Patterico's Pontifications

10/16/2012

Popehat: The Year in Blasphemy

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:33 am



A rich, link-filled roundup of how countries deal with blasphemy worldwide. Here is Ken’s reasoning for doing the roundup:

The incendiary film “”The Innocence of Muslims” was merely an unconvincing pretext for a terrorist attack, not the true cause of the attack. Yet the film has spurred new discussions of American free speech exceptionalism, and led some to question whether we should hew to the First Amendment in the face of worldwide demands for an international ban on blasphemy.

Eric Posner wrote in Slate that we ought to consider that other societies believe that “free speech must yield to other values and the need for order.” Anthea Butler, a professor at Penn, defended calls for the arrest of the man who made the film, suggesting that it had “inflamed” people across the globe, putting Americans at risk. Garrett Epps wrote that blasphemy is not the “essence of free speech” and that other nations understand freedom differently than we do. Professor Peter Spiro reacted to the film by suggesting that “international norms” about hate speech should prevail over our relatively absolutist free speech values.

We should address such views, not ignore them. But as we consider them — as we evaluate whether anti-blasphemy laws will ever be consistent with the modern American values embodied in our First Amendment precedents — we should examine what the competing values truly are. What are the “other values” which other societies believe outweigh free speech? What sorts of things “inflame” people in those societies? If other societies understand free expression differently than we do, how do they understand it? What “international norms” are emerging on blasphemy?

I decided to try to answer those questions by looking at how the nations of the world have treated blasphemy during one year: October 2011 through September 2012. In other words, I decided to examine how one year reflected the competing values concerning free speech and blasphemy.

And a sample:

In France, riot police responded when angry Catholic activists targeted a theater featuring a play that they labeled as blasphemous. The theater — and others showing similar plays — experienced death threats, attacks on their security system, eggs thrown at theatergoers, stinkbombs, and protestors rushing the stage.

In Pakistan, three Ahmedis — members of a minority religious sect — were arrested and charged with various forms of blasphemy. A father was accused of registering his son as a Muslim on a school form, the son was accused of making derogatory comments about Mohammed (which carries the death penalty), and a school headmaster was accused of snatching religious books from the hands of students cheating on a test and hurling the books into a pond.

Also in Pakistan, a 23-year-old Christian laborer was charged with blasphemy for desecrating the Quran based on accusations levied by his Muslim landlord, with whom the defendant had just had a dispute about rent. Another Pakistani Christian — who had previously been acquitted of blasphemy charges — was arrested in church at Christmas services for blasphemy. Previously his wife and son were kidnapped by Muslim village elders in an effort to extort him into converting to Islam.

In Turkey, a court cited “the right to respect for one’s religious feelings” in upholding an indictment of a man for “ridiculing Muslim prayer rituals and the Islamic belief that the universe was created by God” in comments on a website.

In Saudi Arabia, an Australian man on a pilgrimage to Mecca was detained, accused of blaspheming the companions of Mohammed, and sentenced to a year in prison and 500 lashes. This sentence was later reduced to 75 lashes over a leather jacket.

That’s December 2011.

Nice job by Ken.

13 Responses to “Popehat: The Year in Blasphemy”

  1. Didn’t Obama plagiarize a speech where he repeated the phrase “Just Words?”

    Why can’t the rest of the world understand that it’s “just words” and get over it? Catering to violent, petulant children does NOT solve the problem, you idiots.

    Brave men have fought and died for that right for centuries, so you that think it needs to be restricted in any way can GFY and STFU. GO MOVE TO A MUSLIM COUNTRY if you think life there is so awesome.

    © Sponge (9fff1f)

  2. Obama said – maybe this is in his first book – that as he did his (really political)work, people asked him what is home church, and that’s why he picked a church – that of Jeremiah Wright.

    Obviously, he picked it because it had very little traditional religion and/or because of it was very politically active in the circles he wanted to be involved with.

    I maybe wasn’t all that clear when it happened.

    In fact I’m still not clear when he met Michelle.

    I think it was before he went to law school(because someone in her family knew Barack Obama and he died before he graduated from law school)

    I’m even less clear about the circumstances, but I think they were not both lawyers at the time. Only she was. Obama is deliberately not that clear about it.

    Another thing: I read something about Obama in 1986:

    Barack and Mitt, as I knew them by Arnie Graf Friday, September 28, 2012 New York Daily News

    Young Obama attended a national training session that my colleagues and I conducted in Los Angeles in 1986. Besides being one of the main trainers, I had three extensive one-on-one meetings with him. He was bright and engaging, with a quiet, sober personality that drew people to him. I remarked that he seemed wise beyond his years — a young man with an older man’s soul.

    I encouraged him to try out with one of our organizations, but he was committed to returning to Chicago, where we were not active at that time, and said he saw himself becoming a civil rights lawyer or a judge down the road.

    In those roles, he felt that his passion to right injustices and to address the deeper causes of poverty could best be put to use.

    Note well: In 1986, he didn’t want to leave Chicago, even for a better opportunity.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  3. Wrong thread.

    In this thread, I wanted to link to one or two New York Times columns by Thomas Friedman about attacks on religion – by Moslems.

    Look in Your Mirror (Sept 19 2012 New York Times)

    I don’t like to see anyone’s faith insulted, but we need to make two things very clear — more clear than President Obama’s team has made them. One is that an insult — even one as stupid and ugly as the anti-Islam video on YouTube that started all of this — does not entitle people to go out and attack embassies and kill innocent diplomats…

    Friedman it looks like, on Sept 18, was buying the video theory for Benghazi)

    And, second, before demanding an apology from our president, Mr. Ali and the young Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Sudanese who have been taking to the streets might want to look in the mirror — or just turn on their own televisions. They might want to look at the chauvinistic bile that is pumped out by some of their own media — on satellite television stations and Web sites or sold in sidewalk bookstores outside of mosques — insulting Shiites, Jews, Christians, Sufis and anyone else who is not a Sunni, or fundamentalist, Muslim.

    Still links Libya here.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  4. He gives lots of links to defamation and hatred of other religions by Moslems, courtesy of MEMRI.

    I asked Memri for a sampler of the hate-filled videos that appear regularly on Arab/Muslim mass media. Here are some:

    I didn’t copy over his descriptions, but I put the direct links here to minimize clicks in case anyone wants to click on them.

    http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/1528.htm — July 20, 2007.

    http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/5200.htm — April 14, 2011.

    http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/992.htm — Dec. 16, 2005.

    http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3466.htm — June 13, 2012.

    http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/3101.htm — Aug. 7, 2011.

    http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/51/6208.htm — March 21, 2012.

    http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/51/6656.htm — Sept. 7, 2012.

    http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/51/6557.htm — Aug. 1, 2012.

    http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/51/6086.htm — Feb. 14, 2012.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-19380083 — Aug. 26, 2012.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  5. And one week later:

    Backlash to the Backlash (Sept 26, 2012 p. A27 NYT)

    He quotes things written in the Islamic world in response to rioting triggered by the idiotic YouTube video insulting the Prophet Muhammad — that are not the usual “What is wrong with America?” but, rather, “What is wrong with us, and how do we fix it?”

    Also courtesy of MEMRI.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  6. Any “blasphemy” law the left manages to assemble will be very careful to carve out exceptions for “artistic merit” and “social or political commentary” while still “respecting minority faiths”. In other words — they’ll come up with a way to say it’s OK to blaspheme Christ, but Mohammed is right out.

    And they’ll never admit that’s what they did.

    Rob Crawford (e6f27f)

  7. Patterico,

    I’m offended by this blogpost. Delete it immediately, or you’ll soon face a mob.

    norcal (37ea2a)

  8. That was TIC, by the way.

    norcal (37ea2a)

  9. Tell ya what:

    -> *MY* <- God wants me to speak the Truth as best I can see it, especially regarding the vile behavior of Islamists who are willing to {fer cripes sake) actually go out and KILL people in various horrible ways, merely because their oh-so-tender "religious sensibilities" have come in contact with an opposing viewpoint.

    So, if all the Islamic fookers want to respect MY religious rights regarding not-just-blasphemy-but-real-live-MURDER, they're just gonna hafta SHUT UP and hear me out.

    (Do you really think that'll fly? Nah. So it's not really about some high-minded mutual agreement that we all treat each other's beliefs with respect, then, is it? It's about WHO HAS THE POWER TO CONTROL OTHER PEOPLE'S BEHAVIOR. The Islamists want that power. The Progressive Left wants that power. And *I* am absolutely committed to thwarting BOTH groups of totalitarians.)

    A_Nonny_Mouse (903b0b)

  10. Goddamn it, by Mary’s virgin vagina, I swear to Christ, this stuff makes me want to say to the Devil with them all.

    nk (875f57)

  11. My father beat me once, when small, for saying something similar to the above. It’s a question of sensibility and not a matter for the state. God and the Devil can take care of themselves.

    nk (875f57)

  12. BTW, I approved of the three-year sentence for the Posse Riot(?) in Russia who thought they could interrupt a liturgy with a garage song. I would have given them five years.

    nk (875f57)

  13. Sammy #2,

    I’m not sure why it’s relevant to this thread but here is the story of how Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson met.

    DRJ (a83b8b)


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