The Argument of Force vs. The Force of Argument

Anjem Chourdy doesn’t speak for all Muslims.  When he speaks though, there are others who listen and act accordingly:

CHOURDY: She (Pamela Geller) should be put before a shariah court and tried and if found guilty of course she would face capital punishment.

HANNITY: She’s not a Muslim, Anjem!

CHOURDY: It doesn’t make any difference! She should have thought about that before she had this competition. You know, you need to learn the lessons of (garbled) and Salman Rushdie. You cannot continue to go down this road and expect the Muslims to stand back. You know, I would retaliate if someone insulted my own mother, let alone the Prophet whom I adhere… and you know, I love a hundred times more than my own family. Come on, your own Pope said that he would attack somebody who would attack his mother. What about the Prophet?

The interview is worth the four minutes.

Of course, the Iranians held a similar competition this year where the Jewish Holocaust was caricatured.  No Muslims or Israelis were harmed in the making of such cartoons.  Nor were any harmed in 2006, where the first contest was held, ostensibly to caricature Western norms of free speech and what was “acceptable” and “unacceptable” speech in Europe and the United States (the cartoons made their point, as the Western media did indeed condemn the contest).

Yet in the wake of the now-confirmed ISIS terrorist attack on Pamela Geller’s event in Texas, one has to wonder about the whole 1% argument, namely that if out of 1 billion Muslims only 1% are radicalized, that’s 100,000 Islamists roaming about.

…of course, one could say the same for Catholics — and we’ve formed military orders in the past.

What should be concerning for any observer here is the instinctive pull of the left to insist that if Pamela Geller didn’t want it, she shouldn’t have been wearing that dress.  Or namely, that Geller should never have held the event for fear of instigating an Islamist response.  Which is somewhat interesting when compared to leftist outrage (properly felt) about “rape culture” as a whole.  Fear should never be the governing position of a free society, and asking women to “cover up” or become more demure for fear of either rapists or Islamists seems intuitively wrong.

Yet this comes back to the debate over the niqab in France.  The headscarf itself isn’t even a tradition — it’s an innovation created by the Muslim Brotherhood in the mid-20th century in order to identify faithful Muslim women in contrast to more Westernized Egyptian women.  Yet the niqab itself is now a religious point of pride for many Muslims, particularly French Algerians where state run schools wedded to French ideas of laicism (secularism taken the next step further) have sought to eradicate all religious sentiment from the public square.

In essence, it is the precise opposite reaction to free speech that Chourdry insists upon.  One side demands total accommodation to one form of expression, the other a total extermination of all forms of expression.

The balance in the West has always hinged upon a very specific form of pluralism gifted to us by Christendom, and on that rung we hang our all concepts of freedom; religion, speech, thought, press.  Sadly, the secular West has done just about everything in its power to undermine pluralism because it refuses to accommodate or recognize the Christian taproot.

Arguing from weakness, secular norms have done everything possible to drive out Judeo-Christian values from the public square, lurching towards laicism in the effort.  We see it in just about every public policy statement from the Obama administration down to our public schools.  We are even seeing a slow replacement of these rights in exchange for others never before seen in the American patchwork; privacy, equality, good speech, and dignity… the last one being the most recently contrived invention to impose a 50-state mandate to redefine marriage, but I digress…

islam_no_free_speechThe insistence on religious pluralism — and yes, that includes room for the absence of religious sentiment as well — is the bedrock of American exceptionalism.  Chordry may not understand this, but in time American culture leans on and changes minds, much as it did with Roman Catholics coming on these shores and discovering that freedom of religion actually gave the freest sphere of operation for the Catholic Church to grow, thrive, and prosper — despite her past and present enemies.   Eventually, the Second Vatican Council recognized the strength of religious pluralism and allowed it to become the fullest expression of what the Church sought.

That’s noble, and it will take time before moderate Muslims will have the forum and influence to be heard over those who preach salvation at the point of a gun, as Dr. Imad Damaj and Joshua Ralston so eloquently defended in the Richmond Times-Dispatch this August 2014.

In the meantime, Americans should not be forced to restrict their freedoms — and in this instance, freedom of speech — in the face of violence and fear.  We have already experimented with the restriction of civil liberties in a time of peril over these last 15 years, and most Americans regardless of where you are placed on the political spectrum are worn thin.

Times like these require the exercise of civil liberty, not its restriction.  Chourdy is free to express his thoughts on the argument of force; Geller is free to express her own through force of argument.  The wrong response would be the abdication of any argument whatsoever.

 

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