24 years after Rushdie, Islamists put Brits once again under police protection

[Originally posted at NOW]

Heresy hunters have a tendency to reserve their most concentrated and toxic venom for precisely those deviants whose doctrinal improprieties are the slightest. When Salman Rushdie, in a moment of delirious desperation after nearly two years of fatwa-induced fear for his life, allowed himself to be persuaded by an Egyptian fraudster into converting to Islam, the effect on his would-be murderers in Tehran was worse than had he done nothing at all. Supreme Leader Khamenei, who alone had the power to revoke the assassination order issued by his predecessor, responded that the fatwa would forever remain valid even “if Rushdie became the most pious man of all time,” while the Iranian state press howled that the novelist’s death was now imminent. So far from earning him leniency, his membership in the club only placed him in redoubled peril.

And so it has proven – on a far broader scale – with Islam’s 21st century holy warriors, who may well despise the Jews and the rest of the kuffar, but with nothing like as much conviction as they loathe their Muslim rivals. Just last week it was reported that yet another Salafist in Gaza had shunned battle with the Zionists, preferring to make his way to Syria via Turkey to fight the true jihad against the “nusayri” regime. And then we learn that Somalia’s al-Shabaab has chosen to mark the festival of Eid al-Adha by threatening several prominent British Muslims, including an imam, whom it said had “mutilated the teachings of Islam” by failing to endorse things like the wanton slaughter of shoppers in Kenya last month. In an eerie symmetry – and a sign of how much progress has been made in 24 years – it transpires that at least three of these men will be placed under Rushdiesque police protection.

I happen to be an atheist, and one of the school that says we’d be better off without faith of any kind, no matter how secularized or ‘moderate’. All the same, to abandon fellow foes of extremism in their hour of need would be no less shameful than the silence of many Muslims (and indeed non-Muslims, for that matter) after 1989 who couldn’t stomach Rushdie’s godlessness. The British government must be urged to put every necessary resource at the assistance of Mohammed Ansar, Usama Hasan and Ajmal Masroor, no less than it must do everything in its power to confront and defeat the abominable thugs who would kill the rest of us the moment after they were done with them.

Making a film is not a crime. Period.

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

To say that surveying the media over the past few days has been a distressing task doesn’t quite cut it. Nor has it merely been irritating or fatiguing, though it certainly has been those in abundance. No, above all the experience has been comprehensively, piercingly dispiriting: “depriv[ing] of spirit, hope, enthusiasm, etc.; [to] depress; discourage; dishearten,” as Dictionary.com so ably defines it.

I’m talking, of course, about the abject surrender of the so-called “civilized world” to hysterical, mediaeval barbarism. Eight years after the broad-daylight murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic fascist, not one Western official has been able to condemn Tuesday’s killing of a US ambassador and three of his staff by Islamic fascists without hastily adding an accompanying condemnation of… a YouTube video. President Obama was eloquent in vowing that “no acts of terror will ever [...] eclipse the light of the values that we stand for,” but this was directly at odds with his earlier coded apology to the murderers, where he affirmed that “we reject all efforts to denigrate the religious beliefs of others.”

Nor were columnists any better. In a particularly appalling Guardian example, Andrew Brown said the “blasphemous” film “offends against the central values of liberal democracy” and ought to be “banned” and have its “distributors prosecuted” (a position that puts Mr. Brown in the company of Ayatollah Khamenei, who demanded that the US government “punish those who committed this heinous crime”). Elsewhere, the best that many were able to come up with was that the embassy attack was “un-Islamic,” chillingly suggesting things would be different it if it wereIslamic.

I don’t care who made the film, who paid for it, or what it contains. Unless we’re to simply give up on liberty and the Enlightenment, this prostration has to stop right now. Unless our culture is forever to be held hostage to the veto of injured feelings, then the following ground rules need to be plainly articulated: You can say whatever you want about the Prophet Muhammad. You can do the same about the Pope, Jesus, Moses, Mithras, Buddha, Brahma and Zeus. No ifs. No buts. No apologies.

Making a film is not a crime.

Fission and the fatwa

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

The Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reiterated today the claim that nuclear weapons are forbidden in Islam. “Based on Islamic teachings and the clear fatwa [edict] of the Supreme Leader, the production and use of weapons of mass destruction is [sic] haram [forbidden] and have no place in the Islamic Republic of Iran’s defense doctrine”, AFP reported him as saying.

The “Supreme Leader” in question is, of course, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the cleric and absolute ruler of the country, who is said to have outlawed The Bomb several years ago (though no evidence has been made public), and who declared its possession to constitute “a major sin” in February this year.

Not nearly enough attention is paid to these remarks, if you ask me. After all, the Iranian regime is impugned for many things, but insufficient religious fanaticism is not one I can recall. The question begged by the fatwa is this: is the Iranian government an utter theocracy, horrified by “sin” and entirely servile to the dictates of the faqih? If so, whence the nuclear bomb? And if not – if, in other words, it is a rational, secular actor – then why should its nuclear arsenal be any more objectionable than, say, Israel’s?

Of course, even Supreme Leaders can make mistakes. The religious in general have a curious habit of producing “revelations” and revisions at strikingly convenient moments. One isn’t only thinking here of the comic fraudulence of, say, Joseph Smith, who couldn’t even convince his own wife of the tripe he peddled. I’m thinking also of Khamenei’s predecessor, Ruhollah Khomeini, who in 1987 declared his war on Iraq a “divine cause” to be waged “until victory”, only to “drink the cup of poison” by making peace with Saddam a year later. The beauty of being God’s hand-picked vicar is exactly that every new rule is just as unchallengeable as the last one.

But the bottom line is those pushing for war on Iran can’t have it both ways. If the Iranians really are slaves to Khamenei’s fatawa, then as things stand there will be no bomb. If, on the other hand, they’re a pragmatic people amenable to reason, then a better excuse is going to have to be created for why they can’t have even one their regional rival’s estimated 200 warheads.