Blasphemy as a National Security Threat
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Spain has begun deportation proceedings against
Imran Firasat, a Christian refugee from Pakistan,
for making a documentary about Mohammed and thereby
threatening the national security of Spain. If
Firasat is deported back to Pakistan, he will face
the death penalty proving that it's a short step
from the Spanish Inquisition to the Pakistani
Inquisition.
The United States has a man sitting in prison for
making another blasphemous movie, which the
government spent weeks blaming for worldwide attacks
on American embassies. And he isn't the first man
persecuted or prosecuted for offending Islam.
Offending Islam has become a national security issue
involving all levels of government.
When Bubba the Love Sponge, a Tampa DJ, proposed to
burn a Koran, the commander of the Afghanistan war
contacted his girlfriend, who would later be stalked
by Petraeus' girlfriend, to contact the Mayor of
Tampa to keep Bubba from burning a Koran. Instead of
explaining how the American system works to the
Lebanese temptress and her four-star general, the
mayor wrote back that the city was working on it.
That month 50 percent more Americans were killed in
Afghanistan in the long slow death march of the war,
but a Koran was not burned in Tampa. Mission
accomplished.
Muslims did not have to kill a great number of
Americans to enforce blasphemy law in this country.
Counting the various reactions to burnt Korans,
rumors of a flushed Koran and assorted things of
that nature, the number is still well below a
hundred. Even counting every casualty in the war
from September 11 onward, it took fewer deaths to
make the United States give up on the Bill of Rights
than it took to liberate it in the War of
Independence.
But it's not really about the deaths, if it were
then the United States wouldn't be senselessly
squandering the lives of American soldiers in
Afghanistan to avoid offending the natives. It's not
the death of men that our leaders are worried about,
but the death of stability.
Knowing that a hundred men will die today in car
accidents does not alarm anyone, but knowing that
somewhere a dozen men might die in a bomb explosion,
anywhere and at any time, can bring a nations to its
knees. That is the difference between predictable
and unpredictable death. Predictable death makes it
possible for most everyone to go about doing what
they normally do. Unpredictable death however erodes
daily order.
Blasphemy makes terrorism seem predictable. It
delivers that false sense of control that is at the
root of Stockholm Syndrome, the seductive illusion
that the thug can be reasoned with and that we can
restore control over our perilous environment by
accepting responsibility for the enemy's violence.
If we meet a set of conditions then we will have
peace. And what kind of lunatic wouldn't want peace?
The kind who needs to be deported or locked up in
the name of peace.
When an entire country goes Stockholm then it is no
longer interested in winning the war, only in
surviving the peace. In a Stockholm country,
national security consists of locking up anyone who
can be blamed for sabotaging the peacemaking. The
less peace there is, the more the peacemakers go on
the hunt for "extremists" who are to blame for the
lack of it. The more their vision of a better world
fails, the more stern measures they must take
against their own people. Peace is always one more
denunciation of extremism away.
The same countries whose leaders have spent a
century and a half blathering incessantly about a
truly progressive order under international law have
shown no ability to cope with the old-fashioned kind
of war. They can quote verbatim the laws of war, but
understand poorly that war makes its own laws. War's
simplest law is that you pick a pretext, any popular
pretext, make your demands and then go on the
attack. If the other side is foolish enough to meet
your demands, then it has shown its weakness and
must be attacked again and again.
Muslims have restored blasphemy prosecutions to the
United States and Europe through violence. Like
Khrushchev banging his shoe on the United Nations
delegate desk, they did their best to convince the
rest of the world that they were violently
irrational and liable to do all sorts of things if
their demands weren't met. And their demands were
met. Rather than going medieval on their asses, the
civilized world instead went medieval on anyone who
offended the medieval cult of Islam.
Muslim blasphemy, like the ghetto hood's respect is
an assertion of supremacy by identity. It isn't a
grievance, it's a right of violence, and if you give
into it, then you accept the inferior status that
comes from being weak in a system where might makes
right and killing people, or threatening to, is what
makes one man better than another.
Islam is submission. If you submit to Islam, then
you're a Muslim. If you submit to a Muslim, then
you're a slave. The western blasphemy trial is not
the enforced submission of an Islamic legal system
that would be crude and brutal, but at least
comparatively respectable, it is the enforced
submission to Muslim violence. The judges who
preside over our blasphemy cases do not believe in
Islam, they believe in the danger of Muslim
violence. This is not theocracy, it is slavery.
For the moment blasphemy prosecutions still involve
trying offenders on some charge other than the
obvious one. Low-hanging fruit like Imran Firasat or
Mark Youssef are the easiest to deal with. Any man
whose freedom depends on the whim of a judge can
already be locked up or deported any time without
the need for actual charges of heresy to be brought.
When that isn't possible, there is always the
ubiquitous hate crime which increasingly extends to
anything that offends anyone regardless of
consequences or intent.
These trials are a contradiction, 21st Century legal
codes built on sensitivity and tolerance being used
to prosecute deviations from a medieval code of
insensitivity and intolerance. But that very same
contradiction runs through the modern state's entire
approach to Islam. It is impossible to embrace
medievalism without becoming medieval. The need to
accommodate Islamic medievalism is forcing the
medievalization of the modern world's political and
legal systems.
The conflict between the modern world and the Muslim
world is being waged by the modern rules of
international law and peacemaking on one side and by
the medieval rules of brutal violence, insincere
offers of peace and bigoted fanaticism on the other.
Rather than fighting it on its own terms, the modern
world is instead trying to accommodate it on its own
terms by accommodating its blasphemy codes.
Trapped in a long-term war, our leaders are looking
for ways of making the conflict more manageable. If
they can't win the war, they can at least limit the
number of attacks. It's not the open book kind of
appeasement, but the double book kind. The open book
is still patriotic, but the second book in the
bottom drawer is running payments to the terrorists
and finding ways to accommodate them. And anyone who
runs afoul of the second book, also runs afoul of
national security.
War often compromises freedoms, but it rarely
compromises the freedom to hurt the enemy's
feelings. But this is a different sort of war. A war
with no enemies and no hope of victory. A war whose
only hope is that one day our enemies will become
better people and stop trying to kill us. Our
enemies are fighting to take away our freedoms and
we are fighting to take away our own freedoms in the
hopes that if we give up some of them to the enemy,
he will settle for them and give up on the rest.
In this sort of war, blasphemy is a serious national
security threat, not because it truly is, but
because our leaders desperately need their Stockholm
control points of appeasement, they need to believe
that if they crack down on Koran burnings then they
can reduce the fighting by 5 percent or 8 percent
and that gives them hope that they can one day
reduce it by 100 percent.
The actual numbers don't matter. On the month after
Bubba the Love Sponge did not burn the Koran, 50
percent more Americans died in Afghanistan, but the
statisticians can always argue that if he had burned
it, then 75 percent more or 100 percent more would
have died. Islam runs on magical thinking and any
effort to appease it must also embrace that same
medieval magical thinking. Hoping that blasphemy
prosecutions will reduce violence, is
psychologically less of a strain than accepting that
nothing will, that there is no magic bullet, only
regular bullets.
The sort of men who deport filmmakers, when they
aren't locking them up, and treat the stunts of
shock jocks as a matter of national security, fail
to understand that they are not fighting some vague
notion of "extremism" which is fed by "extreme"
language and actions, but an organized ideology
whose goal is not merely preventing Bubba the Love
Sponge from burning the Koran, but compelling the
Mayor of Tampa and the American commander in
Afghanistan to compel Bubba not to burn a Koran.
Islamists have not launched a thousand years war
over Bubba; they have done it so that the cities and
countries where Bubba and Imran live submit to
Islam. Locking up filmmakers and warning off DJ's is
not quite up to Saudi and Iranian standards of
submission, but it's a start. Once the principle has
been established, then the rest is a matter of
negotiation. And the negotiations always begin and
end with a bang.
There are two laws that govern men; the law of faith
and the law of force. The law of faith is followed
when you do a thing because you believe it to be
right. The law of force is followed when you compel
others to do a thing or are compelled to do it by
them. Faith at its strongest is more enduring than
force, and yet force can be used to change faith.
America has lived under the law of faith, following
the laws that it believed to be right. Islam
conducts its affairs under the law of force, as it
has since the days of Mohammed. American leaders are
abandoning their laws of faith to force, giving up
on freedom of speech to accommodate the violence of
Islam, while forgetting that when you give up faith
to force, then you also abandon any further reason
to resist that force. Without faith, it is easier to
let force win.