The awful squeal of fundamentalism

• Nick Cohen
• The Observer,
• Sunday March 2 2008

... In language filled with the optimism of the struggles against 20th-century totalitarianism, Article 19 of the

UN Declaration of Human Rights states: 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.'

But faced with a conflict between high principle and a reactionary stunt, the UN Secretary General chose the side of the hysterics. A spokeswoman for Ban Ki-moon said that he thought that the new cartoon controversy showed that 'freedom of expression should be exercised responsibly and in a way that respects all religious beliefs'.

All religious beliefs, that is. Even if they do not respect each other. Even if by the normal standards of intellectual life, they make no sense. Even if the behaviour of their followers does not inspire respect, but fear.

If the UN were to order us to 'respect all political beliefs', conservatives would say they weren't prepared to respect communists, leftists would say they weren't prepared to respect fascists and everyone else would burst out laughing. Yet the UN Human Rights Council is proposing in all seriousness to protect religion by doctoring its universal defence of freedom of expression.

The OIC is pushing it to approve a super-blasphemy law that would make it an offence to 'defame' any religion. Keith Porteous Wood of the National Secular Society said attending the discussions was an Orwellian experience, with speakers using the language of liberalism to justify oppression. 'Anyone seeking to draw attention to the capital offence of apostasy in Islamic countries will be lucky to be heard,' he reported. 'Anything deemed the slightest bit critical of Islam is immediately jumped upon.'

To the bafflement of outsiders, communist China and Cuba have joined the states of the Islamic conference. Both are officially atheist and China persecutes its Muslim minority. But what unites dictatorships is more important than what divides them and no one should be surprised that communist elites will use any weapon available to assault principles which threaten their power.

Sitting in Britain, it is easy to feel superior. We can dismiss the UN as a club without rules that negates its own standards by granting membership to countries that break every article in the declaration of human rights.

You need only look around to realise that complacency is unwarranted. Last week, Channel 4 launched a libel action against West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service, which had accused its film-makers of inventing all-too-real scenes of clerics preaching misogyny, anti-semitism and homophobia. They must have found accurate investigative reporting disrespectful. The government seeks to deny us the very language we need to describe religious terror and insists civil servants don't call Islamic extremists Islamic extremists but 'anti-Islamic extremists'.

He isn't alone in succumbing to obfuscation and appeasement. The past five years have been among the most shameful in BBC history. It presents tiny groups of extreme right wingers as the authentic voice of Islam while shunning liberal-minded Muslims or asking hard questions of those who would oppress them.

Meanwhile, it is not only authoritarian states at the UN which want a universal blasphemy law. The Archbishop of Canterbury is as keen on criminalising criticism.

Thought for the World - Julian Baggini - Secularism

Julian Baggini

from Think Humanist by Humanist Society of Scotland

Thought for the day - Monday

Original audio source

Transcript of Thought For the World's thought for the day

Julian Baggini

18th February 2008

How strange it must feel to be Rowan Williams right now. On the one hand, almost everyone has come down like a ton of bricks on the Archbishop of Canterbury for saying that the introduction of some aspects of sharia law in Britain was unavoidable. But on the other, almost everyone has prefaced their condemnation with remarks to the effect that they greatly respect his humanity and intelligence.

Bishop-baiting may be in, but special respect for religion is not yet out. As it happens, I have rather less respect for Dr Williams, but I also think that, on this issue, he so nearly said something both true and important.

The question he was addressing was how to accommodate deep and real plurality in society without threatening its essential unity. The wrong answer to this is that there should be different laws for people who hold different beliefs. This is a clear non-starter. For one thing, who is to decide to whom such laws would apply? We can't bind people by the religion, or lack of it, of their parents. So the only alternative would be for people to choose themselves which legal code to opt into. This is just absurd. Spirituality has already become something of a pick-and-mix supermarket: law cannot go the same way.

But Williams doesn't want this. For all the stones hastily cast in this debate, the right to throw literal ones was not on his agenda. As has become clearer in recent days, all he meant was that people should have the option of settling some civil disputes through voluntary means of arbitration, and agree to be bound by its conclusion.

There is, and should be, room outside the law for some diversity in how we choose to relate morally to one another. The key distinction here is between laws we all must obey, and practices that can be legally recognised but do not need to be followed by everyone.

A good example of this is gay marriage: the law could recognise this, but that wouldn't, of course, mean there was one law for gays and another for heterosexuals; or that gay marriage was being forced upon the straight community.

Williams's mistake was failing to make clear that the principle of one law for all is sacrosanct.

Secularism requires a neutral public space in which people of all faiths and none can come together to debate and legislate as equals. As long as we maintain this, there is plenty of room in private and community life for people to live by their very different, deeply held beliefs.