Where Victim-Blaming Is Still Considered Okay

By Judson Berger

Friday, August 19, 2022

 

Victim-blaming didn’t die during #MeToo. It thrives today, elsewhere, as it has for decades.

 

·         Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her memoir Infidel, recalled one instance, in 2002. She was listening to a BBC report on the deadly riots sparked by a journalist’s cheeky reference to Mohammed while covering the Miss World pageant. A British pageant organizer came on. Only “instead of blaming the violence on the men who were burning down houses and murdering people, she blamed the young reporter for making ‘unfortunate remarks.’”

 

The journalist’s editor blamed her too. So did the mob in Nigeria, and she was forced to flee.

 

·         Fast-forward: When two Muslim terrorists murdered a dozen people in 2015 at the offices of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, which had published cartoons of Mohammed, a Financial Times piece lamented that the target had a “long record of mocking, baiting and needling French Muslims.” The writer counseled those who would “provoke Muslims” to show some “common sense.” (A variation, in other words, of “Try dressing modestly.”)

 

·         After a man beheaded a schoolteacher on a Paris street in 2020 for showing those cartoons as part of a free-speech lesson, the Associated Press published an article asking, “Why does France incite anger in the Muslim world?”

 

This kind of victim-blaming remains quite mainstream, quite common, quite culturally acceptable. Wherever the honor of Islam is hideously avenged, some measure of blame is by custom apportioned to The Instigator. The one who drew the caricature. The one who blasphemed. The culture within which such “offenses” are even permitted.

 

The reaction is of a piece with that from the Iranian government this past week. After novelist Salman Rushdie was stabbed, the foreign ministry explained that they “do not consider that anyone deserves blame and accusations except him and his supporters” — apparently faulting him, still, for his supposedly blasphemous book The Satanic Verses. Never mind the fatwa ordering Rushdie’s murder or the $3 million price on his head, all tracing to Iran, or the actions of the attacker himself. Rushdie had “provoked,” 34 years ago, and the response to this provocation is portrayed to be as natural as closing one’s eyes in response to a burst of light.

 

This is the view from Tehran, phrased only slightly more coarsely than by our apologists here. But there is no reason the West should continue to espouse this view. It is, among other things, condescending in the extreme to presuppose that these assailants have no alternative but to stab away once provoked on grounds of faith — that restraint would be impossible.

 

Ten years ago, this condescension was dripping from Hillary Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attack and mass protests at American embassies; she repeatedly emphasized how “awful” and “reprehensible” and “disgusting” that Internet video was (you remember: this being the silly video that maybe, like, six people saw) as she also condemned the violence ostensibly linked to it.

 

There’s a better way. Kevin Williamson:

 

Against fanaticism, we have — what? Literature and music, love, friendship, humor, and, with the help of skilled doctors and our prayers, the continuing work of Salman Rushdie and other geniuses of his kind, who help to steer us away from the brutal and toward the humane, away from the ridiculous toward the reasonable.

 

As the coal miners’ song asked: Which side are you on?

 

There are of course lessons concerning the broader free-speech debate to draw from this, pertaining to alarming efforts in the West to, if not physically attack, prosecute those deemed to have caused offense with their words. But no matter how narrow or broad we might go, this issue is simple, so very simple. Charles C. W. Cooke explains:

 

Really, there are only two sides to it. There are the people who believe in free speech, and there are the people who don’t. The person who does believe in free speech is currently in the hospital. The person who doesn’t believe in free speech stabbed him.