Secularists reverse course on defamation
After years of defending repressive religious practices as symbols of cultural diversity, Britain’s secular left has reversed itself and now vigorously opposes the U.N.’s proposed ban on the defamation of religion, according to religion and media analyst Dr. Jenny Taylor.
"If it weren't so serious, it would be funny," Taylor, executive director of the U.K.'s Lapido Media, told a Media Project-sponsored gathering in Jakarta.
"Left-wing secularists have been fellow travelers with Islamists for decades, in order quite literally, to bring down the State."
Secularists even helped Islamists establish outposts in London as a kind of counterweight to Anglo-Saxon, Christian culture, Taylor said. So it is ironic in her view that the same secularists have become such ardent defenders of the persecuted and some of the very few voices publicly opposing Muslim-sponsored U.N. initiatives to ban speech deemed blasphemous or defamatory.
From her post at Lapido Media, which works for religious literacy in world affairs, Taylor closely monitors religion in the public square in the U.K., Europe and beyond. What Taylor sees in the new secularist approach to religion is not a carefully worked out discourse, but a slow awakening to the anti-defamation movement's potential for "back-door" repression.
"The secularists are slowly discovering that religion is about a lot more than private opinion," Taylor observed. "Hateful thoughts emerge as hateful speech, and speech acts. Whole societies of injustice are based around religiously reinforced cultural practices..."
Taylor's own work on blasphemy laws dates to 1991, when she was shocked by New York Times columnist Bernard Levin's "astonishingly blinkered statement" that only Jews had suffered because of their religion.
Since then, Taylor has tracked the development of anti-defamation and blasphemy laws from their birth in the "badlands" of Pakistan - where the laws are used to imprison or kill Christians and other business rivals - to the present-day United Nations, which is using Pakistan's laws as model for the anti-defamation proposals.
She has also watched Britain struggle domestically to balance individual and media free speech against religious - primarily Muslim - sensitivies. But despite growing incidences of religious conflict, Taylor says that almost no one is reporting on the issue.
"Britain is too busy being polite about religion for this to be an issue," one activist told Taylor.
Journalists' energies have also been occupied recently with spectacles such as political scandals, the economic crisis, and Britain's general elections, Taylor pointed out. Defamation is, by comparison, considered "dry as toast".
“The result is that there has been absolutely no journalism at all on the subject. There have been a couple of blogs written by NGOs - but that is not journalism,” Taylor emphasized.
The debates that are taking place are relegated to poorly attended diplomatic dialogs in Geneva, where Britain doesn't even maintain a media presence. And Britain’s diplomats are a group of people that “do not do media,” Matt Jones of Christian World Solidarity commented to Taylor.
As one of the few outside observers who bother to attend the UN's Human Rights Council meetings, Jones notes that, though the meetings are public, they so are badly covered it's as if they're taking place behind closed doors.
The National Secular Society (NSS), a UK-based group active across Europe, together with its countepart in Geneva, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU), are the leading protest voices. They aim to defend the "rights of non-believers from the demands of religious power-seekers" and to "combat the influence of religion on governments".
The IHEU now actively campaigns against casteism in India, witchcraft in Africa and stoning in Islamic societies as well as Catholic child abusers, in an effort to appear even handed. This anti-religious activism stands in stark contrast to Britain's traditional secularism, which for years believed its own propaganda that religion was dying, Taylor said.
But there has been a bit of an explosion of secular thinking on the issue, arguing that anti-defamation laws and Islamophobia are ruses by Muslims states to escape criticism. Such laws would not only close down freedom of the press to report on injustice, but undermine human rights as a whole, said Taylor.
"A whole slew of books emerged last year by left-wingers berating other left-wingers for their moral and intellectual bankruptcy, particularly on religiously sanctioned political injustice," Taylor said.
Taylor says a new generation of Muslim writers, such as Kenan Malik and Dr. Rumy Hasan, have come to agree with secularists on this point, after becoming disenchanted by the Salmon Rushdie debacle.
"Rushdie's critics won the war by pounding into the liberal consciousness the belief that to give offence was a morally despicable act," said Taylor, quoting Malik.
Taylor says the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the primary sponsor of anti-defamation proposals in the UN, has only hardened its position in light of late-blooming secularist critique.
The OIC has turned its attention to legally binding together religion and race as sources of "inherent identity" that promote justice and community cohesion, Taylor said.
IHEU spokesman Roy Brown said secularists will not accept any expansion of religious identity, and will fight it in the Human Rights Council's plenary session.
"[Secular] contempt for religion is exactly what the OIC wants to forbid," Taylor declared. "Islam fears secularists more than other religions because - more than any other group, and certainly more than the Church - it would deny them a place at any public table".