of transcendent porn for freedom’s sake.
In response to that film and its message, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg presciently wrote that
In response to that film and its message, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg presciently wrote that
The argument from supposedly liberty-loving liberals goes
like this: We protect “extreme” and unpopular speech because if that is safe,
they’ll never get to our core liberties. If they can ban trash, argue the
slippery-slopers, what’s to stop them from banning criticism of politicians?
Goldberg also said that “the notion that smut is the
canary in the coal mine of our liberties is a profoundly asinine and dangerous
myth, and it may be costing us the things that really matter.”
I couldn’t agree more. And yet, unfortunately, we are now getting the same argument from liberty-loving conservatives.
Out of the dankest clap-ridden cesspool of the Playboy Mansion’s grotto has crawled a dogma of conservative ideology.
In this ideology, to refuse to celebrate the "journalism" of Charlie Hebdo is to suggest that its staff deserved to die. That, of course, is absurd.
In addition to the Muslim killers, what really deserves to die is the liberal notion that free speech is guaranteed by unfettered obscenity.
I couldn’t agree more. And yet, unfortunately, we are now getting the same argument from liberty-loving conservatives.
Out of the dankest clap-ridden cesspool of the Playboy Mansion’s grotto has crawled a dogma of conservative ideology.
In this ideology, to refuse to celebrate the "journalism" of Charlie Hebdo is to suggest that its staff deserved to die. That, of course, is absurd.
In addition to the Muslim killers, what really deserves to die is the liberal notion that free speech is guaranteed by unfettered obscenity.
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