No religious belief trumps democracy

UNTIL this week I’d not heard of Iqbal Jassat of the Joburg- based Media Review Network. However, once he’d expressed his dismaying views on events in Paris, it was painfully clear that he’s an all-too familiar sort. Pardon the French, but il n’est certainement pas Charlie.

There’s been widespread condemnation of the terror attack on the Charlie Hebdo. Eight staff, including four of France’s most renowned cartoonists, were murdered in cold blood. Two policemen were killed, and a maintenance worker and a visitor to the satirical weekly also lost their lives.

The loss of any innocent life was regrettable, Jassat told The Star on Thursday. Yet he implied that Charlie Hebdo brought this carnage on themselves – by being offensive.

“There is the perception around this incident that it is about freedom of speech – it is not,” he said. “It is about freedom to hate. The media has been repeatedly asked not to continue blaspheming Islam, which is very insulting to many. The true context of the incident, and central to it, is the Arab world’s displeasure at the lampooning of our prophet and whether it should be seen as freedom of speech or freedom to attack Islam and its prophets.”

I’m afraid Jassat is quite wrong. This is very much about freedom of speech – a fundamental human right about which there is much confusion, even in the 21st year of our democracy.

Contrary to popular opinion, such a right is not curtailed or limited by considerations of “displeasure”. It is precisely when offence is taken or given that our freedom of expression and speech come into play.

Earlier this week, our old Stalinist fossil SACP secretary general Blade Nzimande was whining about the “failure” of newspapers to regulate the online comments of internet platforms and fulminating about taking action against them.

“In future those media houses are going to be sued for what gets written there,” he said. “We are calling on the SA Human Rights Commission to monitor and recommend action that needs to be taken about this racism which is being peddled, especially on the platforms of media houses.”

Nzimande’s urge to punish the press is a strong one. That is why he is openly mocked by journalists. Remember his campaign to boycott City Press because it showed The Spear, Brett Murray’s satirical portrait of President Jacob Zuma, on its website?

Remember, also, how that ANCfuelled controversy threw up the demented ravings of the Nazareth Baptist Church’s Enoch Mthembu, who called for Murray’s execution? “This man has insulted the entire nation,” he argued, “and he deserves to be stoned to death.”

Clearly, acts of medieval vengeance were not confined exclusively to Islamic extremists. In this regard, it’s worth noting that about 5 million of France’s 66 million citizens are of Muslim heritage. About two-thirds of them have no interest in religion. They may, in fact, be the world’s most secular “Muslims” – and a very poor reservoir for jihadi recruits.

The attack on Charlie Hebdo, it’s argued, stemmed not from Arab displeasure at silly cartoons, but could have been an attempt to subject ethnic Muslims to acts of retribution from broader French society and thus create a common “Islamic” political identity based on grievance.

There was talk of such an agenda after the 2006 violence in response – four months after they were first published – to the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed and evidence that this “displeasure” was initiated by extremist imams in Denmark and in the Middle East.

In November, the Saudi blogger, 30-year-old Raef Badawi, was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and a thousand lashes for “insulting Islam” and “founding a liberal website”. The flogging started yesterday, and will continue every Friday for 20 weeks. Fifty lashes at a time. Where’s the displeasure?

Last month, a Salafist imam imposed a fatwa on Kamel Daoud, an Algerian writer whose acclaimed debut novel, Meursault, Counter-Investigation, retold Albert Camus’s The Stranger from an Arab point of view. The reason for the death sentence? The book provoked a discussion on religion. Again, where’s the displeasure?

Religion, it’s worth repeating, must observe the principles of democracy – not the other way around. It’s a point that Ronald Dworkin made, in a New York Review of Books opinion piece, fittingly titled, The Right to Ridicule. “No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten,” he said. “No one’s religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.”