Mick Hartley

Good stuff from Anatole Kaletsky, who had the misfortune to have one of his articles, which was less than complimentary about Bush, read out by Rush Limbaugh on the radio, and was deluged by hate mail from the neanderthal Right as a result – prompting a comparison to the Mohammed cartoon affair:

This comparison may seem far-fetched but it brings out three distinctions that are critical in managing relations between Islamic fundamentalism and the modern world.

The first, very obvious, distinction is between civility and legality, between comment or behaviour that is discourteous, inconsiderate or unpleasant and behaviour which is, or should be, unlawful. Despite the hypersensitivity of the Americans who showered me with linguistic ordure, nobody would dream of suggesting that insulting America and its President should be banned. These 300 right-wing nuts wanted me sacked for my ignorance; they wanted The Times used as toilet paper, but none of them would suggest that I should be legally prevented from saying that President Bush was a fool.

How different from the paranoid religiosity of the Muslim fundamentalists who insist that “insulting religion” should not be a question of taste or of judgment, but a subject for criminal law. Yet this obvious distinction between what is offensive and what should be illegal is deliberately ignored by the Blair Government, which wants to make insulting religion a criminal offence.

The second, and related, distinction is between verbal abuse and physical violence. Returning to my self-selected sample of nutty Americans, none of them threatened me with physical harm, or suggested that such harm might be my just desert. How different from the violence of the Muslim rent-a-crowds whose banners portray their enemies beheaded. Yet this obvious distinction between verbal abuse and physical violence is deliberately overlooked by British police, who have refused to prosecute Muslim demonstrators threatening their enemies with hideous violence. Meanwhile, British judges have sentenced Abu Hamza, convicted for inciting multiple murders, to just seven years. Presumably this means that religiously motivated murder is less serious in the eyes of our learned judges than such offences as drug-dealing or fraud.

This brings me to the third and most important distinction that Americans seem to understand much better than we in Europe. This is the distinction between religion and other beliefs. Why should religions be entitled to legal protection from “insults” and “attacks”? Would anyone suggest that communists and fascists or, for that matter, Tories and social democrats, should be protected from insults? Yet the first two of these movements were all-embracing secular religions and their believers, who numbered in the hundreds of millions, believed in them every bit as passionately as Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in their religions.