As the reaction to the anti-Islamic film, Innocence of Muslims, continues the leader of Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has called for international blasphemy laws to protect the sensibilities of the faithful. He wants these laws to apply to the big three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam; to protect all the Major Prophets from criticism and defamation. These calls are a reaction to the realization that, outside of the Muslim world, no actual laws have been broken; calling for the prosecution of the filmmakers is futile as America’s freedom of speech laws clearly protect them.
No doubt the producers considered this before embarking on the project to cover themselves in the event of the predictable shit-storm that would erupt after the film came to light.
Innocence of Muslims is clearly a cynical attempt to inflame Muslim sensibilities, and it has worked; protests are raging all over the world and these are being seized upon, if not organized, by extremists to push their own political agendas. It isn’t a coincidence that American flags are being burnt on the streets in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan; it is no coincidence that the first protests started in Egypt, a country that is drifting towards theocracy day by day; and it is no coincidence that the American embassy was attacked and the ambassador murdered in Libya. Religion is being used as a political vehicle for self-interest and the perpetrators are hiding behind an affront to their faith.
This excuse has been gifted to the extremist by a bitchy bit of religious infighting; although the origins of the filmmakers haven’t completely come to light it is starting to seem that the makers of the Innocence of Muslims are a consortium of Egyptian Christians and Israeli Jews. The film has been made to deliberately cause offence and ignite the Middle East, what they hoped to achieve by this other than show that Muslims are incredibly sensitive isn’t obvious to the casual observer. The film is, almost, hysterically bad; an amateur Carry On film; it would be funny if the consequences hadn’t been violence and murder.
Enter Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, yesterday he called for ‘peaceful’ protests on behalf of the religion and the Prophet; he stressed that Muslims not attack Christians because the only people that were at fault were the filmmakers, the people who supported them and, rather cryptically, the people who refused to prosecute them. In essence he was saying if your not with us, you’re against us. Condemning the film as cynical and inflammatory isn’t enough; Nasrallah wants secular governments to move to prosecute the makers. This, obviously, isn’t going to happen. The film isn’t, strictly speaking, hate speech; modern Muslims aren’t being criticized, their Prophet is being mocked. They aren’t being attacked as a people, their beliefs are being insulted. Therefore as it stands no law is being broken in the West and Nasrallah knows it; as it stands only international blasphemy laws would be of use in this case and hence the leader of Hezbollah, today, calls for them.
Instigating blasphemy laws on this scale would be a terrible mistake. It would open the very real possibility of extradition to Islamic theocracies of Westerners for things they have said, for intellectual criticism of Islam. Nasrallah has sweetened the pill by calling for Christianity and Judaism to also be protected, but this is a bluff; he knows that the ‘Christian West’ and Israel won’t be nearly as touchy at a state level. He is using the situation to make Islam intellectually untouchable, to put it above criticism. Giving it this status will be intolerable philosophically; clerics would be in a position to decide what is blasphemous and what isn’t, and in the internet, social media world this power will be abused. I’m not being paranoid, this year Malaysia extradited Saudi writer Hamza Kashgari back to Saudi Arabia for two tweets that were deemed to criticize Mohamed and Allah. This is Islamic blasphemy law in action, prosecution for tweeting. He is expected to get two years.
Even this month the World Council of Churches has called for international examination of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Non Muslims in the country live in ‘a state of terror’, lynchings are common and are often carried out on rumour alone. This year a young Christian girl was arrested after it was alleged that she had burnt a Koran, the penalty being death. Thankfully it was proved that the allegations weren’t true, but the possibility of execution, of a child, was very real.
In the event of a world wide law it is feasible that Muslim states would demand extradition for similar offences and carry out similar punishments. We can not accept this in the West. It is one thing to respect figures from the past, it is something completely different to demand we honour them and enforce that in law.
If such a law ever did come in to existence we would all be living in an Islamic theocracy
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