Censoring .. Is No Way to Fight Terrorism (reaction to Redeker Islam dump)

[papau]

Is Redeker's opinion piece one which will cost him his life? A non-copywrited translation of French philosopher Robert Redeker (just include source info if reproduced) is at the end of this post.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-ash5oct05,0,6339754.story?track=tottext

Censoring Ourselves Is No Way to Fight Terrorism
Violence now looms for those who only dare to express the unpopular.

By Timothy Garton Ash
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is professor of European studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

October 5, 2006

...I believe, for example, that Redeker's article in Le Figaro was an intemperate and unwise one, with its claim that Islam (not just Islamism or jihadism) is today's equivalent of Soviet-style world communism, and his denunciation of Muhammad as a "pitiless warlord, pillager, massacrer of Jews and polygamist." But once the fanatiques sans frontieres respond by proposing to kill him, we must stand in total solidarity with the threatened writer — in the spirit of Voltaire.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1887929,00.html

The struggle to defend free expression is defining our age

We may not agree with a particular sentiment, but we must defend to the death the individual's right to express it

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday October 5, 2006
The Guardian


Almost every day brings a new threat to free expression. A French philosopher is in hiding, running for his life from death threats on Islamist websites, because he published an article in a French newspaper saying that Muhammad is revealed in the Qur'an as a "master of hate". A production of Mozart's Idomeneo, which at one point displays the severed (plastic? papier mache?) head of Muhammad, alongside those of Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon, is pulled off the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin after a telephoned threat of violence was reported to management by local police. And that's just the past week.<snip>

The erosion of free expression comes in many different ways. Most obviously, there is violence or the threat of violence: "If you say that, we will kill you." This is dramatically facilitated in our time by the internet, email and mobile phones. The French philosopher Robert Redeker went into hiding after an Islamist website called for him - "the pig" - to be "punished by the lions of France" as "the lion of Holland, Mohammed Bouyeri did", and then gave Redeker's home address, photograph and phone number. Mohammed Bouyeri was the slayer of Theo van Gogh.<snip>





This is FAUSTA'S BLOG translation of the Redeker article. PLEASE CREDIT FAUSTA'S BLOG http://faustasblog.com/2006/09/article-that-may-cost-man-his-life-and.html
IF YOU USE THIS IN YOUR WRITINGS.

Face aux intimidations islamistes, que doit faire le monde libre?
In the face of Islamist intimidations, what is the free world to do?


Robert Redeker
Le Figaro
Robert Redeker (Professor of philosophy at the school Pierre-Paul-Riquet in Saint-Orens in Gammeville. Author of the upcoming Dépression et philosophie (éditions Pleins Feux).

The reactions generated by Pope Benedict XVI's analysis on Islam and violence aim to continue Islam's attempt to suppress what is most valuable in the West and which Muslim countries don't have: freedoms of thought and expression. Islam tries to impose its rules on Europe : restricting public swimming pools at certain hours for women only, prohibiting to caricature this religion, requiring the compliance of strict dietary rules for Muslim children in school lunchrooms, fighting for wearing the veil at school, and issuing charges of islamophobia against those who are not like-minded.

How to explain the prohibition of the string bikini at the Paris-Beaches this summer? It was a strange argument: because of the risk of "disorders against law and order". Did that mean that bands of frustrated young people were likely to become violent from the display of beauty? Or did one fear islamist demonstrations, via virtue brigades, within the Paris-Beaches?

However, allowing the wearing of the veil on the streets is, because of the support to the oppression of women that the veil signifies, more likely "to disturb the law and order" than the string bikini. One is not out of line in thinking that this gesture represents an Islamization of the French spirit, a submission more or less conscious to the tenets of Islam. Or, at the very least, that it results from an insidious Moslem pressure on the spirit. Islamization of the spirit: even those which protested against the inauguration of a Jean-Paul-II Square in Paris do not oppose building mosques. Islam tries to force Europe to yield to its vision of man.

As formerly with Communism, the West is under ideological monitoring. Islam arises, like the image of late Communism, as an alternative to the Western world. Following the example of the Communism of old, Islam, by aiming to conquer the spirit, strikes a sensitive cord. It boasts a legitimacy which disturbs the Western conscience, always sensitive to others: to be the voice of the poor of planet. Yesterday the voice of the poor claimed to come from Moscow, today it would come from Mecca! Today again, the intellectuals incarnate this eye of the Koran, as they incarnated the eye of Moscow yesterday. They excommunicate for islamophobia, as they did yesterday for anticommunism.

In opening to others, specific to the West, a secularization of Christianity appears, which can be summarized as: the other must have a right to be. The Westener, heir to Christianity, is the one who loves to discover. By doing so it takes the risk of appearing weak. Like Communism, Islam regards as soft the generosity, broadmindedness, and tolerance; and women’s freedom, liberty of mores, and democratic values are considered marks of decline.

These are weaknesses that it wants to exploit with the help of "useful idiots" with good consciences filled with finer feelings, in order to impose the Koranic order on the Western world itself.

The Koran is a book imbued with violence. Maxime Rodinson states, in the Encyclopédia Universalis, some truths regarded as taboo in France. On the one hand, "Muhammed revealed in Medina unsuspected qualities as political leader and military chief (...) He resorted to the private war, current institution in Arabia (...) Muhammed sent quick small groups of his partisans to attack the caravans, thus punishing his unbeliever compatriots and at the same time acquiring spoils from the rich."

In addition, "Muhammed successfully eliminated from Medina, through massacre, the last Jewish tribe which remained there, the Qurayza, which he accused of suspect behavior". Lastly, "after the death of Khadidja, he married a widow, Sawda, and also young Aisha, who was hardly ten years old. His erotic inclinations, contained for long time, were to make him contract ten simultaneous marriages".

Violence instigator, ruthless war chief, plunderer, massacrer of Jews, polygamist: such is the image of Muhammed in the Koran.

True, the Catholic Church is not free from reproach. Its history is strewn with black pages, of which it has repented. The Inquisition, witch hunting, the execution of the philosophers Bruno and Vanini, the poor-minded epicureans who in the middle of the eighteenth century were tired for impiety, do not plead in its favor. But what differentiates Christianity from Islam appears: it is always possible to turn to evangelic values, the soft person of Jesus against the drifts of the Church.

None the faults of the Church are rooted in the Gospel. Jesus is non-violent. The return to Jesus is a recourse against the excesses of the institution connected with the church. The recourse to Muhammed, on the contrary, reinforces hatred and violence. Jesus is a Master of love, Muhammed a Master of hatred.

The stoning of Satan, annually in Mecca, is not a mere superstitious phenomenon. It doesn't only show a hysterical crowd flirting with cruelty. Its rage is anthropological. Here is indeed a rite, to which each Moslem is invited to subject, registering violence like a duty crowned in the heart of belief.

This stoning, where annually some of the faithful - at times hundreds - die from being trampled on, is a ritual which breeds ancient violence.

Instead of eliminating this ancient violence, by imitating Judaism and Christianity, by neutralizing it (the Judaism starts with the rejection of human sacrifice, i.e. by which it enters into civilization, Christianity transforms the sacrifice into Eucharist), Islam builds a nest for it, where it will grow from the heat. While the Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites delegitimize violence, Islam is a religion which whose very own sacred texts, as banal as some of its rites may be, exalts violence and hatred.

Hatred and violence live the book in which any Moslem is educated, the Koran. As in the times of the Cold War, violence and intimidation are the means used by an ideology with hegemonic vocation, Islam, to throw its lead cover on the world. Benedict XVI suffers from this cruel experiment. In these our times it is necessary to call the West "the free world" compared to the Moslem world, and in these times the enemies of this "free world", dedicated civil servants of the Koran, swarm in its centre.

http://faustasblog.com/2006/09/article-that-may-cost-man-his-life-and.html

Comments at the blog:
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the islamists hate Redeker for making all that Koranic & Mohammed violence, mass murder of Jews, looting, polygamy, etc., sound like a bad thing
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Once again, Islam responds to accusations of violence with threats of violence.

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[bobbieinok]

1. more important thoughts from Ash's article

....

Then there's self-censorship in the face of such threats. Chancellor Angela Merkel aptly described the Deutsche Oper Berlin's decision to pull Idomeneo as "self-censorship out of fear". But self-censorship can also flow from a well-intentioned notion of multi-cultural harmony, on the lines of "you respect my taboo and I'll respect yours" - what I've described in this column as the tyranny of the group veto. And there are misguided attempts by democratic governments and parliaments to ensure domestic peace and inter-communal harmony by legislating to curb free expression. The British government's original proposal for a law on incitement to religious hatred was a case in point.

The threats also come from the most diverse quarters. It would be absurd to pretend that Islamist extremists are not among the current leaders in intimidation, at least in relation to Europe and America. After all, Christians, Buddhists and, indeed, Poseidonites did not - so far as we know - threaten violent retaliation because the severed heads of their all-holiest were displayed on a Berlin opera stage. But my opening case-list shows that it's not just jihadists who want to squeeze the oxygen pipe of free expression.

Even as I write, news reaches me of a good friend, Tony Judt, a historian of modern Europe and outspoken critic of recent Israeli policy, finding a venue in New York suddenly withdrawn after telephone calls to the host institution, which happened to be the Polish consulate. (He proposed to talk about "the Israel lobby and US foreign policy".) According to the Polish consul, those telephone calls came from "a couple of Jewish groups", including the Anti-Defamation League and "representatives of American diplomacy and intelligentsia". Such phone calls are, of course, not comparable with death threats. But this is all part of a many-fronted, incremental erosion of free expression, even in the classic lands of the free, such as the United States, France and Britain.

What is to be done? First, we need to wake up to the seriousness of the danger. I repeat: this is one of the greatest challenges to freedom in our time. We need a debate about what the law should and should not allow to be said or written. Even Mill did not suggest that everyone should be allowed to say anything, anytime and anywhere. We also need a debate about what it's prudent and wise to say in a globalised world where people of different cultures live so close together, like roommates separated only by thin curtains. There is a frontier of prudence and wisdom which lies beyond the one that should be enforced by law.

....