From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Wed 27 Nov 2002 - 05:43:03 GMT
Beauties and the beasts
Islamic fundamentalists opened another front in their war on
liberal culture with their bloody Miss World riots in Nigeria. But
many feminists and progressives still don't want to hurt their
feelings.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Andrew Sullivan
{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=print"}{PRIVATE "TYPE=PICT;ALT=e-mail"}
Nov. 27, 2002 | The facts of the case are not in much dispute. A
journalist, Isioma Daniel, for the Nigerian newspaper This Day,
made a crude reference to the coming Miss World pageant in her
column. She wrote last week that Mohammed might approve of
the contest since he might pick one of his wives from the throng
of beauties. This comment prompted an outpouring of enraged
Muslims from a local mosque, who grew into a crowd of rioters.
Christians were attacked, dozens of churches were burned, and
some Christians fought back. As many as 500 people were killed
in the rampage, and there are reports that Christians are now
fleeing the area entirely.
The Miss World contest was subsequently transferred to London,
and the journalist who wrote for This Day was placed under a
fatwa. "What we are saying is that the holy Koran has clearly
stated that whoever insults the Prophet of Islam, Mohammed,
should be killed," Umar Dangaladima Magaji, the Zamfara state
commissioner, told Reuters.
This is now a somewhat familiar story. Radicalized Islam -- on
every continent -- is stepping up its assault on Western freedoms.
The Miss World contest and This Day are just the latest targets.
The act of putting on a beauty pageant or writing a column are
now subject to the approval of radical religious fanatics. Those
who do not please these fanatics will not be criticized or
campaigned against or smeared or railed at. They will be killed.
Even those who have nothing to do with either the contest or the
column will be killed if they do not share the religious convictions
of the Islamists. We've known this since the fatwa against Salman
Rushdie -- the first major warning sign that the forces of darkness
were gathering, and one we ignored.
So what is our excuse now? In the aftermath of horror, the
Washington Post reported early on that "after plans to stage the
show in Nigeria sparked Christian-Muslim riots that killed at least
175 people, the organizers moved it to Britain but flew into a
storm of protest at home too." "Christian-Muslim riots"? Those
are weasel words, obscuring the real responsibility for the
murders. The organizers of the Miss World contest also managed
to blur the issue. "A journalist made this problem and we hope
journalists can put it right," said Julia Morley, Miss World's CEO.
Excuse me? The journalist was doing her job. The "problem" -- a
rather glib description of the murder of hundreds -- was caused by
extreme Islam. And by singling out the journalist, Morley gives a
patina of credibility to the disgusting fatwa now lodged against
her.
The Arab News predictably blamed the contest: "Though they
have attempted to distance themselves from the deadly riots that
followed the blasphemy produced by a local newspaper, the
tensions that were unleashed had been building for weeks as a
direct result of their actions ... The organizers are hinting darkly
that they made a mistake in assuming that Nigeria was a
sufficiently stable country to host what they keep trying to pretend
is a genuine and important international event. Blaming Nigeria,
however, is unfair. Of course, those Nigerians who were party to
organizing the unseemly parade are certainly guilty of a grievous
lack of judgment, the worse because a moment's thought would
have told them that even were the event suitable for a country
with devout Muslims, the timing was totally inappropriate ... It
must be hoped that those who perpetrated this awful mistake will
be properly pilloried for their error." No word about the real
responsibility for the riots. No word about the right to freedom of
expression regardless of religious sensibilities. But this is a Saudi
paper, from whom one can hardly expect support for liberalism.
But the mayor of London? Tuesday Ken Livingstone placed the
blame squarely on the pageant. "After the violence and terrible
loss of life in Nigeria, the staging of a Miss World event in this
city is not welcome," Livingstone opined. "It defies belief that
after Miss World has brought tragedy and strife to Africa its
organisers should think it appropriate to carry on with the
razzamataz as if nothing had happened." So Miss World "brought
tragedy" to Nigeria? So far as I know, no one connected with Miss
World hurt a fly.
Paleo-feminists also blamed the victim. "The best thing to do after
such fratricide and blood-letting is to cancel the whole
competition," averred Labor deputy Glenda Jackson. Muriel Gray
went further and opined that "These girls will be wearing
swimwear dripping with blood." Now it's the contestants' fault?
But there has always been a weird overlap between some
puritanical, anti-capitalist feminists and radical Muslims. They
both hate free societies in which women can choose how they
want to present themselves. Jill Nelson summed up this bizarre
moral equivalence on MSNBC: "As far as I'm concerned it's
equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around
a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in
burkas in order to survive." I can't think of a more fatuous
statement after a bloodbath, orchestrated by fanatics who won't
allow women the slightest autonomy in their lives.
A columnist in the Guardian, the wonderfully named Ros Coward,
argued that the West should respond to attacks on free speech by
avoiding offense to bigots: "The Nigeria debacle shows how naive
people are about this divide between cultures, especially in a post-
Sept. 11 world. A culture where a woman can be stoned to death
for adultery clearly contains elements that will not be entranced
by a parade of female flesh or the 'modernity' it promises. To hold
the contest during Ramadan compounds the insult." Do any of
these female journalists worry in print about a fatwa being
pronounced on another female journalist, who has succeeded in
her work despite being in a brutally misogynist culture? Not so
far. Her right to write freely seems not as important as sensitivity
to other cultures.
Now imagine a scenario in which, say, the play "Corpus Christi"
was produced in New York (as it was). The play was highly
offensive to some fundamentalists because it depicted Jesus as
gay. What if a mob of enraged Christians, after a holy sermon at a
neighboring church, had decided to torch the office of the New
York Times because they ran a favorable review, or to burn down
the theater? What if they killed hundreds of innocent bystanders in
their rage? What if they issued a call to all faithful Christians to
kill playwright Terence McNally for his blasphemy? Do you think
the rampage would be described as "atheist-Christian riots"? Do
you think leftists would call on the playwright to be more
sensitive in future? Would the mayor of New York blame the
theater? Yet when it comes to a far, far deadlier menace to our
freedoms than fundamentalist Christianity, much of the left is
silent or, worse, making excuses for this Islamist threat.
This is what cultural relativism, p.c. journalism and decadent
feminism amounts to: a failure to grasp that freedom is under
attack. The only reason I am writing this column is because I live
in a free society. One of the keys to that free society is freedom of
the press -- even to be disrespectful, annoying, blasphemous.
What just happened in Nigeria is that a newspaper's offices were
burned to the ground, a journalist has had a death sentence
pronounced on her, and hundreds of people have been killed
because of radical Islam's hatred of our freedoms. The propriety,
politics and principles of a beauty pageant are utterly irrelevant. If
I don't like such a pageant, I have many ways to protest. But
killing people isn't one of them. That isn't so hard a line to grasp.
So why have so few grasped it?
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