Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression (2 page)

Let’s face it—the term “Islamophobia” is poorly chosen if it’s meant to describe the hatred felt by a few morons for Muslims. And it’s not just poorly chosen, but dangerous.

If we look at it from a purely etymological perspective, “Islamophobia” should mean “fear of Islam.” But the inventors, promoters, and users of the word deploy it to denounce hatred of Muslims. I find it odd that “Muslimophobia,” or the broader term “racism,” has not gained ground over “Islamophobia.” Either of those would be on a firmer footing, semantically speaking. So why has “Islamophobia” won the day?

Out of ignorance, laziness, and error, for some, but also because many of those who militate against Islamophobia do so not to defend Muslims as individuals, but to defend the religion of the prophet Muhammad.

Racism has existed in all countries ever since the invention of the scapegoat. There will probably always be racists. The solution is not to paw through the minds of every citizen, searching for the least little ember of racism, but to prevent racists from putting their nauseating ideas into words, from claiming their “right” to be racists, to express their hatred.

In France, racist speech was largely set
free by Sarkozy
¹
and the issue he made of national identity. When the highest authority of the state stands up in front of assholes and bastards and tells them, “Let ’er rip, boys,” what do you think the assholes and bastards are going to do? They’re going to start saying publicly what, up till then, they had limited themselves to belching out at the drunken conclusion of family dinners. Racist speech, which our institutions, politicians, and intellectuals had succeeded in confining to the zone between the xenophobe’s teeth and his kitchen door, made its way out into the street, flooded the media, and further befouled the plumbing of social networks.

Yes, we are witnessing a renaissance of racist outbursts, yet the term “racism” is only used timidly these days. The term “racism” is quite simply in the process of being superseded by “Islamophobia.”

When a veiled woman is harassed and assaulted because she is veiled in the Muslim fashion (the elusive aggressor generally being described as a skinhead), the anti-Islamophobe champions the victim as a representative of Islam. Not because she is a citizen who happens to have been singled out by a fascist for her beliefs. For her champion, the sin lies in the fact that she has been attacked not as a citizen who has the right to dress as she likes, but as a Muslim woman. The real victim is Islam. God has thus been placed well above his believer, but when the latter is harmed, God is the intended target. This is what the anti-Islamophobic activist finds truly unacceptable.

And that’s why anti-Islamophobes have not chosen to call themselves “anti-Muslimophobes.” They consider the Muslims they defend to be merely the instruments of God.

It’s gotten to the point where you might get the impression that foreigners or citizens of foreign extraction are assaulted in France solely for being Muslims. Victims of racism who are of Indian, Asian, Roma, black African, or Caribbean descent may soon need to find themselves a religion if they wish to be protected.

Minority pressure group activists who seek to impose the concept of “Islamophobia” on judicial and political authorities have only one goal: to persuade the victims of racism to proclaim themselves Muslim. Forgive me, but the fact that racists may also be Islamophobic is essentially incidental. They are racists first, and merely use Islam to target their intended victim: the foreigner or person of foreign extraction. By taking only the racist’s Islamophobia into account, we minimize the danger of his racism. Yesterday’s anti-racism activist is turning into the salesman of a highly specialized commodity: a niche form of discrimination. The fight against racism is a fight against all forms of racism; but what is the fight against Islamophobia against? Is it against criticizing a religion or against abhorring its practitioners because they are of foreign descent? Racists have a field day when we debate whether it is racist to say the Koran is a useless rag. If tomorrow the Muslims of France were to convert to Catholicism or renounce all religion, it wouldn’t make the least bit of difference to the racists—they would continue to hold these foreigners or French citizens of foreign descent responsible for every affliction.

Okay, so Mouloud and Gérard are Muslims. Mouloud is of North African extraction and comes from a Muslim family; Gérard is of European origin and comes from a Catholic family. Gérard has converted to Islam. Both are trying to rent the same apartment. Assuming they have similar incomes, which of the two Muslims is more likely to get the apartment? The Arab-looking fellow or the white guy? It’s not the Muslim who will be turned away; it’s the Arab. The fact that the Arab bears no outward sign of belonging to the Muslim faith changes nothing. Yet what does the anti-Islamophobia activist do? He charges religious discrimination instead of decrying racism.

I recall here the relevant section of the Penal Code:

Social discrimination, while the subject of much less debate than religious discrimination because it is manifested more insidiously and discreetly, is nevertheless far more predominant in France. Managers choose their future employees less on the basis of their religious membership, true or supposed, than, for instance, on their place of residence. Between the Mouloud who lives in upscale Neuilly-sur-Seine and the Mouloud who lives in the down-at-heel
banlieue
of Argenteuil, which of the two, assuming they are of equal competence, is more likely to get the job? Yet who ever talks about this kind of discrimination? People are massively discriminated against based on their social class, but since a large proportion of the poor—whom no one wants hanging around their place of work, their neighborhood, or their building—is made up of people of foreign descent and, among these, a great many of Muslim origin, the Islamic activist will claim that the problem is Islamophobia.

Let’s take a look at the example of Mouloud and Abdelkader. Both are Muslims, both are of foreign descent, both are darker-skinned than Gérard. Mouloud is flat broke; Abdelkader is a millionaire. Which of the two will be rejected for the apartment? The Muslim Mouloud or the millionaire Abdelkader?

While we may need to reject the terms “Islamophobia” or “Christianophobia,” which I will return to later, what about the equally novel concepts of “homophobia” or “negrophobia”? The simple fact is that neither of these terms is ambiguous, even if the fashion of adding “-phobia” to the end of every other word is perfectly ludicrous. “Homophobia” and “negrophobia” are used to describe the hatred people may feel not toward an ideology or a religion, but toward human beings, pure and simple. Homophobia should be condemned not because it implies criticism of homosexuality, but because it expresses hatred of homosexuals. Likewise, when we speak of negrophobia, we are clearly speaking about the hatred that some express against black people, against individuals.

According to the dictionary, “Islam” means “submission” in Arabic. A Muslim is someone who is
submissive
to God. Why does he submit? Because his God is the best, the brawniest, the nattiest, but most of all because, if he says anything to the contrary, he will burn in hell until well after the end of the world. The believer is thus encouraged not to screw around with God under penalty of something worse than death for all eternity. So shouldn’t we prosecute all the imams, rabbis, and priests who exhort their flocks to fear the Lord? Do these devoted servants of their Lord not contribute to a sort of theophobia?

It’s easy to see how a certain kind of impressionable fuckwit believer, having attended the weekly sermon, might head home in a cold sweat, convinced his every movement is under divine scrutiny. God is a super-surveillance camera that no one seriously objects to. And yet, it was installed without input from a single elected official or voter. But I digress.

One day, just for fun, I will have to publish a collection of all the hate mail I’ve received at
Charlie Hebdo
from Catholic fascists and Muslim fascists. The main argument against blasphemy is just plain stupid: after our death, God will really stick it to us. Wouldn’t it be perfectly normal for certain sensitive souls to develop a phobia of religions that threaten them? A phobia of God?

By these lights, the main Islamophobes are the believers themselves. They’re shitting themselves at the thought that their vengeful God will punish them for the least slip-up.

Being afraid of Islam is no doubt moronic, absurd, and plenty of other things as well, but it’s not a crime. Likewise, you can demonstrate your fear of Christianity or Judaism without disturbing a judge and setting the whole legal system in motion. In any case, an adherent himself may well have a phobia of other religions. He has been taught that his religion is the best of all—no, not the best, the only True One! By declaring that the texts he holds sacred tell the truth, he implies that the others tell fibs. It’s easy to imagine him terrified by the prospect of mass conversions to the false religion. Or, more precisely, of a mass exodus of the clientele to the competition. There’s nothing surprising about a Catholic being Islamophobic or a Muslim being Cathophobic—that is precisely what their religious shepherds ask them to be. Disapproval of the other guy’s religion is the daily bread of clerics of all creeds, and nobody seems to be bothered by it. Priests, imams, and rabbis have the right to be Islamophobic, Judeophobic, or Cathophobic without reprimand.

Let us recall, too, that a religion does not exist without believers. A text becomes sacred and, ultimately, dangerous only when some fanatic decides to take his bedside reading literally. You have to be really gullible to swallow the foundational texts of any of the great religions word for word, and you’d have to be a true psychopath to try to reproduce their teachings at home. In short, the problem is neither the Koran nor the Bible—tiresome, incoherent, and poorly written novels though they may be—but the faithful who read the Koran or the Bible the way you read the assembly instructions for an Ikea bookcase. If you don’t do exactly what it says on the paper, the universe will blow the fuck up. If I don’t slit the infidel’s throat along the dotted line, God will banish me from Club Med when I die.

Take any cookbook, declare everything written in it to be the Truth, and apply it to the letter, for yourself and others, as prescribed in these new Holy Scriptures. The outcome? A bloodbath. Your neighbor cooks gluten-free pancakes because he’s allergic? The Holy Book makes no provision for such behavior! Put your blaspheming neighbor to the torch! He butters his pie dish too liberally? Kill! Kill!

You can do the same experiment with any book. Try it out with a Stephen King novel, for a laugh.

“Sacred” texts are sacred only to those who believe in them. While some Muslim and Catholic institutions have been working for years to have the crime of blasphemy recognized and actionable under French law, no one is in danger of going to jail for criticizing such or such religious dogma (except in Alsace-Moselle, which we’ll get back to).

A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning for him. A nonbeliever, no matter how hard he tries,
cannot
blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.

For example, no communist would ever consider identifying anti-communists as communistophobes, or prosecuting them on the grounds of anti-communist racism. No matter how hard you try to bend reality to your way of thinking, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone that there is such a thing as a communist “race.” Likewise, there is no such thing as the Islamic “race.” Communism, as a school of thought, is now in the minority in France, regularly attacked or at the very least mercilessly derided by all faithful champions of the triumphant capitalist model. There are not (alas) a billion-plus communists in the world; the Communist Party is not (alas) the second-largest in France; there are (alas) more mosques than Communist Party federations; and no communist who interacts with customers at work is allowed to sport a big fat yellow hammer and sickle on his red T-shirt.

While, unlike the existence of God, it is difficult to deny the existence of Marx, Lenin, or
Georges Marchais,
³
it is neither blasphemous, racist, nor communistophobic to cast doubt on the validity of their writings or their speech. In France, a religion is nothing more than a collection of texts, traditions, and customs that it is perfectly legitimate to criticize. Sticking a clown nose on Marx is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad.

Frankly, if God exists and is as powerful as his minions claim, we infidels, unbelievers, layfolk, atheists, antitheists, free thinkers, and apostates are in deep shit. We are irremediably damned to the fires of hell.

Which raises the question: Why do believers resort to human justice to punish us when divine justice would do the trick, far more severely than any judge? Exactly who is this God character, who is said to be all-powerful yet needs to hire lawyers to take us to court? Isn’t he miffed when someone he had always considered to be a true follower turns to the legal system rather than to prayer? Why would the faithful risk making God look ridiculous by losing a trial on Earth when he is certain to win every trial in heaven? I don’t want to quarrel with anyone, but from the believer’s perspective, isn’t it blasphemy to ask jurists who may themselves be nonbelievers to condemn other nonbelievers in the name of God? Isn’t being the lead lawyer on God’s defense team just another way of committing the sin of pride? Does God—the creator of the world, this swaggering broad-shouldered guy who toys with our planet the way a driver stopped at a red light toys with his boogers—really need some ambulance chaser to uphold his honor?

By taking blasphemers to court, our minority pressure groups prove only one thing: they don’t believe in God.

Or else they are in favor of convicting people twice for the same crime, which is particularly mean-spirited and perverse. They want us to be found guilty and sentenced here in France, and a second time Up There. Or should I say Down There, since it is commonly understood that hell is in the basement and paradise, upstairs.

Believers who want to put a handful of blasphemers through hell on Earth are counterfeiters. How could even the most talented disciple hope to rival God by patching together a pale imitation of the official hell, where the skin of supplicants grows back every time it is flayed? Disneyland would sue anyone who dared to open a park modeled on the original without authorization. It’s astonishing that God, who is reputed to be even more of a stickler for the rules than the Disney heirs, does not severely punish those do-it-yourself believers who try to profit from an earthly theme park to which they don’t own the rights.