This week in Geneva, the United Nations is reviewing Indonesia’s human rights record. It should call on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono to crack down on extremists and protect minorities. While Indonesia has made great strides in consolidating a stable, democratic government after five decades of authoritarian rule, the country is by no means a bastion of tolerance. The rights of religious and ethnic minorities are routinely trampled. While Indonesia’s Constitution protects freedom of religion, regulations against blasphemy and proselytizing are routinely used to prosecute atheists, Bahais, Christians, Shiites, Sufis and members of the Ahmadiyya faith — a Muslim sect declared to be deviant in many Islamic countries. By 2010, Indonesia had over 150 religiously motivated regulations restricting minorities’ rights.
In an interview on free speech, Mark Thompson, director general of the BBC implies that the threat of violence from religious Muslims influences the BBC’s decisions on which shows it airs. His acknowledgement and justification of self-censorship has to be disheartening to all defenders of free speech. The BBC is the world’s largest media organization and is sustained by the British government.
Questioned about the conflict between free speech and offending people’s religious beliefs, Thompson justifies censorship in criticizing some religious figures [ but not others ] by suggesting that such criticism can be more “heinous” than harming real people.
… they believe that their faith refers to things which have an objective reality. And so, for example, they regard blasphemy as causing objective harm. So it’s not just that a blasphemous statement or act would hurt their feelings or anger them because it went against their opinions; it would do actual objective harm. That offending of an act of sacrilege against the god head or religious figure, actually creates harm in the world as it were and might be as heinous or more heinous than harm to a human being.
Thompson then shifts from the abstract to the specific:
I think you have to tread really quite carefully and sensitively because of the character. The point is that for a Muslim, a depiction – particularly a comical or demeaning depiction of the Prophet Muhammad – might have the force, the emotional force, of a piece of a grotesque child pornography. One of the mistakes seculars make is I think not to understand the character of what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief.
Interviewer Timothy Garton-Ash: But it is an ace, isn’t it? And a rather nasty ace if people say, “I feel so strongly about that; if you say it or broadcast it, I will kill you.”Thompson: Well clearly it’s a very notable move in the game, I mean without question. “I complain in the strongest possible terms” is different from “I complain in the strongest possible terms and I’m loading my AK47 as I write.” This definitely raises the stakes. But I think there’s two or three things going on, so manifestly a threat to murder, which by the way is quite rightly a crime, massively raises the stakes.
In more veiled language, Thompson also implies that such threats sway the BBC’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ash: What, if I may just interrupt for a moment, what are the areas in your experience, your great experience as a broadcaster, have you experienced threats of violence, threats to murder?Thompson: Well, the coverage of Israel-Palestine, and one or two other conflicts in the world, can lead to and have in my case led to threats of violence. Our editorial decision-making, where someone has come to believe you are not doing it fairly, or maybe likely not to do it fairly, have been threatened once, twice in my career about one or two major conflicts, which have some of the same features: a sense of victimhood, a sense of conspiracy – you know conspiracists who believe everyone else is conspiracist, and so forth – and a sense that the desperation or the circumstance means that the normal don’t apply.
Thompson does not spell out who is making the threats. But the penchant for sharp criticism of Israel’s government and a pronounced pro-Palestinian tilt in the BBC coverage has been widely noted. That observation, along with the contrast between the unfettered and highly critical Israeli press and the strict media control practiced by the Palestinian Authority, suggest that the threats are coming from the Palestinian side.
I guess we should be thankful that even this interview passed the BBC censor.
Arab societies are dependent on servants. Twenty-five per cent of Lebanese families have a live-in migrant worker, according to Professor Ray Jureidini of the Lebanese American University in Beirut. They are essential not only for the social lives of their employers (housework and caring for children) but for the broader Lebanese economy.
Yet in the Arab Gulf, the treatment of migrant labour – male as well as female – has long been a scandal. Men from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in the billionaires’ paradise of Kuwait – and are consistently harassed, treated as third-class citizens, and arrested on the meanest of charges.
Saudi Arabia long ago fell into the habit of chopping off the heads of migrant workers who were accused of assault or murder or drug-running, after trials that bore no relation to international justice. In 1993, for example, a Christian Filipino woman accused of killing her employer and his family was dragged into a public square in Dammam and forced to kneel on the ground where her executioner pulled her scarf from her head before decapitating her with a sword.
Charles and I agree on this new and clever form of racism and paternalism. Universal rights for me and thee – but not for the female victims of honor killing, forced child marriage, female genital mutilation, and forced veiling. Religious rights for Muslims in the West, but the lethal persecution of Christians, Hindus, and Jews in “Muslim lands.”
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Here’s the thing. Tell the truth about Radical Political Islamism and you will be branded a racist. Dare expose the Muslim practice of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, religious intolerance, and gender apartheid and you will find yourself branded a “conservative racist” and therefore demonized.
It happened to me early on, between 2003-2005.
It has happened to every single truth teller ever since, including Dr. Charles Small.
Yes: They hate us. It must be said.
Some may ask why I’m bringing this up now, at a time when the region has risen up, fueled not by the usual hatred of America and Israel but by a common demand for freedom. After all, shouldn’t everyone get basic rights first, before women demand special treatment? And what does gender, or for that matter, sex, have to do with the Arab Spring? But I’m not talking about sex hidden away in dark corners and closed bedrooms. An entire political and economic system — one that treats half of humanity like animals — must be destroyed along with the other more obvious tyrannies choking off the region from its future. Until the rage shifts from the oppressors in our presidential palaces to the oppressors on our streets and in our homes, our revolution has not even begun.
So: Yes, women all over the world have problems; yes, the United States has yet to elect a female president; and yes, women continue to be objectified in many “Western” countries (I live in one of them). That’s where the conversation usually ends when you try to discuss why Arab societies hate women.
Anti-Semitism is mankind’s oldest hatred, irrational, obsessive, and seemingly indestructible. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born activist whose childhood was spent in Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, and Kenya, recalls being instructed “practically on a daily basis that Jews were evil, the sworn enemies of Muslims whose only goal was to destroy Islam.” She grew up hearing Jews blamed for everything from AIDS to war; “if we ever wanted to know peace and stability,” she was taught, “we would have to destroy them before they would wipe us out.”
The Jew-haters always see themselves as victims, and their victimhood becomes their license to persecute. It is a phenomenon as old as the pharaohs and as contemporary as Al Qaeda. Hitler took it to an unprecedented scale. But while Hitler died in 1945, genocidal Jew-hatred lives on.
Of course, the media’s obfuscation of jihadi goals serves a purpose: it leaves the way open for the politically correct, MSM-approved motivations for Muslim violence: “political oppression,” “poverty,” “frustration,” and so on. From here, one can see why politicians such as former U.S. president Bill Clinton cite “poverty” as “what’s fueling all this stuff” (a reference to Boko Haram’s slaughter of Christians).
In short, while the MSM may report the most frugal facts concerning Christian persecution, they utilize their entire arsenal of semantic games, catch phrases, and convenient omissions that uphold the traditional narrative—that Muslim violence is anything but a byproduct of the Islamic indoctrination of intolerance.
