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Philosophy Teacher In Hiding After ‘Insulting’ Islam
Well, reasonable Muslims have, again, proven themselves to be completely unable to deal with criticism. This time, a French philosophy teacher and author had the nerve to criticize Islam in a newspaper commentary.
Afterwards, he received a “series of death threats, including one disseminated on an online radical Islamist forum.”
15 Responses to “Philosophy Teacher In Hiding After ‘Insulting’ Islam”
Here is a petition on behalf of the teacher.
It’s interesting that you start the post saying reasonable Muslims are unable to handle criticism, and then you mention a radical Muslim web site. It seems that you allow the radicals to stand in for all Muslims.
Pacatrue: It’s was a dry, sarcastic, albeit also ironical joke.
Furthermore, I would say to the ‘moderate and reasonable Muslims’: Please stand up and publicly denounce terrorism and fight for your religion.
Because for now, the Moderate Muslims in the world, only react when someone says something about extremists that they find to be generalizing.
Tommy, thank you very much for that link!
Reasonable muslims huh? We keep being told that “most” muslims are reasonable, but then we never hear from them. I’m actually willing to believe most muslims are reasonable, mostly because I really can’t imagine that there are too many humans that could get violently upset over a cartoon and then only express “concern” over beheadings and attacks on civilians. I like to think that most people are more decent than that and that most Muslims are simply not so inmature as to get upset over a cartoon.
But then, where the hell are they? I really believe they exist, but why don’t we hear from them? I have yet to read a good explanation for invisibility of the “moderate majority”.
Lynx: Good comment. I agree completely.
If 90% of the Muslims in the world are reasonable and moderate, why the heck aren’t they organizing themselves and are they only publicly making their voices be heard, when they believe people are ‘generalizing’ but not when people kill other people in the name of Allah? Why is that?
Read this excellent post in the LA Times. Quote:
There’s obviously strong reluctance among non-extremist, nonjihadists Muslims to criticize, much less do anything physical to rein in psychopaths and sociopaths who commit heinous crimes, supposedly in the name of Islam.
Want to cut people’s heads off? Always wanted to blow up some trucks? Get your kicks turning an outdoor market into a shooting gallery? Just praise Allah, say what you’re doing is jihad, and you’ve got yourself a free pass to maim and kill.
Oh, and always be on the lookout for some insult or criticism of your faith or fellow Muslims. Any time you spot one, you’ve got a license to riot and murder, and to incite others to do the same.
Will the average Ahmed on the Arab street or the imam at the mosque give you grief for all your murder and mayhem? Not likely.
I dislike generalizing about people based on race, religion, ethnicity, geography, etc., and almost never do it. Still, evidence has been piling up for a very long time that an awful lot of Mideast folks aren’t working off the same concept of what it means to be civilized as the rest of us.
That ought to change, but it’s a job for Mideast parents, teachers, religious leaders and other opinion makers. I don’t see bullets and bombs doing it. I doubt anything else will, either.
S.W. Anderson has covered it pretty well. Who would know the extremist better than the Muslims who have had to deal with them.
But does that excuse them for their silence. I think not.
Michael,
Let’s imagine that you are right. You seem to be saying that essentially all Muslims react violently to any criticism, support death threats on teachers, and are proponents of violence. One billion people all think this way. One billion. It simply can’t be the case.
As for evidence it is not the case, unfortunately, I cannot dig up lots of condemnations of this particular act of violence – or at least the threats of violence – since this incident isn’t widely reported in the U.S. But I did type in “Islamic condemnation of violence” into Google and here’s some sites I found that are exactly of Muslims forming into groups and protesting the use of violence:
Sept 11 responses
CAIR release 1
CAIR release 2
CAIR release 3
(Those last three are press releases from 9/5, 9/11, and 9/16 of 2006. They aren’t exactly silent.)
This is a call denouncing threats against the Danish cartoonists.
You get the point.
I certainly wish even more was being done, but the calls denouncing violence are out there. These denunciations above concern the cartoons, violence in general, Sept. 11, the Pope’s remarks… most of the issues that we are talking about. I will give the people in places like Iran a pass on public protests, since even critical bloggers are shut down there, much less organized groups marching through Tehran. As for other places like Northern Europe, I will have to defer to you since I am ignorant.
paca
CAIR cannot be considered a “moderate” organization.
Holly, I was just trying to quickly grab a bunch of condemnations of violence from Muslim groups. The whole point is that no single organization – Al Qaeda or CAIR – stands for a billion people. All it took to find a bunch of condemnations was the first page of Google.
Pacatrue, I don’t think anyone denies that a few responsible people in the Muslim world have spoken out against the extremists’ and crazies’ violence.
Still, reasonable people in the rest of the world expect there would be enough widespread disapproval to prevent the kind of rioting and mayhem that results in innocent people being killed.
For example, the pope said something many Muslims found disagreeable. A couple of days later, I read that a woman teacher at a Catholic school in a Mideast city (which city escapes me just now) had been killed by Muslims angry about what the pope said.
I find it hard to believe anyone who truly understood and believed in any faith, or anyone with any genuine sense of justice, would even try to justify that woman’s death.
Did you actually link to CAIR? They are about as moderate as the Imam in the mosque saying that gays should be thrown from the roof of the highest building in Amsterdam.
Pacatrue: I am sure that you can find sóme Muslims who have denounced violence, kind of, but if 90% of the Muslims are opposed to extremism, where are they? The one or two people are quite irrelevant. The so-called majority is silent. Like it or not, it is a fact.
SW Anderson: exactly. But they are trying to convince us that ‘moderates’ aren’t ‘a few’ but the far majority. Well, so far, there is no proof of that. I am willing to believe it, but not before that majority actually starts doing something against extremism instead of crying when they believe Westerners are ‘generalizing’.
pacatrue,
Part of your point seems to be that there is evidence that the majority of Muslims aren’t taking up arms. I agree, the population of Islamic followers in the world obviously far outnumbers the population that we know are committing these acts.
I can even agree with you (assuming I’m reading you correctly) that most of those people don’t even want to act out violently. The point that I think you’re missing, though, is the need for them to go farther than that and en masse, speak out against violent jihad. The Islamic faith doesn’t have one leader, obviously, to make such a pronouncement, but there are a large number of these leaders who have not spoken out and some of course who have endorsed or condoned the violence.
The point is that the situation will not improve until such time that we hear from the now silent majority. We can’t just act on the assumption that most Muslims denounce violence but keep their opinions to themselves, because it is those very people who need to convince the radicals that their cause will not reach it’s fruition in them.
The greatest enemy Islam has is its own extremists and the fear they engender among other Muslims. The extremists don’t limit themselves to killing non-believers after all. An interesting question is would Islam be better off if they had more centralized leadership? It seems that one thing that you have in Islam is that with few exceptions one Imam can claim as much spiritual authority as another one and so all you need is someone for the disaffected and angry to drift towards and there is no greater Islamic authority that can readily condemn them and have the gravitas to be listened to and create doubt in the minds of his followers.