Insult to Injury

Chances are you've seen this already, but then maybe not given all of the coverage around Romney's latest faux pas about the so-called 47 percent. Maybe, like what I'm guessing is a relatively small number of people, you have actually read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Newsweek article, which was advertised on the cover under the inauspicious title, "Muslim Rage." Unsurprisingly, a group of liberals have taken to condemnation of Hirsi Ali and her publisher, prompting satirical tweets to surface and liberal blogs to brand the author, who renounced her Muslim faith in her thirties, as a peddler of the rare Islamophobic polemic.

Islamophobia? This is nothing of the sort.

You may know her as the Netherlands-based author and outspoken critic of Islam who in association with Theo van Gogh made a short film named Submission, which drew a direct link between the Quran and the plight of Muslim women. (You might recall that van Gogh was murdered by a 26 year-old Dutch-Moroccan, who punctuated eight gun shots by leaving two knives in his victim's body, to one of which was attached a note threatening the West, Jews, and Hirsi Ali herself.)

You might also recall that her criticisms are blunt. She characterises the meeting of western secularism and Islam as a "clash of civilisations," and believes that Muslims have a choice to make between the darkness of Islam and the light of secular enlightenment.

In her response to the "Innocence of Muslims" anger, she draws an apt comparison with the Satanic Verses affair of Valentines Day 1989. It's apt, mostly, because Salman Rushdie has just published a memoir about his years in hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence for the crime of writing a novel deemed blasphemous by senior Islamic clerics. Hirsi Ali says she herself at the age of nineteen participated in a burning of the book, which, of course, she hadn't even read. Angry demonstrators, their rage buttressed by pontificating clerics who call for punishment of Americans by the US government for the crime of making a stupid film, as Hirsi Ali notes, are indifferent to whether or not the source of the supposed blasphemy is a work of literature or an insensitive, amateurish home movie. "All that matters is the intolerable nature of the insult."

"For a homicidal few in the Muslim world," she writes, "life itself has less value than religious icons, such as the prophet or the Quran." Which is true. I am against religious superstition of any sort, but a faith that elevates symbols, icons and holy texts to a sacredness where violence must be employed in the event of insult is one that doesn't really deserve 'respect'. I'm very much for 'respecting' those who are content to practice their religion in private, and will protect their right to do that. But when people are killed because of a YouTube clip, it doesn't matter how many times and how forcefully you call the morons who produced the clip irresponsible. Shifting blame for the violence to the morons is irresponsible in itself.

And while we're on the topic of being offended...

Let me just say that I am offended that people (not the president or the State department, I should point out) have in any way tried to place blame in anywhere except than in the hands of the perpetrators of violence and murder. I am offended that the White House would petition YouTube and their parent company Google to have the clip in question removed, at the expense of the basic right to free speech. The United States cannot be said to have upheld its own Constitution if the First Amendment is not respected. And I mean fully respected, no matter how much hate or offence it may cause. I am offended that government officials have not been firm in their protection of blasphemers, just as liberals should have been offended that people complained about taxpayer-funded police protection for Salman Rushdie, or in any way failed to come to his defence. I am a free speech absolutist. And the prospect of a few stupid people saying or doing stupid things doesn't scare me. We're faced with it everyday.

Like the Satanic Verses affair, this is another test. It is a test of whether or not we are willing to stand up in defence of free speech like Susan Sontag and Christopher Hitchens (and Rushdie himself, till this day) in 1989 or whether, like so many people, we will shamefully shy away from condemning riotous religious indignation in favour of fulfilling some misguided desire to be politically correct.

But when people are being killed because of a film, this is not a time to be concerned about whether we conform to expectations of political correctness. The First Amendment may very well have been written with the intention of protecting criticism of religion. It doesn't matter how vulgar or obscene or unpalatable the criticism may be, it cannot be policed or censored. The constitution, in its noble way, guarantees it. The film may be vulgar, but its own kind of vulgarity barely registers next to the vulgarity of killing innocent people because of such a film.

Criticising Judaism doesn't make you anti-semitic; criticising Christianity doesn't mean you hate or even dislike Christians; and advancing legitimate criticism of Islam doesn't make you phobic. Let's just get that straight.

[Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Ms. Hirsi Ali was the author of a Foreign Policy magazine article titled, "Why Do They Hate Us." The author of that article was actually the Egyptian author Mona Eltahawy.]