Andrew Klavan, Sam Harris and I agree: a contagion of moral cowardice

I cannot express better than Andrew Klavan the sentiments of resistance to Islamic insanity: “How to behave during an Islamic massacre”.

I have no doubt that some things are blasphemous, even if, as Sam Harris insists, the objects of concern are imaginary. Obviously, our conceptions of the Deity are imaginary, or our images of the Divine are conceptual. That is beside my point. I do not wish to encourage deliberate outrages to anyone’s idea of the Deity. Inadvertent outrages will happen daily, whether we wish them or not, as long as we have religious pluralism. That, too, is beside my point.

The issue raised by Muslim outrage always concerns their attempt to impose Islamic conceptions of blasphemy on us, and the intrusion of our blasphamous, irreligious ideas on them.

A hundred years ago they were in some other part of the world. The closest Muslims to London were in Bosnia. Now Muslims are in London, Toronto, Sydney and Moscow, invited there by immigration policies, devised and imposed by leftist and capitalist elites alike, without regard for their future adaptibility to secular societies. Why are they here? The immigration of Muslims to secular free societies based in Christianity confronts us with insoluble problems.

For once there is no difference between cultural conservatives like Klavan and me, and cultural liberals like Sam Harris. I will let Harris speak for us:

The contagion of moral cowardice followed its usual course, wherein liberal journalists and pundits began to reconsider our most basic freedoms in light of the sadomasochistic fury known as “religious sensitivity” among Muslims. Contributors to The New York Times and NPR spoke of the need to find a balance between free speech and freedom of religion—as though the latter could possibly be infringed by a YouTube video. As predictable as Muslim bullying has become, the moral confusion of secular liberals appears to be part of the same clockwork.

Consider what is actually happening: Some percentage of the world’s Muslims—Five percent? Fifteen? Fifty? It’s not yet clear—is demanding that all non-Muslims conform to the strictures of Islamic law. And where they do not immediately resort to violence in their protests, they threaten it. Carrying a sign that reads “Behead Those Who Insult the Prophet” may still count as an example of peaceful protest, but it is also an assurance that infidel blood would be shed if the imbecile holding the placard only had more power. This grotesque promise is, of course, fulfilled in nearly every Muslim society. To make a film like “Innocence of Muslims” anywhere in the Middle East would be as sure a method of suicide as the laws of physics allow.

What exactly was in the film? Who made it? What were their motives? Was Muhammad really depicted? Was that a Qur’an burning, or some other book? Questions of this kind are obscene. Here is where the line must be drawn and defended without apology: We are free to burn the Qur’an or any other book, and to criticize Muhammad or any other human being. Let no one forget it.

 As Klavan points out, in considering Obama’s America:

When I see, in the United States of America, a man rousted from his home at midnight and dragged to a police station over a YouTube video, when I see brutal, primitive, violent Islamism on the march and the values of free men and women in retreat, when I see so-called journalists doing everything they can to suppress, deny, and explain away rather than spread the news, my first reaction isn’t outrage at our foolish failure of a president, nor is it hatred for the cancerous religion currently doing murder to people of every competing belief system everywhere around the world. My first reaction is genuine sadness over the many, many Democrats of good will who are going to betray every value they profess to hold dear and double down on their error this election day because they simply can’t bear to acknowledge the fact that they were wrong.