As many as 500+ people are dead in Nigeria after Muslim extremists began rioting over what seems like a rather inocuous comment in a story by a Nigerian journalist — that if Mohamed were alive today, he would probably take one of the contestants as a wife rather than protest it being held.
There are two important lessons from the rioting: a) placating religious extremism does not work, and b) nonetheless, there is no length to which some Western liberal-leftists will go to placate religious extremism.
Placating religious extremism does not work.
One of the issues being debated is who is responsible for the riots. The answer is simple — the blame rests with Nigerian President Obsanjano.
Obsanjano has tried to have his cake and eat it to. When talking to Western reporters he constantly says that he will not allow human rights outrages — such as the death by stoning sentences for adultery — to be carried out. But at the same time, Obsanjano has refrained from actually doing anything about the death sentences and other outrages because he doesn’t want to alienate Muslim voters ahead of planned 2003 elections.
This is why, for example, Obsanjano says that the death sentences will not stand, but he has not intervened at all to stop public floggings and other equally inhumane punishments imposed by states. It is also why Obsanjano has backpedaled into blaming the Nigerian media for the riots rather than confronting the problem of Islamic extremism.
In the West, we hear this constant refrain from some corners that we need to understand and accomodate religious extremism. The same people who are apoplectic (and rightfully so) when an Alabama judge displays the Ten Commandments in his court room turn around and insist that we need to identify with and accomodate theocratic Middle Eastern states. Thanks, but no thanks.
Some Western liberal-leftists will go any lengths to placate religious extremism.
In a Salon.Com piece, Andrew Sullivan does an excellent job of chronicling UK objections to moving the Miss World contest there. Much of it runs along the lines of this bizarre quote from London mayor Ken Livingstone,
After the violence and terrible loss of life in Nigeria, the staging of a Miss World event in this city is not welcome. It defies belief that after Miss World has brought tragedy and strife to Africa its organisers should think it appropriate to carry on with the razzamataz as if nothing had happened.
On this side of the Atlantic we call that blaming the victim. It defies belief that Livingstone thinks that the Miss World pageant is responsible for religious nut cases run amok.
Feminists also jumped on the blame-Miss-World bandwagon on both sides of the Atlantic with Jill Nelson outlining the oppression inherent in Miss World, “As far as I’m concerned it’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burkas in order to survive.” Muriel Gray added, “These girls will be wearing swimwear dripping with blood.”
Sullivan aptly sums up this bizarre situation,
Now imagine a scenario in which, say, the play “Corpus Christi” was produced in New York (as it was). The play was highly offensive to some fundamentalists because it depicted Jesus as gay. What if a mob of enraged Christians, after a holy sermon at a neighboring church, had decided to torch the office of the New York Times because they ran a favorable review, or to burn down the theater? What if they killed hundreds of innocent bystanders in their rage? What if they issued a call to all faithful Christians to kill playwright Terence McNally for his blasphemy? Do you think the rampage would be described as “atheist-Christian riots”? Do you think leftists would call on the playwright to be more sensitive in future? Would the mayor of New York blame the theater? Yet when it comes to a far, far deadlier menace to our freedoms than fundamentalist Christianity, much of the left is silent or, worse, making excuses for this Islamist threat.
Sullivan blames P.C. moral relativism, but a bigger problem is that liberal-left and feminist ideologies tend to romanticize and place non-Western “oppressed” peoples on a higher moral plane. Much of the post-9/11 analysis on the far Left, for example, implicitly accepts the view that Western democracies are sites of extreme decadence and corruption as compared to the more “authentic” lives of people barely surviving in the Third World.
Sometimes this occurs as admiration, such as when Leftists admire Cuba for its lack of commercial billboards, and sometimes it is condescending, such as the Chomsky-ite thesis that poor people have no choice but to turn to terrorism.