“An Ignored Manifesto” – Excerpts

Diana West, the widely read Washington Post columnist wrote this essay early last year but it continues to be relevant, current and highly readable…. Excerpts:

“Last month, 12 mainly European-based, mainly Muslim or ex-Muslim intellectuals, alarmed by the spell on free speech cast by Cartoon Rage 2006, signed onto an anti-totalitarian manifesto for freedom of expression published by Denmark’s Jylland-Posten.

“After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new totalitarian global threat: Islamism,” the manifesto began. “We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.”

Among the dozen signatories were Somali-born Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ugandan-born Canadian writer Irshad Manji, Indian-born British writer Salman Rushdie, and Pakistani-born writer Ibn Warraq. Rounding out the list were a few French writers, a Bangledeshi, a Lebanese and several Iranians.

What is striking is that…the manifesto was printed, “not in the New York Times, Le Monde or the Times of London, but of all places, in a provincial Danish newspaper of no particular fame.”

All of which should shove a big, fat question mark onto the “world” stage to ask where these brave signatories’ writerly, journalistic and intellectual brethren are on this one, not to mention Big Media coverage.  After all, the world didn’t overcome fascism, Nazism and communism with the silent treatment, restrained rhetoric, or exquisite editorial discretion.

But beyond the blogosphere, coverage of the manifesto — not the last word on the subject, but certainly a start — has been sparse, just as though freedom of speech weren’t in peril. And just as though the signatories, for affirming freedom of speech, weren’t either.

But they are. A crude death threat has been posted at the British Muslim Web site, ummah.com — the kind of Web site where, as Time magazine reported after the London Underground bombings last year, a poem said to have been posted by Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi
glorified terror-bombings in Iraq, and another user wrote that “killing Americans is not murder, it is retaliation.”

…I asked Mr. Warraq, author of the superb “Why I Am Not a Muslim” written after the Salman Rushdie affair, about the threat. “We must take it seriously in one sense, but we mustn’t let it stop us in our tracks,” he said. He’s right, of course; although most of the “world” writers, journalists, intellectuals — have already been stopped in their tracks, intimidated, paralyzed, almost disfunctionally so.

…So here we are, living in a world where a manifesto for free speech constitutes “[sticking] their necks out,” draws death threats on the one hand, and silence on the other. ”

The article concludes by this nice quote attributed to John Stuart Mill: “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by exertions of better
men than himself.”