Ben Lowry: Salman Rushdie has been a hero of free speech against extremism

The death sentence from the then Supreme leader of Iran was a massive moment in global history, yet it took many years for its implications to be fully understood.

The September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001 twelve years later did greatly focus minds in the western world on the dangers of Islamic extremism.

The sort of extremism that would, on the one hand, send global hit squads round the world in pursuit of a novelist for insulting a religion, or, on the other, slam passenger jets into skyscrapers with the intent of killing tens of thousands of civilians (they did not in fact kill so many people on 911, but that was the aim, which, when you think about it, is morally indistinguishable from using a nuclear bomb and trying to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a city).

Yet to this very day swathes of otherwise smart and informed, liberal-minded people still seem not to have grasped the lessons of what happened to Rushdie back then.

I have a particular interest in the terrifying saga because I was 17 and it was one of a number of formative episodes in my long journey from the left of the political spectrum to the right.

At the time I was still left of centre, but not as firmly so as I had been.

One of my strongest political convictions at the time was the need to tackle racism (apartheid was still in place in South Africa). I suppose that if the phrase Islamophobia had been in use then, I would have accused Rushdie of it for his insult to the Prophet Mohammed in his novel The Satanic Verses (not that I had then, or have since, read it).

But I did not need to read the whole book, only summaries of Rushdie’s ‘insult’, to come to see quickly how outrageous it was to threaten such a writer, let alone to issue a global fatwah for his murder.

I soon came to be repelled by the sight of some Muslims in communities in England such as Bradford burning Rushdie’s novel, and the spineless response of a number of Labour MPs who sided with these fanatical thugs, such as Keith Vaz, who called for the novel to be banned.

And my anger at the death threat against Rushdie was enhanced by the fact that I had been able to watch on video, at around the same time, The Last Temptation of Christ, the film by the brilliant director Martin Scorsese in which Jesus is shown being tormented by sexual imaginings.

The contrast was clear, between the open minded values of Europe and America, which were shaped over 2,000 years by Judeo Christian values, but in which free speech had become enshrined, particularly since the emergence of a free press (including titles such as this one) three centuries ago.

In the UK, I could watch the Scorsese film and make up my own mind.

In Iran, the mere existence of a ‘blasphemous’ passage was enough to warrant execution for anyone involved in its distribution.

I remember reading a commentator at the time pointing out that while a few deranged individuals threatened or carried out violence over The Last Temptation of Christ, no church leader did, and certainly no theocratic western country (because there are no such western countries).

And that was despite the fact that the Scorsese film was a grievous insult to many Christians, indeed an insult that many of them considered to be of a graphic and very upsetting nature.

Yet still, decades later, there are liberal-minded people who get into all sorts of hoops about Islam.

Some of the same people who are scathing about Christian fundamentalists and who are outspoken in support of LGBT rights are quick to defend extreme Islamists who they think are victims of discrimination.

This reached blackly comical levels some years ago when Ken Livingstone, the former mayor of London and an early supporter of gay rights, expressed admiration for a Muslim cleric who defended throwing homosexuals off buildings as a death penalty for sodomy.

There was also a blackly comic element to the Belfast trial of Pastor James McConnell (see below) for an anti Islamic sermon, after he was reported to the authorities by an Muslim activist who defended the “peace” that Isis brought to Mosul when they controlled that Iraqi city (where they put their Islamic paradise into action and actually did throw gay people off buildings).

Martin McGuinness more or less encouraged that prosecution of Dr McConnell for hate speech — a man who, you might say, knew a thing or two about hate ‘acts’, not just hate speech.

Salman Rushdie has been a hero of free speech. The UK government did the right thing in sparing no cost in protecting his life in safe houses for years. For a while he was given secure accommodation in military compounds in Northern Ireland.

I was delighted when he was later given a knighthood (Dame Shirley Williams, that great ‘liberal’ voice of the 1980s, condemned the honour because he had insulted Muslims).

I very much hope that Rushdie survives this attack in New York state.

One glimmer of hope in this wider horror story is that Islamic extremism has not risen as rapidly as, by 2001, it was seeming it might.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter editor. Below other articles he wrote about Islamic extremism, including a few that have fallen off the web and are republished here if you scroll all the way down:

Ben Lowry in 2016: It was indeed shameful to see elderly pastor flounder in court

Ben Lowry in 2016: Dr Al-Wazzan role in McConnell case was a reason to pause

• Ben Lowry wrote the below article on the day of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. It was published the next day, on January 8, 2015 and is pasted below because it has fallen off the website, due to technical changes over the years:

Years of Western weakness towards Islamic fanaticism

By Ben Lowry

There are many ways of illustrating the muddled, even cowardly, way that we in the West respond to the sort of Islamic extremism that slaughtered 12 people in Paris yesterday.

But here is an example that sticks in my mind.

In 2005, I was at a performance at the Belfast Festival by the comedian Stewart Lee in which he mocked Tony Blair’s plans for an Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill.

There was much talk at the time about a possible Christian-inspired blasphemy case against the musical that Lee had co-written not long previously, Jerry Springer - The Opera’ (and indeed there would be a later failed prosecution bid).

It was thought that the bill could replace the outdated blasphemy laws, and so it was drawn in a way that could have had the effect of making it hard to “insult” religion.

Lee was right to ridicule this misguided Blair initiative, but went about it the wrong way.

He told a long story about Jesus offering himself as a loving, forgiving and selfless receptacle for the physical excesses of a drunken night out.

I have a vague memory that two people on the lower level of the Elmwood Hall (I was sitting upstairs) walked out. Mostly the crowd loved it. Lee had a cool sign-off along the lines of: That’s what happens Mr Blair when you threaten us with a new version of blasphemy laws.’ (As it happens, the then prime minister’s bill was later watered down by the House of Lords.)

Had Lee taken a different approach, I might have applauded his bravery, Instead, I emerged feeling contempt for him.

It was not because he had insulted Jesus, although I know many people who would have found the story unutterably obscene. It was because he didn’t have the courage to insult the Prophet Mohammed.

Now before anyone starts threatening me, this is not to say that I wanted to hear such insults or that I would ever be inclined to issue them.

But if — emphasis on if — Lee was going to use the device of heaping abuse on religious leaders as a way of defending the freedom to criticise religion, then the only honourable course was to insult the religion that poses the biggest threat to such freedoms.

It had been plain for almost 20 years before Lee’s Belfast show that this was Islam.

In 1988, Martin Scorsese’s film the Last Temptation of Christ showed Jesus being tempted by sexual thoughts, sparking Christian fury. But the response was not even remotely as menacing as the terrifying Islamic reaction to Salman Rushdie’s book of the same year, Satanic Verses, which was disrespectful towards Mohammed.

That a state, Iran, should have placed a bounty on a foreign writer on the grounds of blasphemy was an unpardonable international crime.

The British government’s response was in one respect excellent: no expense was spared protecting Rushdie.

But, overall, it was weak. Iran got away with it.

Notice was served on the decadent West the day that the Ayatollah issued the fatwa.

After this came the lunacy of the Taliban in the mid 1990s, the Bin Laden bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and then September 11 2001.

And yet, after all that, after the 2004 Madrid bombs massacred almost 200 civilians and after the 2005 London blasts slaughtered 52 civilians, who was the target of Lee’s satire? Jesus.

You might say that Christianity is guilty of immense crimes down the centuries, including the Crusades, and is richly deserving of being mocked. OK. Then why did Lee not bring Mohammed into his sketch and mock both?

I believe the answer is simple. If he had toured with such content, he would have been murdered long ago.

Lee is only one in a multitude of fools to have missed the target. Weeks after that Belfast performance, the Danish cartoons that insulted Mohammed led to fresh violence. I felt then that every UK publication should have re-printed them in solidarity, regardless of their artistic merit. It would have been hard for the extremists to attack each media outlet.

The cartoons saga was fresh evidence of the threat that Islamic fanatics pose to fundamental freedoms of speech, honed in countries such as Britain, France and America over centuries, and in newspapers such as this one (founded 1737, at the outset of the Enlightenment).

But what was actually said about the cartoons? The Irish President Mary McAleese condemned their publication, as did Jack Straw. The normally sensible Shirley Williams later condemned the knighthood given to Rushdie, because he had insulted Muslims.

None of what I write is to deny that most of the Muslim world is deeply civilised and moderate. I have received hospitality in countries that I have adored from Turkey to Kosovo to Tunisia to Mali (the latter now struggling with fanatics). I was even treated for malaria in an Iranian clinic in Bamako.

My point is that there are pockets of deranged extremists that are an existential threat to ordered, liberal societies. There is no equivalent Christian threat.

Evangelical Christianity is flourishing in many parts of the world such as central America, and it remains powerful here, but in the West it has dwindled markedly in the last 50 years. They are mostly not fundamentalists, who in Christianity now have minimal potency — and in any event are not planting bombs.

Our failure to say this loudly, to denounce the greater threat after episodes such as the Rushdie affair or Danish cartoons, was the precursor to yesterday’s massacre.

• Ben Lowry is News Letter deputy editor. This is his personal view

KEEP SCROLLING DOWN. ANOTHER ARTICLE ON ISLAMIC EXTREMISM:

• Ben Lowry wrote the below article a week after the November 2015 Islamic attacks on Paris. It was published on November 19, 2015 and is pasted below because it has fallen off the website, due to technical changes over the years:

If you wrote about a transgender Mohammed, you would be killed

By Ben Lowry

After the Paris atrocities on Friday, there was a global wave of revulsion.

But something has changed since previous western attacks by Islamic extremists.

People are not as fast to parrot: Islam is a religion of peace.’

Even David Cameron is now saying that our response must be more than such platitudes.

The overwhelming bulk of the world’s Muslims are moderate and peaceful, as has been apparent to me in the many Muslim countries I have visited.

But that truth does not contradict the fact that mankind has, at this point in history, a specific problem with fanatical Islam, and we should talk bluntly about it.

Imagine that the transgender Jesus play that was just staged in Belfast, upsetting Christians, had been about a transgender Prophet Mohammed.

The author of the play, the director and the actors would now be on a death list and might already be dead. The theatre might well be bombed.

The only imponderable is whether Islamic fascists would be able to carry out such a response in a place as removed from large Muslim populations as Belfast.

The Salman Rushdie Satanic Verses saga, almost 30 years ago, told us how the fanatics view free speech, and the Danish cartoons saga and Charlie Hebdo underlined it for anyone who somehow missed the point.

If a theatre company ever did dare to stage a transgender Mohammed play, many UK Muslims would support a violent response to it.

The BBC in February commissioned a poll of British Muslims that found that a quarter are at best ambivalent about violence (27 per cent said they had some sympathy with the motives behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre and 24 per cent disagreed with the statement that violence against those who insult the Prophet Mohammed cannot be justified).

These were shocking findings weeks after a massacre at a satirical magazine.

But it was not so surprising when you think that hundreds of UK Muslims are fighting Jihad overseas.

The BBC is a fine organisation and not as biased as some people say, but Radio Four badly missed the point when it reported that survey by emphasising other less controversial findings, then mentioning almost as an afterthought the 24 per cent stat.

Islamic extremism has been high on my radar since I worked on The Times website monitoring news wires in the late 1990s and I read about Taliban brutality.

A key moment for me was a report about two young men — barely older than boys — accused of homosexuality. No doubt hoping for mercy, they confessed but were made to stand before a wall that was bulldozed on top of them.

Imagine the terror those kids felt as wizened savages passed the judgment and read the penalty, before some swines carried it out. If it had been me about to suffer that fate, I doubt I would have had the courage and dignity to stand upright in front of a wall that was soon to come crashing down on top of me.

Apparently there is an Islamic justification for such a disgusting penalty for sodomy.

The thugs who do this sort of thing are backed by Dr Raeid Al-Wazzan, a Belfast Muslim, although he hasn’t made his position clear on whether he supports such grisly details.

I was on Talkback with him on Monday and did ask if he supported people being thrown off buildings (another sick penalty for which there is some religious justification).

The programme was drawing to a close and a few of us were talking on top of each other in the last seconds so I do not know his answer. He seemed unable to say in response to my preceding question that he opposed Sharia law in the UK.

Dr Al-Wazzan did this year defend Isis rule in Mosul. Much has been made of the fact that he praised the peace in the city, not Isis barbarians, and he later apologised.

But imagine that a journalist wrote about how peaceful life had been in Warsaw during World War Two under the Nazis.