FionaK |
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| I had not seen the kind of cartoons which were published in this magazine, until today. The coverage here has been very largely focused on freedom of speech, and the threat to our liberties posed by radical islam. But I read a description of one of the cartoons today, and it made me wonder.
So tonight I went and had a look. It made me think about how radical christians would respond to similar depictions of Jesus Christ. As it happens we don't really have to guess: we have an example. There was a film called The Last Temptation of Christ. It offended some christian sensibilities and this led to molotov cocktails being thrown in a Parisian theatre, injuring 13 people and severely burning 4 of them.
Less violence attached to the showing of a work called Piss Christ, but gallery staff received death threats and the work itself was vandalised both in Australia and in France.
Then there are the attacks on abortion clinics and staff by christians, who have murdered several people in a campaign of christian terrorism. While this is arguably not directly comparable since it is not a question of art or of freedom of speech, it is a directly related phenomenon. Or so it seems to me.
In our liberal western societies it seems clear that we go out of our way not to gratuitously insult the religious beliefs of others. Christians are not regularly exposed to offensive depictions of their god or of christ or of the mother of god: it is not forbidden, but we self censor. It is a matter of manners, and it is my belief that it grew from the certainty that such behaviour does lead to violence, as night follows day. There are some things that people will kill and die for, and religion is one of them. So we are polite. It costs us nothing. I wonder why we do not extend the same "respect" to islam?
That is not to defend the slaughter we have seen. I hold no brief for any religion and I do not suggest that such action can be justified. But I do ask myself why we should expect people of other faiths to behave better than christians, if we do not extend the same courtesy to them as we routinely do to christians, as a matter of pragmatic recognition of what is likely to happen when we do not. It is no accident that films such as the Last Temptation of Christ are rare, imo.
I hear a lot of people saying that freedom of speech is central to our culture, and I agree with that. But the fact that we have such freedom does not mean that we exercise it always and everywhere. We just don't.
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