Hitchens on the Case for Religious Mockery

Just came across the best essay I've read so far on the violent reactions in the Muslim world to the Danish caricatures of Muhammad. It's by Christopher Hitchens and it's titled Cartoon Debate: The case for mocking religion. The essay has many highlights, which I won't bother to enumerate. Note, however, that Hitchens comes out swinging. He takes the U.S. State Department and the Bush Administration to task for failing to "distinguish between criticism of a belief system and slander against a people" and describes their betrayal of the First Amendment as "appalling." (After reading some of his contorted defenses of the Bush Administration after their numerous flip-flops on the reasons for invading Iraq, it's good to see that he's not transformed into a Bush-Cheney toadie. Indeed, as noted earlier, he is suing the administration for its unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. civilians.) Then he proceeds to explain why secular governments must not cater to religious fundamentalists who preach - and practice - violence.

Here's the final two paragraphs:

The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

Second (and important enough to be insisted upon): Can the discussion be carried on without the threat of violence, or the automatic resort to it? When Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, he did so in the hope of forwarding a discussion that was already opening in the Muslim world, between extreme Quranic literalists and those who hoped that the text could be interpreted. We know what his own reward was, and we sometimes forget that the fatwa was directed not just against him but against "all those involved in its publication," which led to the murder of the book's Japanese translator and the near-deaths of another translator and one publisher. I went on Crossfire at one point, to debate some spokesman for outraged faith, and said that we on our side would happily debate the propriety of using holy writ for literary and artistic purposes. But that we would not exchange a word until the person on the other side of the podium had put away his gun. (The menacing Muslim bigmouth on the other side refused to forswear state-sponsored suborning of assassination, and was of course backed up by the Catholic bigot Pat Buchanan.) The same point holds for international relations: There can be no negotiation under duress or under the threat of blackmail and assassination. And civil society means that free expression trumps the emotions of anyone to whom free expression might be inconvenient. It is depressing to have to restate these obvious precepts, and it is positively outrageous that the administration should have discarded them at the very first sign of a fight.

Ok, enough world politics for today. I'm ready for some football...