A Muslim demonstrating against the Danish cartoons in London carried a placard reading “Prophet Mohammed is the father of civil rights”. Errmm, excuse me? Was Mohammed a great prophet? Yes. Did he found a world religion? Yes. Was it Islam which preserved the wisdom of Ancient Greece, the bedrock of the West, from the barbarian ravages of the European Dark Ages? Yes. But was Mohammed the father of my civil rights? I don’t think so.
Over the last few hundred years, European soil has been reddened by the blood of English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Greek and other European men and women. Quite a bit of that blood was spilt to uphold and protect a right that has become the bedrock of this great continent of ours: the right to free speech. Today, thankfully, these battles are over and in Europe the right to free speech is enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights.
More importantly, the right is now taken as politically read. Its exercise is no longer contentious and has largely come off the political agenda. It is as much a staple of a European’s being and lifestyle as running water. In contemporary Europe freedom of speech is not an etiquette, a right which can be cavalierly sacrificed at the altar of politeness, political correctness or, even, political expediency. It crops up on the odd occasion when some artist or advertising company decides to display some risqué painting or billboard.
Now it is droll to repeat that the right to free speech is not absolute. If I tell a damaging lie about you in public there are libel laws to protect you. If Malta were at war, the State would have the right to suppress the free flow of information in the national interest. And rightly so. But it is only in such extreme circumstances that the right to free speech should be curtailed.
This is the context within which the controversy over the Danish Mohammed cartoons needs to be framed in Europe. The extremist Muslim violence and embassy burning around the world is another matter altogether. It is not what I wish to address in this column.
Does the publication of a cartoon showing Mohammed wearing a turban in the shape of a bomb fall in such extreme categories? I do not think so. In contemporary democracies the State has largely, though not totally, divested itself of the responsibility to decide which information or images adults can consume.
As far as these cartoons go, they are nothing to write home about. They are unfunny, flat and unsophisticated. And let me say this without fear of retribution because I am a European: they are as unfunny, flat and unsophisticated as the Danes themselves. Yet I do not think that the cartoonist portraying Mohammed wearing a turban-cum-bomb is the one indulging in blasphemy.
The cartoon reflects the blasphemy of all those Muslim extremists who have usurped the name of Mohammed to justify the setting up of some of the most repressive regimes since Stalin’s heyday. It is this small minority of maniacal power hungry mullahs preaching the destruction of the West who are blaspheming against Mohammed and not the cartoons. And it is time for the vast but silent majority of moderate Muslims to stand up and disassociate themselves from this blasphemy. It is also time for European politicians and people to stop being ashamed of defending what this continent is all about.
The question is not just that in Europe the domain of censorship has contracted to insignificance. More importantly, citizens, the consumers of information and images, have substituted the State as arbiters and censors. They decide what they can and cannot consume, not the State. That is why the Maltese Broadcasting Authority’s decision to issue a cautionary directive to all local TV stations not to show them was extremely worrying.
As a constitutional body, the BA is part of the Maltese State. Consequently, with this directive, it has effectively committed the Maltese nation – that’s you and me – to a position no other European Sate has taken: that, faced with the Mohammed cartoons, we as a State, a nation and a community are banning them, thereby curtailing the right to free speech. Despite Foreign Minister Michael Frendo’s view, expressed on Bondiplus, that governments should not interfere in editorial decisions, the Broadcasting Authority has seen it fit to caution TV news and current affairs editors not to show them. Not surprisingly, the Authority takes such an anti-European decision and no one bats an eyelid. This is a country which goes into hysterics over the Eurovision but remains completely impassive when the right to free speech is trampled on in this manner. More depressingly, apart from Joe Grima on Opinjonisti, no other media person in this country has lifted a pen or opened his mouth in protest.
Many are arguing that in European democracies freedom of speech is curtailed all the time by the gatekeepers of contemporary media – from editors, to reporters to talk show hosts. Editing and presenting, the argument goes, is in itself an act of censorship. Well yes, but this is not quite the issue. When an editor decides to leave out or include a fact, to give a story this interpretation rather than that, his choice is not the end but the beginning of his or her work. Once made, the media gatekeepers’ choices leave the printing presses or the television antennas they enter the consumer market.
Ultimately, it will be in this market of public opinion where their editorial decisions sink or swim.
Such European concepts are alien to Muslims who accept without question the word of their prophet over individual rights, secular citizenship and democratic institutions For them, Islam is not a religion. It is a blueprint for government. Mohammed is not seen as a religious figure. His religion has been transformed into a theory of government, now being practised with bloody and repressive consequences from Iran to Pakistan.
While Europe started separating Church and State over two centuries ago, those setting up Muslim States are reuniting them. That is why Muslim protests world-wide over these cartoons are so abysmally misguided when they are directed at governments. Muslim extremists burning embassies and businesses cannot understand how the Danish prime minister is not able to send in his police or militia to close down the newspaper which published the cartoons.
As much as I viscerally disagree with the idea, Muslims in Iran or Pakistan have a right to set up a State in which there is no separation between Church and State. What I object to is the presumption that a Muslim who lives in a European country expects the State to behave in his or her regard as if it were a Muslim State, as if Denmark were Iran. Should Europe succumb to the pressure of violating the right to free speech as a special concession to one ethnic or religious group, we would effectively be rethinking what the European project is all about. We would be re-fighting battles that were won in the Enlightenment.
At the same demonstration in London mentioned at the opening of this piece another placard read: “We love Prophet Mohammed more than our lives”. A true European’s response should be quite simple. “Good for you. Our ancestors loved the right to free speech more than their lives as well. And, quite frankly, we are not about to start dying for it all over again.”
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