The Newsstand Sophisticate

Norm links to a story about the Bishop of Carlisle’s attempt to claim meteorology as a branch of theology. The Rt. Rev. Graham Dow has, the article says, suggested that recent floods in the U.K. are a punishment from God, provoked by the introduction of gay equality.

Norm was kind enough to post a question I had about the right reverend’s theory, living as I do in a state where same-sex marriage is proscribed by the constitution yet which inexplicably continues to be punished by flooding. You can read Norm’s post and my foray into theological meteorology (or is it meteorological theology?) here.

Christopher Hitchens has written an article in Slate on the semi-pro members of the “Muslim street” who keep Karachi’s flag shops in business with their regular protests against any and all perceived insults to Islam from the West. Anger over Salman Rushdie’s knighthood is only the latest casus jihadi. Hitchens once again rightly chastises Western media producers for setting up people like “Rage Boy” as the true representatives of the Muslim world:

But our media regularly make the assumption that the book burners and fanatics really do represent the majority, and that assumption has by no means been tested. (If it is ever tested, and it turns out to be true, then can we hear a bit less about how one of the world’s largest religions mustn’t be confused with its lunatic fringe?)

Christopher Hitchens lays the smackdown on Baroness Shirley Williams on British television program “Question Time” after she regrets the knighting of Salman Rushdie, a man who, in her words, “deeply offended Muslims in a very powerful way.” Some of the audience is also on the receiving end of the smackdown as well for applauding her “contemptible” statement:

One of the oddest things about Western leftists defending illiberal but non-Western groups and movements is that though they are obsessed with diversity and dissent within the U.S. and U.K., they absolutely ignore diversity and dissent that exists within countries like Iran or in the Palestinian territories. Why are Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hamas taken to be legitimate spokesmen for Muslims, but not Muslims who disagree with the fatwa against Rushdie or who don’t want an Islamic state?

Hitchens points out this contradiction toward the end of the video: “If you say that Muslims are offended by this, and you lump them all together, you immediately grant that they are in fact represented by the most extreme, homicidal, fanatical, illiterate, intolerant people.” When looked at this way, it’s hard to see how Baroness Williams can believe she’s actually defending Muslims at all.

(Via DSTPFW and David Thompson)

The New York Times has an article on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent crackdown on dissent and “un-Islamic” behavior. It’s full of sickening details: men with “Western haircuts” forced to walk through the street sucking on jerry cans used for cleaning your bottom, Iranians with American citizenship not allowed to leave the country because they’re accused of being spies, student leaders thrown in prison for publishing “articles suggesting that no humans were infallible, including the Prophet Muhammad and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.” It’s worth reading in full to see what democrats, trade unionists and other reformers are up against in Iran.

But there’s an odd paragraph late in the article where the reporter, Neil MacFarquhar, writes:

“Iran can prove a difficult country to separate into black and white. Amid all the recent oppression, for example, last week the public stoning of a couple—the punishment for adultery—was called off. Women’s rights advocates had been agitating against it.”

I can’t see why the Iranian government’s decision in one instance not to carry out its standard barbaric punishment for adultery somehow suggests that we shouldn’t characterize it as fundamentally despotic, unjust, and illegitimate. If he means that we shouldn’t paint Iranians with the same brush as we do the Iranian state, he’s right, but that’s obvious from the article. It chronicles the many Iranians who are fighting against the state in small and large ways, putting their lives and security at risk to assert their rights and dignity in the face of an oppression that in the modern U.S. is very difficult to imagine.

It’s almost as if MacFarquhar (or possibly an editor or copyeditor) feared someone might think the article was biased or racist because it’s saying bad things about a non-Western government, so he had to throw in a paragraph to muddle up the obvious moral distinctions the rest of the article displays. See? We can’t say the government’s completely bad. They decided not to stone some adulterers, after all!

More on human rights abuses in Iran here.

Mick Hartley on the Sir Salman brouhaha:

“At least the latest tantrums from the Muslim world about Salman Rushdie’s knighthood should demonstrate to those who persist in thinking that all the suicide bombings, 9/11, 7/7, Madrid, Bali, are understandable reactions to Western provocation that, really, no, we’re dealing with a violent pathology here which feeds off a childish sense of grievance.”

Why is it so hard for some to think of violence committed in the name of Islam as a pathology, while it’s an automatic conclusion when violence is carried out in the name of a more private or eccentric set of beliefs? Because we give large collective faiths a greater legitimacy than they usually merit. Seung Hui Cho was a psychopath, Jim Jones a madman, but when it comes to suicide bombers we’re supposed to imagine that they’re just carrying out an intelligible political and cultural program through admittedly regrettable and possibly misguided means.

According to this article in the Washington Post, Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung Hui Cho “displayed many of the same characteristics of a criminal behavioral profile called the ‘Collector of Injustice,’ or someone who considers any misfortune against him the fault or responsibility of others.”

Cho used religious language in attempting to justify his rampage: “”I say we take up the cross, Children of Ishmael, take up our guns and knives . . . and take no prisoners and spare no lives.”

The article says the collector of injustice’s “compilation of wrongs becomes overloaded, and he lashes out violently to right them and get even with those who he believes have caused him misfortune and ridicule.”

What is the difference between Cho, whom everybody agrees was a psychopath, and the Islamic suicide bombers who kill themselves and others with such alarming frequency? Only that Cho’s “collection of injustices” was a private collection. The suicide bombers have thousands, perhaps millions, of people legitimating their grievances and the horrific “solution” to them by appealing to one of the world’s largest religions.

Salman Rushdie has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. “Sir Salman” has a delightfully odd but mellifluous ring.

Of course, some are not happy. David Thompson and Norman Geras examine the ugly reaction and a particularly egregious example of condescending leftist vitriol about what the knighting “really” means.

It all adds up to depressing reading, and I worry that Sir Salman, who has recently been able to live relatively free of worry about the 1989 fatwa calling for his death, will face renewed threats. It’s a good time to remember Hitoshi Igarati, Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses, who was murdered in 1991 for his services to literature. And to remember that defending liberal principles is not some decadent concern of overprivileged Westerners, but a matter of life and death.

Paul Berman has written a long, very interesting article (registration required) on Swiss Islamic “philosopher” Tariq Ramadan and the way some Western journalists, especially Ian Buruma, have downplayed the more retrograde aspects of his thought and failed to press him for specific answers on how he envisions Islam operating within European democracies. Berman also examines Buruma’s tiresome assertion that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an “enlightenment fundamentalist.”

Hirsi Ali is in Sydney now, spreading her fundamentalist belief that everybody should be free to make his or her own choices so long as they don’t directly harm anybody else. (Shocking, aren’t they, the things these fundamentalists try to shove down everybody’s throats?) In an article on her visit, one Nada Roude, of the New South Wales Islamic Council, is quoted offering a statement worthy of Mr. Ramadan in its vague authoritarianism: “Anyone who causes harm to our society because they have the right to express their opinion is not welcome.” The use of the words “anyone who causes harm to our society” is of course misleading and irresponsible. “Anyone who hurts our feelings” would be much more accurate. Peoples’ right to believe whatever they want should be respected, and protected by the state. No state or religion has the right to curtail others’ movement or speech to protect someone’s feelings.

What with Christopher Hitchens all over the airwaves and the Internet and the boom in atheist books, I felt I needed a break from relentless criticism of religion. So, last night I sat down to read George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman and the Mountain of Light”—and what did I find at the beginning of the chapter I was on? This:

“If there was one thing worse than Jawaheer’s murder it was his funeral, when his wives and slavegirls were roasted alive along with his corpse, according to custom. Like much beastliness in the world, suttee is inspired by religion, which means there’s no sense or reason to it . . . “

And then a bit later:

” . . . why, Alick Gardner told me of one funeral in Lahore where some poor little lass of nine was excused burning as being too young, and the silly chit threw herself off a high building. They burned her corpse anyway. That’s what comes of religion and keeping women in ignorance.”

I know it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead. Christopher Hitchens knows this, too, which is why he was especially nasty when asked about the death of Jerry Falwell last night on CNN:

“I think it’s a pity there isn’t a hell for him to go to.”

There’s more from Hitchens here. I’ve heard and read much lately that Hitchens is too abrasive in his atheism. But he’s a forceful polemicist when he writes about other topics, too, so I’m not sure why it should be different when he tackles religion or religious figures. The notion that criticism of religious ideas should be watered down simply because they are “matters of faith,” or “deeply held,” is itself a pernicious article of faith deeply held by too many.