The free world is shuffling into a psychological bondage whose chains are mostly of our own making. The British “historian” David Irving wound up in an Austrian jail because of his Holocaust denial. It’s not unreasonable for Muslims to conclude that, if gays and Jews and other approved identities are to be protected groups who can’t be offended, why shouldn’t they be also?
They have a point. How many roads of inquiry are we prepared to block off in order to be “sensitive”? And, once we’ve done so, will there be anything left to talk about other than Paris Hilton and Jamie Lynn Spears? Holocaust denial should be ridiculous and contemptible. But not illegal.
If the objection is that hate speech laws would have prevented the rise of Nazism, well, pre-Nazi Germany had such laws. Indeed, as we’ll see, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia of Canadian speech restrictions, and a fat lot of good it did.
If the objection is a subtler one – that the Holocaust is a uniquely terrible stain on humanity that cannot be compared with other crimes – that’s all the more reason to talk about it openly. Instead, we live in a world where David Irving sits in a cell for querying the numbers of the last Holocaust while the President of Iran plans the next Holocaust and gets invited to speak at Columbia.
The more we hedge ourselves in with “hate speech” regulations, the less we’re able to hold any genuinely inquiring discussion on the challenges we face. And once that’s the case, as the angry young men in the streets have figured out, you might as well just threaten to burn and kill to get your way. You won’t have to do a lot of burning and killing – just give the impression, in a not particularly subtle way, that you’re an excitable type, and it’s best not to provoke you. That’s why the state justifies its need to crack down on Islamophobia by fretting over the entirely mythical wave of anti-Muslim violence – at a time when Danish cartoonists and Dutch parliamentarians and even California professors are in hiding, and French synagogues and schools and kosher butchers are being bombed and torched. In the wake of the bloody kidnappings, torture and mass murder in Bombay at the end of 2008, Mohamed Elmasry, the founder of the Canadian Islamic Congress and the man who launched the three lawsuits against Maclean’s, produced a perfect if inadvertent parody of the indestructible Islamic victim complex. Here’s the opening sentence of his analysis:
The recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India highlight the dangerously vulnerable situation of India’s Muslims…
Ah, right. So that’s what all those Hindu, Christian and Jewish corpses highlight: the vulnerability of Muslims.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And what the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Islamic Congress and similar groups in Britain and Europe are trying to do is criminalize vigilance. They want to use the legal system and other routes to circumscribe debate on one of the great central questions of the age – the relationship between Islam and the west – and to enforce silence on the most basic reality of that relationship: the remorseless Islamization of much of the western world as part of what the United Nations calls the fastest population transformation in history.
I’m often accused of being a demographic alarmist, so I’ll quote instead one bald line from Le Figaro in March 2008:
La capital européenne sera musulmane dans vingt ans.
That’s French for “Nothing to see here, folks.”
If you’re a young European adult, you’ll be reaching middle age in a society that’s half Islamic and half cowed infidels, and you’ll be ending your days somewhere beyond that intermediate stage.
Are we allowed to talk about that? Modern social-democratic governments preside over multicultural societies which have less and less glue holding them together, and they’re very at ease with the idea of the state as the mediator between different interest groups. Most of these governments haven’t a clue what to do about their turbulent surging Muslim populations, but they have unbounded faith in their own powers, and so it seems entirely natural to manage the problem by regulating freedom in the interests of social harmony.
For example, in America Alone, I mention Iqbal Sacranie, a Muslim of such exemplary “moderation” he’s been knighted by the Queen. Sir Iqbal, the head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was “immoral”, “not acceptable”, “spreads disease” and “damaged the very foundations of society”. A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard’s “community safety unit” which deals with “hate crimes” and “homophobia”.
Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a “barmy doctrine” growing “like a canker” and deeply “homophobic”. In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for “Islamophobia”.
Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for Islamophobia.
Personally I’m phobiaphobic. The reason I’m a phobiaphobe is that I have a great fear that all these mostly fictional “phobias” encourage the shrinking of the public square and the expansion of the state as the sole legitimate arbiter of acceptable discourse. And because a lot of these phobia-prone identity groups are not equally motivated, the one that wins will be the one willing to apply the most muscle. A while back, Her Majesty’s Government in London passed a law requiring elementary schools to teach kindergartners and other youngsters all about the joys of same-sex marriage. You know the kind of books – Heather Has Two Mommies; or King & King, in which a handsome prince goes looking for a bride, meets three lovely princesses but eventually marries one of the princesses’ brothers and they reign happily over their magic fairy kingdom together. When evangelical Christians object to these books, they’re told you uptight squares need to get with the beat. But when the Muslim parents at the grade school in Bristol, England complained, the city council caved in nothing flat and yanked them from the school. It’s an interesting lesson not just in the internal contradictions of multiculturalism but in which side is likely to win. If it’s a choice between Heather Has Two Mommies or Heather Has Two Imams, bet on Heather Has Two Imams – or Heather Has Four Mommies And A Big Bearded Daddy Who Wants To Marry Her Off To A Cousin Back In Pakistan.
That’s the way it goes. If you point out that EU prohibitions on “xenophobia” or the proposed British law restricting comment on religion would be unconstitutional in America, the more thoughtful Europeans will respond ruefully that things like the First Amendment presuppose a social consensus that across the Atlantic doesn’t exist: It’s all very well to say Danish cartoonists should be able to draw what they like, but not if it means people are getting killed and your cities are burning. Yet, oddly enough, the state’s urge to coerce self-restraint only applies to one party. If the true believers at the Grand Mosque of Stockholm are enjoined to sally forth and kill “the brothers of pigs and apes” – ie, Jews – well, that’s just part of their rich, vibrant cultural tradition. But, if I quote what’s being said in the mosque, I’m the one committing a hate crime. Crumbs, I might even do it accidentally. The Archbishop of Canterbury says he wants new laws to punish “thoughtless and, even if unintentionally, cruel styles of speaking”. The ever more illiberal liberal state is advancing from “thought crime” to “thoughtless thought crime”.