Flemming Rose is a modern day prophet, with a unique calling as a humble secularist whose intelligent vision is needed by believers and non-believers alike. I would say a voice from God. Yes, God speaks through atheists too. Heed the warning: protect secular values now or suffer when it's too late. Read this book and you'll see what I mean.
The Danish cartoons are not just cartoons; they reveal a Western problem -- a failure to hold to our liberal values. Powerful leftism has turned the concept of tolerance on its head.
Tolerance used be the ability to accept speech that one disliked, yet still live together in peace. The imperative of tolerance applied to the person who heard the speech rather than to the speaker. Now, we make demands of the speaker. So says, Flemming Rose.
The territory in which we combat discrimination and inequality has become so broad that almost any speech may be branded intolerant or racist. Hence Rose's newspaper the Jyllands-Posten's publishing of the Muhammad cartoons was condemned as intolerant, while threats, violence, and calls for the cartoons to be banned were interpreted as wholly understandable, reactions of a persecuted minority.
Worse than that is the story Flemming tells of how imams whipped up anger and reaction around the world over very innocuous cartoons, cartoons rarely even seen.
I myself am a believing liberal Christian, yet stand firmly with Lemming Rose for full, true, freedom of speech. The only line for a sane society to draw is that in the American Constitution: immediate incitement to violence. Speech and actual physical violence must be where the line is drawn; anything else is a slippery slope, inviting people to be offended about anything and everything in the name of their identities.
Mockery also is often essential to challenging taboos and other controls, and is central to the health of society. People need more "in-sensitivity" training, NOT more sensitivity training, as Flemming says. Toughen up if you want a strong democracy that works. Watch Mr. Rose on YouTube and you will be, as numerous Muslims have been, won over to his arguments and the value of this pivotal historically-valuable story.
A point I especially value in this book is Rose's analysis of the United Nations. "Human Rights" as a concept has also shifted under our feet. Ironically in Geneva, a few feet away from where Servetus was burned in 1553 for his speech, the UN Council of Human Rights has been circling religion with special prohibitions, criminalizing speech considered offensive to God, as tyrants in many member countries tyrannize over actual minorities and ordinary citizens in the name of God.
According to Ann Elizabeth Mayer, lawyer and author, the resolutions adopted by the UN Human Rights Commission between 1999 and 2009 has moved from simply defending an Islamic version of human rights to outright attacking the West for supposed Muslim rights violations, expecting EU states to punish people who "offend" religion. You may well NOT agree with this definition of "human rights."
Excellent book, with many points I've not heard anywhere else.
No comments:
Post a Comment