Another rejected column. From back in the wake of the Summers kerfuffle and the riots over the Pope's speech. Hope you like it!
The jury’s still out on whether Pope Benedict XVI had any intention to provoke anything except polite applause during his now infamous speech on “Faith, Reason and the University.” For those who missed it, in the middle of a speech in German, the Pope quoted a 14th-century exchange in which a Byzantine emperor criticized Islam for spreading itself by the sword. Within days, once the remarks had been translated and exagerrated by the usual suspects in Friday prayers, the Pope, long thought ineffable, was in fact burning in effigy around the world as radical Muslims firebombed churches, murdered a nun, and made themselves generally unpleasant.
Regardless of what one feels about the speech, its fiery reception and the Pope’s subsequent reaction can teach us a great deal. When compared with a somewhat similar incident closer to home, we discover a pattern that, if not reversed, will lead to the death of free speech.
When former President Summers made his own gaffe, he did not have much to fear; even at their fiercest, feminists burn bras, not infidels. Yet rather than grasp this teachable moment in his stubby fingers and champion academic freedom, Summers apologized so often and with such ingratiating relish one half-suspects that were it not for the intervention of more level-headed advisers, he may have castrated himself, cries of repentant glory piercing the skies, on the Science Center lawn. Now it is the Pope’s turn, and the enemies he faces are infinitely more bloodthirsty and vicious, despite very few among them having tenure. If you are at all interested in Italian Renaissance artwork, I recommend you hurry over to the Vatican right away and check out some of the frescoes before the Sistine Chapel gets painted over in its conversion to the Joseph A. Ratzinger Center for the Study of Jihad as a Peaceful Internal Struggle. Summers showed us that as soon as you apologize, even if you don’t really mean it, it’s over. Your enemies are emboldened, you become weakened, and you might as well retire because you’ll be watching your step so carefully the rest of your life that you’ll never be able to speak truly freely again.
This – these groveling apologies for voicing one’s opinion – is submission. And what the radical Islamist world has done to its women, it now means to do to us. There are too many of us to be hung in public, like their homosexuals and their dissidents. Instead, like their women, we will simply be forced to show respect and to stay in our place. And while it may appeal in the short term to please – to dutifully shut our mouths and censor our newspapers – in the name of peace, we must recognize that such submission is our assent to any future beatings we receive should we ever be perceived as stepping out of line again. Banning pictures of Piglet from work and copies of Animal Farm from school, as they have done in parts of Britain, censoring cartoons of Mohamed, as they have done all over the world, apologizing for quoting obscure Byzantine emperors in boring academic lectures, as the Pope has done – these small, absurd acts are acts of submission, and each instance of such accepted guilt implies an attitude of deserved punishment. Like a wife assuring her friends that the bruises are from falling down the stairs, a misplaced sense of love or duty might move us towards denial, but this only guarantees that the beatings will continue.
Is this what we want the world to come to? Do we want to grow up to a world in which you can barely get a word out before your likeness is up and burning in cities around the globe? Do we want to live in fear of matches striking every time we open our mouths? The alternative is not pretty, either. Those who refuse to apologize, like those who refuse to convert, tend to get their throats slit. Still, I know where I stand. Freedom means never having to say you’re sorry.
Showing posts with label Columns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Columns. Show all posts
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Liberal Bias at Harvard? If only!
Over the years, I've applied repeatedly for an opinion column in The Crimson, the campus newspaper. I never made it. They don't tell you why they reject your column, it could be for bad writing, could be for your politics, I don't know. Though I have my suspicions. Since I have a lot of columns written and nowhere to put them, I will start publishing parts of them here. Here is the first installment, excerpts from an article about liberalism at Harvard:
Don’t worry, this isn’t a rant about liberal bias at Harvard. Just the opposite: Harvard isn’t liberal enough. Yes, teachers here give to the Democrats as if it were a tithe, and yes, students here pee in the bushes not from drink but from principled opposition to the injustice of gendered bathrooms. But liberalism at Harvard stops at America’s shores. Women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and their relations are human rights, not American ones – they should be fought for the world over, not just in Cambridge. Unfortunately, as my years at Harvard go by, I fear myself more and more alone in that conviction.
The problem concerns Islam. Harvard’s liberals will trip over one another in their rush to defend the rights of anyone unlucky enough to have been detained simply for being a Muslim at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong World Trade Center blueprints. Yet when a Muslim is forced into an arranged marriage, or is murdered by her own brothers for going to nightclubs, or executed by the state for being a victim of rape, there is silence. Those whose grandiloquence knows no bounds when it comes to defending the right of a bespectacled young Saudi man to board a plane with as much contact solution as he damn well pleases, thank you very much, are all too quick to change the subject when it comes to a young Muslim woman’s right to live.
Others who bemoan the liberal double-standard over Muslim rights blame multiculturalism. A reluctance to judge other cultures by the standards of our own, they argue, leads to moral paralysis. I think the real reason is simpler: most liberals are scared. They know that despite the platitudes about Islam being a religion of peace, it’s the bloodiest religion of peace around these days. Yes, I hurry with the caveat that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims are peace-loving pillars of their communities, with nice little dental practices in the suburbs and the firm conviction that jihad is a strictly internal struggle, maybe a good thumb-wrestling match at the most. It’s unfortunate that the tiny minority, the ones who bomb embassies and behead journalists, are rather motivated overachievers. The barbaric violence of their demonstrations, death threats, and public executions worked long ago to frighten Muslim reformists into silence, and they have of late managed to scare the dickens out of Europe, too. Most Europeans, when it comes to Islam, now act the role of henpecked husbands, tiptoeing around the house, apologizing profusely when confronted, all the while without the faintest idea of what they’re in the doghouse for this time. Now, if Harvard is any clue, it looks like the fundamentalists have made their mark in America, too.
Harvard’s renowned late political theorist Judith Shklar coined the term “the liberalism of fear” to describe how the fear of cruelty can serve as a powerful foundation for moral claims. She seems to have overestimated the resolve of her campus, for these days at Harvard, as in much of the West, the liberalism of fear best refers to a liberalism that wets itself and flees as soon as its enemies brandish a knife. Many Republican policies do merit condemnation, and do not lack for it. But no one has ever been in bodily danger for bashing Bush, unless you include the remote possibility that they may drop the Palme d’Or on their foot. Attack Islam, however, and chances are the only thing standing between you and a knife to the throat is a lifetime of police protection. If Europe is any indication, things will only get worse unless we change. We must stand up to our fear, exercise our freedom with no shame, no apologies, and fight just as hard for human rights abroad as we do at home.
Don’t worry, this isn’t a rant about liberal bias at Harvard. Just the opposite: Harvard isn’t liberal enough. Yes, teachers here give to the Democrats as if it were a tithe, and yes, students here pee in the bushes not from drink but from principled opposition to the injustice of gendered bathrooms. But liberalism at Harvard stops at America’s shores. Women’s rights, gay rights, free speech, and their relations are human rights, not American ones – they should be fought for the world over, not just in Cambridge. Unfortunately, as my years at Harvard go by, I fear myself more and more alone in that conviction.
The problem concerns Islam. Harvard’s liberals will trip over one another in their rush to defend the rights of anyone unlucky enough to have been detained simply for being a Muslim at the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong World Trade Center blueprints. Yet when a Muslim is forced into an arranged marriage, or is murdered by her own brothers for going to nightclubs, or executed by the state for being a victim of rape, there is silence. Those whose grandiloquence knows no bounds when it comes to defending the right of a bespectacled young Saudi man to board a plane with as much contact solution as he damn well pleases, thank you very much, are all too quick to change the subject when it comes to a young Muslim woman’s right to live.
Others who bemoan the liberal double-standard over Muslim rights blame multiculturalism. A reluctance to judge other cultures by the standards of our own, they argue, leads to moral paralysis. I think the real reason is simpler: most liberals are scared. They know that despite the platitudes about Islam being a religion of peace, it’s the bloodiest religion of peace around these days. Yes, I hurry with the caveat that the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims are peace-loving pillars of their communities, with nice little dental practices in the suburbs and the firm conviction that jihad is a strictly internal struggle, maybe a good thumb-wrestling match at the most. It’s unfortunate that the tiny minority, the ones who bomb embassies and behead journalists, are rather motivated overachievers. The barbaric violence of their demonstrations, death threats, and public executions worked long ago to frighten Muslim reformists into silence, and they have of late managed to scare the dickens out of Europe, too. Most Europeans, when it comes to Islam, now act the role of henpecked husbands, tiptoeing around the house, apologizing profusely when confronted, all the while without the faintest idea of what they’re in the doghouse for this time. Now, if Harvard is any clue, it looks like the fundamentalists have made their mark in America, too.
Harvard’s renowned late political theorist Judith Shklar coined the term “the liberalism of fear” to describe how the fear of cruelty can serve as a powerful foundation for moral claims. She seems to have overestimated the resolve of her campus, for these days at Harvard, as in much of the West, the liberalism of fear best refers to a liberalism that wets itself and flees as soon as its enemies brandish a knife. Many Republican policies do merit condemnation, and do not lack for it. But no one has ever been in bodily danger for bashing Bush, unless you include the remote possibility that they may drop the Palme d’Or on their foot. Attack Islam, however, and chances are the only thing standing between you and a knife to the throat is a lifetime of police protection. If Europe is any indication, things will only get worse unless we change. We must stand up to our fear, exercise our freedom with no shame, no apologies, and fight just as hard for human rights abroad as we do at home.
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