By Fayyaz Sheikh

Violence has no justification even when protesting against a hate speech or offensive material. A hate speech or offensive material against any sector or group is wrong and deserve condemnation.

But if we are talking about hypersensitivity about hate and offensive material, Muslims cannot beat Western‘s hypersensitivities to anti-Semitism and their efforts to silence such voices. This sensitivity extends  to criticism of Israel. It is often labeled as anti-Semitism to choke off such discussion, and freedom of speech  takes a back seat.

A recent little noticed dust-up in the media highlights the hypersensitivity to Anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel.  Maureen Dowd of NYT, wrote a column on September 15, 2012, called ‘Neocons Slither Back’. It was  critical of Neocons, especially Mr. Senor, and Israel. She writes:

“After 9/11, the neocons captured one Republican president who was naïve about the world. Now, amid contagious Arab rage sparked on the 11th anniversary of 9/11, they have captured another would-be Republican president and vice president, both jejeune about the world. “

“Senor is emblematic of how much trouble America blundered into in the Middle East — trillions wasted, so many lives and limbs lost — because of how little we fathom the culture and sectarian politics. We’re still stumbling in the dark. We not only don’t know who our allies and enemies are, we don’t know who our allies’ and enemies’ allies and enemies are. “

“As the spokesman for Paul Bremer during the Iraq occupation, Senor helped perpetrate one of the biggest foreign policy bungles in American history. The clueless desert viceroys summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army, forced de-Baathification, stood frozen in denial as thugs looted ministries and museums, deluded themselves about the growing insurgency, and misled reporters with their Panglossian scenarios of progress.

“Off the record, Paris is burning,” Senor told a group of reporters a year into the war. “On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

The article did not fit well with some protector of freedom of speech, so they labeled it as anti-Semitism and went on attack.

Jonathan Tobin writes in Commentary, After all these years of endlessly repeating the same tired tropes on the New York Times op-ed page, taking Maureen Dowd’s columns seriously requires a suspension of disbelief that is normally only needed to watch science fiction. But though the Queen of Snark lacks the credibility to discuss virtually any issue in an intelligent manner, she does have a knack for picking up on whatever hateful viruses are circulating through the circulatory system of our body politic.”

“Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times,”

Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic columnist and leading journalist on Israeli issues,writes: “Maureen may not know this, but she is peddling an old stereotype, that gentile leaders are dolts unable to resist the machinations and manipulations of clever and snake-like Jews”

“This sinister stereotype became a major theme in the discussion of the Iraq war, when critics charged that Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, among other Jewish neoconservatives, were actually in charge of Bush Administration foreign policy. This charge relegated George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Stephen Hadley and the other Christians who actually set policy to the status of puppets.”

Steven A. Cook, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations,  Twitter “Dowd’s use of anti-Semitic imagery is awful.

“The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper writes : New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, last seen calling Goldman Sachs “blood-sucking,” is back with more anti-Semitic stereotypes in her latest column, which runs under the headline “Neocons Slither Back.”

“Ryan was moving his mouth, but the voice was the neocon puppet master Dan Senor,” Ms. Dowd writes. The display type in the newspaper reads: “Look who’s pulling the strings of Marionette Mitt and Puppet Paul.” …
This is disturbing on many levels. …

[D]epictions of Jews as snakes or puppeteers are classical anti-Semitic images, right up there with blood-sucking. The snake image has roots in the Christian Bible; the puppet-master goes back at least to Nazi Germany, and when Glenn Beck used it to talk about George Soros, who, unlike Dan Senor, has actually been hostile to Israel, the left was all over him for it.”

Some journalists came to the defense of Maureen Dowd and worte;

Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Beast; The usual would-be policeman of Washington’s discourse on all things to do with Israel, Jeffrey Goldberg, takes a break from the Jewish holidays to consign yet another member of the thinking classes to the ranks of “something much darker.” Dowd wrote a column in which she noted how Greater Israel fanatics run the Romney campaign’s foreign policy (which they do), and their neoconservative bubble is part of what explains Romney’s nasty and divisive attempt last week to politicize the recent flare-up of violent anti-Americanism in the Middle East.

You are not allowed to say this in Washington without being accused of anti-Semitism. Let me repeat: you can not write this. If you are a columnist and blogger, like, say, Tom Friedman or yours truly, the consequences are an immediate accusation that you are another Hitler:

On the right, The Weekly Standard’s Daniel Halper called it “outrageous,” while Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin described it as “particularly creepy.” “Dowd’s column marks yet another step down into the pit of hate-mongering that has become all too common at the Times,” Tobin wrote.

Even if it is the obvious truth. Greater Israel neoconservatives dominate the Romney foreign policy and Senor is chief among them. As Kevin Drum notes:

Salon’s Andrew Leonard:The anti-Semitic charges come with a heaping dose of “doth protest too much” defensiveness. Any reasonable person familiar with the foreign policy disasters perpetrated by the neoconservatives who led George W. Bush to debacle piled upon debacle is right to be horrified by their clear influence upon Mitt Romney. The fact that many of them were Jewish (a point never mentioned or even implied in Dowd’s column) is irrelevant. What’s astonishing is that they’re back.

What’s also amazing is how bad the reading comprehension skills of the critics turn out to be. The only reference to the word “slither” in Dowd’s column is as part of a quote from the crown prince of the neocons — Paul Wolfowitz!

Kevin Drums of Mother Jones: There’s nothing anti-Semitic in Dowd’s column. She just doesn’t like neocons, and she doesn’t like the fact that so many of the neocons responsible for the Iraq debacle are now advisors to Mitt Romney’s campaign. Pretending that this makes her guilty of hate-mongering toward Jews is reprehensible.

M.J. Rosenberg of Huff Post:” It’s come full circle. The neocons are now using classic anti-semitic tropes to attack Maureen Dowd for criticizing Romney adviser Dan Senor and the other neocons who are in charge of the Romney campaign’s foreign policy apparatus. See this in Commentary, typical of the anti-Dowd onslaught.

Saying that attacking neoconservatism is anti-Semitic is like saying that attacking the neo-fascist Opus Dei movement is an attack on all Catholics. Or that attacking the Muslim Brotherhood is an attack on Islam. Or that an attack on the Nation Of Islam is an attack on all African-Americans.

It is worse than that. The neoconservatives now savaging Maureen Dowd are saying that an attack on Jewish individuals who do bad things is anti-Semitic. They are foaming at the mouth because she singles out Dan Senor, Romney’s Middle East brain trust, for particular scorn.”

Muslim Bashing by Pankraj Mishra.

Pankaj Mishra writes about Muslims in an old article “Islamismism” in New Yorker:

“Oriana Fallaci, who memorably claimed that Muslims “breed like rats” in Europe”.

If such a derogatory and insulting slur was said about any other religious sector, will New Yorker publish it?

Freedom of speech should protect even a hate speech but Holocaust denial and display of Nazi symbols is illegal in a number of European countries.

In the last few days we have beaten the drum that the freedom of speech should protect even a hate speech with no exceptions, but in practice West  has exceptions to this rule.

Fayyaz Sheikh

Sources; Politico, NYT, Huff Post, Commentary, Mother Jones, The Weekly Standard, New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, Salon

(Shared by Azeem Farooki )

One controversy subsides; a worse one begins. After the Danish cartoons, the Dutch video Fitna and several low-grade irritants, a short, crudely executed — and scrupulously insulting — film has inflamed deep-seated resentment. Several hundreds of furious demonstrators gathered in front of the American Embassy in Cairo and the US Consulate in Benghazi, Libya. In the confusion and violence, a US Ambassador and three diplomats were killed. Elsewhere, embassies came under violent attacks, with many wounded and serious damage to material. Literalist Salafists succeeded in mobilising a relatively small number of demonstrators; over-excited young people and ordinary citizens who, firm in their intention to protect the Prophet’s [PBUH] reputation, joined in to express their rejection of the American government and its policies. The demonstrations were the work of a tiny minority, but media coverage and the rapid spread of the protest movement have destabilised the region, and may well have substantial consequences for the future of Middle East — and for the process of democratisation and normalisation in the region.

The violence must be condemned unconditionally. To attack innocents, diplomats and to kill indiscriminately is anti-Islamic by its very nature. Muslims cannot respond to insults to their religion in this way. On this principle, there can be no compromise.

Still, there is every reason to ask what lies behind such vulgar provocations (whose intent is clearly to set off a reaction by mocking Muslims’ unanimous respect for the Prophet [PBUH]. Here we have individuals, or interest groups (and not the American government) that make cynical use of the noblest values — freedom of speech — to attain the most poisonous objectives, promoting hatred, racism and contempt. Well-established and protected in their rich and comfortable societies, they pretend to celebrate critical intelligence and wit at the expense of a religion practised by much less fortunate people, many of who are struggling with numerous social frustrations and are barely surviving. But behind the celebration of freedom of speech hides the arrogance of ideologists and well-fed racists who feed off the multiform humiliation of Muslims and to demonstrate the clear “superiority” of their civilisation or the validity of their resistance to the “cancer” of retrograde Islam. In criticising this ideological stance there can be no compromise either.

In the light of the contemporary Muslim conscience, while deploring and regretting the emotive reactions of the populations of the Muslim-majority societies of the Global South, we must take into account their social and historical reality. Economically and culturally disadvantaged, their political and cultural sensitivities are sorely tried by deliberate insults to the sacred symbols that give meaning to their perseverance and their lives — the very symbols invoked by leaders or Islamist tendencies to nurture resentment and to give voice to anger. This reality in no way justifies violence, but helps us understand its source and seek out possible solutions. It is the task of the elites, the leaders, of Muslim religious scholars and intellectuals, to play a leading role in order to head-off explosions of anger and mob violence. They bear three kinds of responsibilities.

First, they must turn their attention to education and work towards a deeper understanding of Islam, one that focuses on meaning and ultimate goals, and not simply on rituals and prohibitions. The task at hand is enormous and requires the full participation of all schools of thought.

Second, Islam’s extraordinary diversity must be accepted and celebrated. Islam is one, but its interpretations are many. The existence of literalist, traditionalist, reformist, mystic, rationalist and other currents is a fact, a reality that must be treated positively and qualitatively, for each of them has its own legitimacy and should (must!) contribute a multifaceted debate among Muslims. Unfortunately, today’s Muslim religious scholars, and the leaders of various trends, are caught up in an ideological confrontation, and often a clash of egos, that create divisions and transform them into dangerous populists who claim for themselves the title of sole and authentic representatives of Islam. Within Sunnis, as within Shiites; between Sunnis and Shiites; scholars and schools of thought lash out at one another, forgetting the fundamental teachings and the principles that unite them and instead splitting along doctrinal or political lines that remain secondary at best. The consequences of these divisions are serious. Populism pushes people to vent their emotions blindly in the guise of legitimacy. The attitude — or the absence of it — of such scholars perpetuates among Muslims nationalist, sectarian and often racist postures based on their particular school of thought, their nationality or their culture. Instead of calling upon individual egos to control themselves, and upon minds to understand and celebrate diversity, leaders and scholars play, in their rhetoric or in their silence, upon people’s emotions and sense of belonging with catastrophic consequences. The Great Powers, West and East, easily exploit these divisions and internal conflicts such as the danger-fraught fracture between Sunnis and Shiites.

Instead, it is imperative that voices from the two traditions collaborate on the fundamental principles that unite all Muslims. Whenever considerations of belonging threaten to replace principles, religious scholars, intellectuals and leaders must return to shared principles, must find common ground between these considerations, in full respect of legitimate diversity.

Third, scholars and intellectuals must have the courage to expose themselves further. Instead of encouraging popular feelings, or use those feelings to further their own religious identity (Sunnis, Shiites, reformists, Sufis, etc.) or their political ideology, they must face the issue squarely, dare to be self-critical, commit themselves to dialogue and — more often than not — tell Muslims what they may not like to hear about their own failings, their lack of coherence, their propensity to play the victim, failure to understand and to accept responsibility. Far from the feverish rhetoric of the populists, they must put their credibility on the line to awaken consciences in an attempt to counter emotionalism and mass blindness. The educated elites, students, intellectuals and professionals also have a major responsibility. The way they follow their leaders, as does their status as intermediaries, accountable, simplifying and participating in grassroots dynamics is an absolute imperative. The passivity of the educated elites, looking down upon inflamed and uncontrolled populations far below them, is a grievous fault.

Ultimately we end up with the leaders — and the people — we deserve. Without committed and determined religious scholars, intellectuals and business people aware of the critical nature of the issues, there can be little doubt that we will be heading for an upsurge of religious populism and the emotional blindness of the masses. The words and the commitment of the leaders must set the highest standards — beginning with knowledge, understanding, coherence and self-criticism. They must abandon the notion of victimisation by appealing to responsibility, by freeing themselves from the illusion that opposition to the “other” can lead to reconciliation with one’s self. Make no mistake: The violent reactions to the insults uttered against the Prophet [PBUH] have driven many Muslims to behaviours far removed from the principles of Islam. We become ourselves not in opposition to someone else, but in accord and at peace with our conscience, our principles and our aspirations. In the serene mastery of ourselves, and not in the aggressive rejection of the Other. Such is the message the world’s Muslims need to hear, and most of all, put into practice.

Tariq Ramadan is professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies in the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University . He is the author of Islam and the Arab Awakening and also teaches at the Oxford Faculty of Theology. He is Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Islamic Studies, (Qatar), Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan)

One of the world’s top 100 most influential intellectuals in the world by Time Magazine in 2004.

He is President of the European think tank : European Muslim Network (EMN) in Brussels.

An online poll provided by the American Foreign Policy magazine in 2009 and in 2010 placed Ramadan on the 49th spot in a list of the world’s top 100 contemporary intellectuals.

In 2008, an open online poll, Tariq Ramadan was voted the 8th top most intellectual person in the world on the list of Top 100 Public Intellectuals by Prospect Magazine (UK). 

This article was originally published in the Gulf News