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February 07, 2006

Religious Hatred and Censorship? C***s, Cartoons and Clerics

When I wrote about religious hatred and censorship last week, I thought this was a pretty parochial UK issue. However, the argument about the printing of cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad -- which many have viewed as offensive and/or blasphemous -- is exploding around the world at the moment. One of the protesters in London - out of jail on licence due to an earlier criminal offence - has been returned to jail, having breached the terms of his licence by dressing as a suicide bomber; he has since apologised for his insensitivity. The extremist Muslim cleric Abu Hamza - who preached at the Finsbury Park Mosque in London - has also just been convicted of inciting murder and possessing documents likely to incite racial hatred.

The UK Government response to the Danish cartoons has only served to give more reasons to be grateful the Government was not able to pass the religious hatred legislation it wanted - Jack Straw has, unfortunately, decided to express his disapproval of the cartoons. It does seem that this Government might have been tempted to use legislation against the incitement of religious hatred to restrict debate and humour in the media. While it was tasteless to publish these cartoons - a right to free speech does not mean you have to say offensive things - the newspapers involved are quite entitled to be tasteless; after all, what could be printed in newspapers if tasteless content were excluded...

So, at the moment it seems that incitement to violence is being punished, 'blasphemy' is not. This is about the right balance to strike, but we should aim for a slightly longer memory - for example, this reminds me of the controversy about the metal band Cradle of Filth's T-shirts with the slogan "Jesus is a C***". There have been at least three convictions in the UK of people for wearing this T-shirt, and the Lord Provost of Glasgow stopped a record shop there from selling the T-shirt. Freedom of speech - if we are, as we should, to allow caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad - should be applied fairly: if Muhammad can be depicted as a suicide bomber, then those who wish to do so should also be free to describe Jesus as a c*** (and, if they really want, to listen to bad metal at the same time).

Even if you wanted to restrict offensive speech, the way that communications today is networked through mediums such as the Internet means that 'censored' speech can easily cross borders and spread around the world - often much more than would have been the case if this speech had been ignored. What this has meant, of course, is that in the 1990s a lousy metal band got masses of publicity and sold a load of T-shirts, just as we're now seeing a few unfunny cartoons of Muhammad being distributed around the world. Perhaps what we really ought to aim for is to make something good (in Friedrich Nietzsche or Oscar Wilde's sense of not being bad, rather than the theistic sense of not being evil) controversial - so that at least something a bit more interesting can colonise these media channels... On that note, I think Gilbert and George deserve more attention for asking, not whether Jesus was a c***, but whether he was heterosexual - at least if that debate spreads we could have something a bit more interesting than those lousy Danish cartoons to look at, while debating if this 'sick stunt' should be banned...

Posted by jon_mendel at February 7, 2006 03:23 PM