You acted according to the law of your country. If you hadnt done that, what would you be called now? Theres nothing else you could have done.
As I said at the outset, I could have moved to a different country. I live in the US of my own free will. And I'm educated and skilled enough to migrate to another country, and live in comfortable conditions.
Likewise, I could have quit my job and devoted my career to opposing Bush. Or at least lended more support to those doing so.
But at the end of the day, it turns out I oppose Bush less than I want to stay here, in my current career. And I accept the (minor) responsibility that accompanies this.
This doesnt stand because if we were to follow this train of thought Bush would be labelled as the leader of Christians.
No, Bush has never presented himself in that way. Bin Laden, meanwhile, has done exactly that.
Every Muslim country can elect their own leader.
Actually, only a few of them can do that. The rest are ruled by kings and dictators.
No one elected Bin Laden.
And no one needs to. He is able to draw sufficient support - in terms of basing, finance, supply and recruits - to operate, without any electoral mandate.
Likewise, the leaders of most Muslim countries, who were not elected.
What worldview would that be?
What I said was "key aspects of their worldview." This would be stuff like the heavy emphasis on colonialism as characteristic of Muslim identity.
No one knows where they are.
Except for the people who DO know, and keep them sheltered. They aren't in outer space, you know.
You think he can just go to any Muslim country and announce his arrival without any consequences?
No, I know that he can go into certain places in certain (Muslim) countries, and expect to be hidden and sheltered, so that he can continue to pursue his wars.
Not in the name of the Muslim world, in the nameof his own reasoning, which, as we saw before, was related to wars against countries in taht region.
Muslim countries, to be specific, that are to be defended because of their centrality to Islam.
it is only realistic that he would draw support from countries that have been attacked and destroyed.
The guys who crashed planes into the World Trade Center were not from countries that have been attacked and destroyed. Quite the opposite: the US has provided vast quantities of cash, and political and military support for those countries, for generations. The entire reason the troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia in the first place was to prevent Saddam from invading and destroying the country.
The Muslim world lacks the capacity to expel him just as much the Western/Christian world lacks the capacity to expel the gangs and drug dealers and cartels.
Fortunately for us, said gangs and cartels do not present themselves as acting in the name of The West or Christianity, and so don't raise any comparable issues. Nor do they seek to legitimate their activities by appeals to Western or Christian ideals or grievances.
Just because they are present there, does not mean they are supported.
Sure it does. Who do you think is buying all those drugs?
Just because people don't generally like to take responsibility for the consequences of their thoughts and actions (or lack thereof), doesn't mean they lack culpability.
I found out very early that a lot of people are ignorant about Muslims and the Muslim world and so will lump all Muslims together, not seeing them as individual human beings responsible for their own actions but portraying them as this vast group filled with undesirables that are supported by the rest.
Are you really numb to the irony of appointing yourself as speaker for a group, in order for them to be seen as individuals? You shouldn't be leaning on this categorical approach at all, if that's what you want (plus, ditching it would instantly resolve most of my and iceaura's objections to your rhetoric).
And no one supports the killings or violence.
Except for the people who do, whose numbers are apparently large enough to wreak havok on random civilians in every corner of the globe.
Rushdie is not an enemy of Islam. He's merely an opportunistic liar and hypocrite who plagiarized all the arguments presented before him, from the Orientalists all the way to the Crusaders. Why should I not be able to criticize Rushdie without approving of any violence?
"Should?" No reason. But the fact is that you
can't, because this conversation is occurring in a context where people used (indeed, invented, out of thin air) the same criticisms you are citing as a motive for violence. Again, not fair, but that's the context in which you are speaking, and in the real world, context counts.
Oh please, no one supports terrorists killing innocent people.
Except for the people who do. Who, again, are numerous enough to allow terrorists to carry out such killings, on a large scale. And so what is required of the majority is not simply non-support, but active resistance, sufficient to prevent the killing from continuing.
So the anti-war protesters were protesting against the war, but happy about people being killed as a result of the war?
No, the anti-war protesters don't subscribe to the war arguments at all, generally. The correct analogue is the people who support the invasion, but then want a pass because they don't support civilian casualties. The fact is that civilian casualties were a foreseeable outcome, and so one must either accept responsibility for them, as a price worth paying, or withdraw the support for the war, in general.
You don't get to go along with an international campaign to portray Rushdie as an evil enemy, and then get a pass on the resulting violence directed at him. Especially in hindsight, when the issue of forseeing the violence doesn't apply.
Doesnt make sense. You accept that the vast majority of protests were peaceful,
The truly "peaceful" protests aren't the ones I care about, and no legitimately "peaceful" person continued to protest once it became apparent that the protest movement was feeding into a campaign of violence. Which was early on.
but by doing so you have compromised your argument and therefore must resort to presuming to know what people really think.
No presumption is required, when they provide ample evidence via their actions (or lack thereof).
Not really. The fatwa is still in effect, and Rushdie had to remain in hiding for many years. Even today, his name has become a codeword for a specific militant attitude towards the West.
The grieveance of the the vast majority, not the handful of people that committed actual crimes.
It's the same grievance. The difference is in how far the response is taken.
By not allowing the grieveances of the people that protested against him to be aired, we would just be controlling what people can and cannot say.
I have no problem with the airing of legitimate grievances. I have a big problem with the manufacture of imaginary grievances to drive people apart, and fuel campaigns of violence. And, anyway, what I want is not to silence you, but to confront you with the consequences of your position, and so induce you to modify it. That's an
instantiation of free speech, not its suppression.
If I were to respond by, say, targetting you for death, that would be suppression.
Been there, done that. Its been done ever since the Crusades, when the arguments Rushdie presented were used as morale boosters for the Christians to go and slaughter the Muslims, right through to the Orientalists
Again, this "reading" is so blatantly unreasoned, and propagandist, that it merits little more than derision.
The "little more" consisting primarily of pity.
and even Rushdies works have been adressed in a very polite and productive manner. However, that doesnt make for headlines now does it?
It would make for big headlines, if Rushdie's work was addressed in a "productive" manner. It would represent a huge advance in human freedom, in a region sorely lacking in it, as well as the death knell of the terrorism and dysfunction now emanating from it.
Sadly, he is widely dismissed, reviled and - crucially - misunderstood, often willfully.
What Rushdie wants and what Rushdie did are 2 seperate things.
Indeed, but the actions were consistent with the desires.
Im not attacking Rushdie, just showing what he did that isnt so well known to his supporters.
That's because "what he did" is a fantasy invented by people invested in the injustice and oppression he was criticizing.
Meanwhile, "what he wrote" seems to be almost entirely unknown to his detractors.
Ya, rushdie criticized colonialism, which only added to the fire when he kept attacking the very people that saw him as a hero, book after book.
The essense of the problem is the supposition that Rushdie's books are an attack on people. On the contrary, they are attacks on the oppression of said people. That so many have been induced to confuse the two is a cause for great concern.
And, after having spent a long time recovering, migrating, trying to adjust, hearing the same arguments your conquerors used against you and the author of that getting all kinds of awars isnt very pleasant.
Again, the arguments are very - VERY - different. To the extent that there is overlap, it should suggest that perhaps that argument actually has merit, as distasteful as such an idea might be.
To invoke a similar lesson: just because George Bush believes something, doesn't mean it's not true.
Has it occurred to you that many of the "arguments" underpinning colonialism were not inventions imposed upon the colonized, but rather
descriptions of exactly what features of the victim society left them weak enough to be dominated in the first place?
And so the priority should be addressing those weaknesses, instead of pretending to fight imperialism by denying them. That only leaves your society in the same weak position that allowed it to be dominated in the first place.
If Rushdie - no imperialist, by any stretch of the imagination - thinks that these are serious social problems in their own right, then a reasonable person should take that fairly seriously, without worrying about what role these problems played in colonialism.
That people like you work to prevent such consideration from occurring, by painting anyone who would think that way as an accomplice to colonialism, is extremely regressive and unhealthy.
The only thing I dislike about Rushdie is his refusal to grant other people freedom of speech,
Freedom of speech is not Rushdie's to grant. All he can do is show you the door, and hope you walk through it (instead of trying to kill him).
For the rest, hes just the same as his predecessors.
He has no real predecessors, that I know of.
Ah, so if we criticize someone, we demonize him?
No, of course not. But you have consistently gone beyond the bounds of criticism, and into the realm of demonization. The stuff equating him with colonialism, in particular, is way over the line, given how totally unjustifiable it is, and its obviously prejudicial nature.
I dont have a problem with people criticizing absolutist thought.
And yet, when Rushdie applies such criticism to the particular school of absolutist thought associated with your religion, you equate that with an international crime of historic magnitude.
But it seems it is you who wants to prevent me from expressing myself by questioning my right to criticize Rushdie under the freedom of speech without explicitly stating that if I choose to criticize Rushdie, I might as well have killed him myself.
There are plenty of ways to criticize Rushdie without aligning yourself with the terror campaign that was launched against him. Not taking your critiques directly out of the playbook of said terrorists would be a good start.
