Freedom to Insult
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
The aftermath of the Paris rampage once again underlines the importance of how an issue is framed. How an issue is framed changes the context of a debate. In the West, it is presented largely as a defense of freedom of speech. The response of Western Muslims has been to divide themselves between extremist Muslims and moderate Muslims, casting the blame on the extreme while exempting the mainstream.
Both perspectives are misleading, inaccurate, and falsify facts.
Europeans take fraudulent shelter under freedom of speech when, in fact, Holocaust denial is a crime in many European countries including, but not limited to, Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland and, of course, France.
To be more exact, it is illegal in France to question the existence of crimes that fall into the category of “crimes against humanity” including the Holocaust. This is not seen as a violation of freedom of speech.
More accurately, the issue is of common human decency and the attempts to overturn the settled norms of civilized behavior. The frequency of malicious and outrageous insults sends, in effect, a clear message to Western Muslims that the price tag of being in the West is to absorb being insulted and humiliated frequently. Many may have no problems in swallowing this bitter pill. But a few evidently haven’t. To insult is not a joke for the target of the insult. Nor is it a game for those whose feelings are hurt. Freedom doesn’t impart a license to humiliate.
European cultures today are mired in secular atheism, with little grasp of old-fashioned shame.
The Rushdie affair of 1989 and the Danish caricatures of 2006 provide ample evidence that what occurred in Paris was to be expected.
Freedom of speech has its own parameters. As the famous jurist, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, explained in a US Supreme Court decision (Schenck v United States (1919)): “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
The cartoon issue is not an issue of ‘moderate’ Muslims or ‘extremist’ Muslims. It touches the self-respect and core being of all Muslims. It would be catastrophic to misdiagnose it and treat it lightly.
When the cartoon controversy erupted in 2006, I was then in the Punjab Cabinet. I had proposed convening an emergency Islamic summit in Lahore with a one-point agenda: to impose sanctions on Denmark whose economy is heavily dependent on their dairy exports to the Middle East. It would have sent a loud and clear collective message. It was a failure of Muslim governing elites not to take ownership. Predictably, then, the quill has ceded space to the gun.
The word “Muslim” is rapidly becoming a fright word in the West. It is a consequential happening. 100 years ago, the French were warned by Churchill not to be vindictive toward a vanquished Germany. But they didn’t heed and were bent on humiliating Germany. It triggered German revanchism, leading to the rise of Hitler. But France, to quote Napoleon, has forgot nothing and learned nothing.
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