3/31/2023 0 Comments Stupid game stupid prizeAre these all fame seekers looking for wealth? Are they just provocateurs punching down? Most of the victims are religious minorities, political dissidents, LGBT activists, teachers, students, secularists, artists, feminists, lawyers, children, and otherwise non-famous individuals (sometimes falsely) accused of insulting or offending religious figures or groups. In reality, the victims of blasphemy-related violence and prosecution are rarely French cartoonists or award-winning novelists living in the United States. īut this is not the sophisticated balancing act between rights its adherents seem to think it is. It’s other people who need to be protected from them. They are, critics suggest, just fame seekers looking to monetize offense and hurt for their own gain. This view may seem attractive to people who considered Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons to be deeply offensive examples of “punching down” or Rushdie’s writing unnecessarily divisive. Their attackers have no choice how they respond to the offense. Only the blasphemers, it’s insinuated, have agency: They can choose whether or not to offend. If they didn’t want violence, they should’ve avoided the expression that caused offense. The suggestion here is that when there is violence against blasphemers, it is the blasphemers’ fault for provoking such a response. The High Representative stresses that insulting religions and sacred religious symbols provokes hatred and violent extremism leading to polarization and fragmentation of the society. The inflammatory caricatures have also provoked acts of violence against innocent civilians who were attacked for their sheer religion, belief or ethnicity. The High Representative is following with deep concern the growing tensions and instances of intolerance triggered by the publication of the satirical caricatures depicting Prophet Muhammed, which Muslims consider insulting and deeply offensive. I’ll leave the obviously false claim that free speech does not protect religious criticism or insult for another time, because the condescension dripping from the rest of the tweet deserves special attention: “Play a stupid game – you will win a stupid prize.” Most people would perhaps phrase it a bit more delicately than Al-Qasimi did here, but what she said isn’t so different from what the Spokesperson of the High Representative for the UN Alliance of Civilization said, for example, after school teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded in 2020. Some people only want fame no matter the cost/sacrifice. Play a stupid game – you will win a stupid prize. Some people don’t care about their religion but some do. This tweet from Emirati royal Hend bint Faisal Al-Qasimi (an apparently proud adherent of the “free speech for me but not for thee” philosophy) is a good representative of the genre:įree speech does not authorize you to insult, condescend, & mock other religious figures & religions. You can find plenty of comments like these if you look - this man, for example, so sagely suggested that people “in the West” who “don’t want to be stabbed” should “refrain from doing things that would make it likely someone stabs them” - but at their basic level, they say the same thing. After all, can you really blame Rushdie’s attacker for bringing a knife to a word fight? Or, at minimum, they believe the victim is an equal participant in the attack. As it turns out, some think it’s fair game for an author to be stabbed if people are still angry over a decades-old book of his that they likely haven’t even read. Once again, a noxious but popular view, one widely shared after the Charlie Hebdo and Samuel Paty murders, reared its ugly head. Most of the immediate reactions appropriately expressed revulsion at this attack on Rushdie and rightfully raised alarms about what it portends for basic principles of free expression. These are just some of the blasphemy stories from the past eight months.Īnd then last week, Salman Rushdie was attacked on stage by a man - now charged with attempted murder - who was not even alive when The Satanic Verses was published and the fatwā issued. Mohsin Abbas was threatened with death after working on a BBC documentary about Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Free Saudi Liberals blogger Raif Badawi was finally set free from prison after a decade but is banned from leaving Saudi Arabia to see his family. Nigerian college student Deborah Samuel was beaten to death and set on fire after sending a group message her classmates found offensive to their faith. Safoora Bibi’s throat was slit after students and a colleague at the school where she taught accused her of blasphemy.
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