What is so difficult to get here? In her Wespeak (in response to mine), Ms. Guha argues that we should seek to “understand” and “empathize” with those who riot against Western governments for failing to punish a newspaper for publishing cartoons depicting Mohammed. That is both absurd and racist.
It is absurd because there is no mystery about what motivates the rioters, or why they are offended. They’ve been very clear about that. They are offended because Western governments permitted a newspaper to publish cartoons containing images that, they claim, violate their religious sensibilities. They are doubly offended because they believe, based on the false claims of Muslim religious leaders, that those cartoons depicted Mohammed having intercourse with an animal and as a pig.
The cartoons actually published are mildly offensive at worst, and indeed depicted Mohammed in a far softer manner than editorial cartoons regularly depict Western religious and political figures, and they certainly lack the venom and explicit racism with which Muslim media regularly refer to other faiths. (Not that that matters in the slightest, except to the extent those like Ms. Guha prefer blaming victims over protecting free speech.)
The rioters have been silent about the suicide bombings, the slavery, the genocide, the honor killings, but they riot over cartoons illustrating an editorial asking whether Muslims are willing to adapt to the Western values of tolerance and free expression. The message is crystal clear: Our religion makes us better, we’re entitled to do whatever we want, and if you fail to recognize our superiority, we’ll kill you.. Indeed, they say that explicitly. That is bigotry in its purest form, an exercise of the raw power that comes from willingness to commit violence on a massive scale against the unarmed and the innocent simply because they have a different religion. What is so hard to understand?
Empathizing with the rioters is racist because it elevates the petty sensibilities of violent bigots over the genuine needs of their victims on the sole basis of ethnic group identification. It is akin to telling a rape victim that she needs to understand that from the rapist’s point of view she was asking for it. It lends legitmacy to the rioters, and does so at the expense of those the rioters are trying to intimidate. It is at the further expense of Muslim dissenters, who already fear that any criticism of Islam or of Muslim violence will be shortly followed by a visit from the Muslim Brotherhood. One is reminded of the Gaza professor who found himself thrown out a window by his students for suggesting that bombing a nightclub might not be a legitimate act of self-defense.
To grant the rioters any credit at all is to assist their campaign of using violence to quash criticism of Islam. By empathizing with them, by acknowledging the pretense that they are rioting for anything other than bigotry and intimidation, by suggesting that there is any legitimate question that can be asked of the rioters beyond “What’s wrong with them, and how can we change them,” Ms. Guha, like those misguided Wesleyan students who thought it appropriate to conduct a “teach-in” about the rioters’ motivations, is complicit in the process of intimidation and undermines both Muslim dissenters and the rioters’ other victims.
Our empathy is not properly directed to the rioters, but rather at the newspaper whose employees find themselves in fear of their lives for exercising their speech rights; to the Western societies who find their most cherished values of tolerance and free dissent subject to extortion; to the Muslim dissidents who live in daily fear of those rioters; and to the millions of Muslims’ neighbors in Sudan, Israel, India, Thailand, the Philippines, and elsewhere who live in daily fear that the slightest offense (real or, as with the cartoons, fabricated) will lead to suicide bombings, riots, invasion, rape, and slavery, as they have repeatedly in the past.
(A note on the subject of colonialism. The period of Western colonization of Muslims lasted some 50 years; Muslim colonialism has persisted for 1300. Ms. Guha’s reference to “post-colonialism,” like Mr. Bhuyian’s to “ethnocentrism,” carries no moral authority.)
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