There Is A Price For Living In A Free Society

By Charles Moore

Friday, January 09, 2015

It is a bad habit, but I often listen to Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4. On Wednesday morning, it was presented by Nick Baines, the Bishop of Leeds. He did not like the recent demonstrations in Germany against the Islamisation of the West. Some marchers had made “irrational” comments, he said. The bishop offered us a choice: “Be driven by fear and insecurity into suspicion and hatred of the other, or take the risk of dancing to a different tune.”

I felt irritated. I have no desire to hate “the other” and I deplore all religious leaders who do so – numerous ayatollahs and imams, for example, who insult Jews, homosexuals, bare-headed women etc from the pulpit. I would, in principle, prefer to take the risk of dancing to Bishop Nick’s tune round the streets of Leeds in one of those displays of weedy niceness which are a precious part of our Anglican heritage. But he made me cross, because he was not being honest.

A few hours later came an event which must have made even that Right Reverend gentleman stop dancing. Two prize examples of “the other” murdered ten Parisian journalists and two policemen. Yesterday another of them was dealing death in a kosher shop. If we say that these events have nothing to do with Islam, we are lying. If we do not try to work out, publicly, what the link is and try to break it, fear and hatred will become uncontrollable.

Not enough attention has been paid to the precise reason why the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo were targeted. It is because they deliberately insulted the Muslim God and his Prophet. In Islamic culture, such insults are the worst thing there is, because they profane what matters most of all.

This is true, in fact, of Christianity as well, and in the past blasphemy was often punished by death in the Christian world. But there are two differences. The first is that, in its belief in Jesus, “despised and rejected of men”, Christianity always has, somewhere in its make-up, the idea of turning the other cheek. The other is that western Christian society gradually ceased to accept that the law of God, as interpreted by the Church, should automatically be the law of the land. However wicked the blasphemer might be, that was a matter for him and his God (if that God existed), and no longer for the magistrate.

So far as I can see, most Muslim societies have not accepted this distinction. The Muslim umma is the global nation of believers, above all nations. Their law (sharia) is supposed to be the law of every Muslim land, enforced by (often fearsome) punishments here on earth. Some Muslim countries, including important ones such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, enforce this notion very literally. Blasphemy there can get you killed, judicially.

If these matters were contained within Muslim countries we in the West might protest about this assault on liberty, but we could live with it, just as we live, reluctantly, with Kim Jong-un’s North Korean version of Communism. But the modern world is not like that, so we end up dying with it.

There are now millions of Muslims in the West. Those claiming to be their religious leaders cannot Islamise the entire society, but many want to create a sort of state within our state – a place where their laws (over marriage, for instance) are given the force of our law over their own believers. And because they are so horrified by the freedom in our society to speak openly and to mock, they constantly campaign for laws which forbid religious insults.

So when you listen carefully to the reactions of Muslims to the Charlie Hebdo murders, you will find genuine condemnation from most, but you will rarely find a Muslim saying that the cartoonists should have been free to draw what they did. “They had no right,” declared a pleasant-sounding chap from High Wycombe on the radio yesterday, “to make cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed and no right to say Islam is bad.”

There is some continuum between what Muslims generally believe and those Muslims who kill those who insult Islam. Few Muslims are terrorists or even like the idea of killing rude cartoonists. But we do have in our midst millions of people who have a different belief about the nature of society itself. This fact rightly makes us resist the Islamisation of Europe.

It also means that the extremists exert a special emotional pull on fellow Muslims. The killers may be psychopaths, misfits, drug dealers, often driven by essentially secular communal obsessions – Palestine, Kashmir, Syria. But they carry some appeal to many fellow Muslims because their “courage” feels like a reproach. “Look, we are warriors and martyrs! Are you?”

I heard a French former national security adviser say that 90 per cent of French Muslims are peaceful. I bet he is right; but there are about six million Muslims in France, so the other 10 per cent amount perhaps, to 600,000, not far short of the entire population of Bishop Nick’s Leeds. That is a lot of unpeaceful people. A recent study of Muslim opinion in France showed that the more observant are the more extreme. Observance has risen to 40 per cent.

So what can be done? Up till now, here in Britain, the policy solutions have been quietly to increase security, but publicly to “reassure” and “engage with” what are called “credible” Muslim partners. Among the intelligence agencies, it is in practice understood that bad actions are almost invariably inspired by some types of Muslim belief. But in public, it is denied. In his otherwise strong speech on Thursday, the Director General of MI5, Andrew Parker, endorsed the view that Isil is not Islamic. But what else is it? Isil is not, and could never be, Jewish, Christian, Hindu or secular: its religion explains its victims, its aims, even its means of killing and of dying. If it is to be combated, its “faith-based” nature has to be understood.

As for our politicians, they go around saying “Islam is a religion of peace”, which they would not need to repeat if they believed it. Under Labour, we came close to conceding a fully fledged law forbidding blasphemy (“religious hatred”) and we introduced the repressive concept of a “religiously aggravated” crime.

Before she resigned from the Government over Gaza last year, the Muslim peer Lady Warsi worked with the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, which wants a worldwide ban on insulting religions. She supported the UN Human Rights Council Resolution 16/18, which would declare an attack on a faith to be an unacceptable affront to its adherents and vice versa. She was on television after the Paris murders, saying that they were “an attack on Islam”. It seems a funny way to look at it (though two Muslims were among those murdered, I do not think that is what she meant).

As for civil society in general, we have tended to tiptoe round the problem. The media deplored the death threats that followed the (genuinely un-nasty) Danish cartoons, but did not publish them. We say “Nous sommes Charlie”, but fight shy of reprinting the magazine’s Mohammed gags, so readers never quite know what the story is about. Employers worry about their staff’s safety. Some even fear upsetting Muslim newsagents. Terrorism is working.

All this has created a chasm between public doctrine and what the public can see is the case. It is not for politicians to make theological statements. Like all the main religions, Islam is rich, deep and complex and will probably outlast our system of government. But what our leaders can and should do is insist that there is a price for living in a free society, and all citizens must pay it.