Or will we fall to our knees?
This is not a glib sentiment, but a foundational premise of the civilization under which we choose to live.
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| A Charlie Hebdo cover, 2011: “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing!?” AFP/GETTY IMAGES |
Wednesday’s massacre [January 7, 2015], following a long string of plots foiled by police in the U.K., France and elsewhere, is a reminder that jihadism isn’t a distant Middle Eastern phenomenon. There will be many more such attempts at mass murder, and authorities in the U.S. and Europe need broad authority to surveil and interrogate potential plotters to stop them.
This offends some liberals and libertarians, but imagine the restrictions on liberty that would follow if radical Muslims succeed in blowing up a soccer stadium or half a city. Men willing to execute cartoonists in Paris and 132 children at point-blank range in Peshawar in the name of religion won’t shrink from using more destructive means to impose mass casualties. Better to collect metadata and surveil some people now than deal with public demand for mass Muslim arrests or expulsions after a catastrophe.
Wednesday’s attack also demonstrates again that violent Islam isn’t a reaction to poverty or Western policies in the Middle East. It is an ideological challenge to Western civilization and principles, including a free press and religious pluralism. The murder of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is merely the latest evil expression of a modern arc of Islamist violence against Western free speech that stretches back to Ayatollah Khomeini ’s 1989 fatwa calling for the killing of novelist Salman Rushdie.
Muslim leaders in the West will no doubt react by denouncing the attack and insisting that the attackers were perverting the meaning of Islam. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi struck the right note earlier this month when he called for a “religious revolution” within Islam.
“It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [the Muslim community] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world,” he told an audience at Cairo’s 1,000-year-old Al Azhar university. “The entire world, I say it again, the entire world is waiting for your next move.” More Muslim leaders, especially prayer leaders, need to call out and ostracize those who kill in Islam’s name.
The editorial in the UTSanDiego quotes from a British imam who adheres to the fundamentalist world view that rails against free speech and the satire we are accustomed to:
[T]hen there is the pure Islamist view. Anjem Choudary, a London cleric, wrote the following in USA Today: “Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression, as their speech and actions are determined by divine revelation ... . In an increasingly unstable and insecure world, the potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike.”
This is the poisonous mindset that Egypt’s president says imams must encourage their followers to reject. We hope he is heeded — and that it is indeed imams’ “next move.”
The teachable moment is that many in the West have pandered to the sentiment that Islam is the religion of peace and end the discussion. The discussion needs to continue - to identify which practitioners are espousing which brand of Islam, and whether they are in accord with the value and practice of free speech or antagonistic to it.
The writers at Charlie Hebdo tested the contours of free speech and underline that it takes courage to practice it.
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