A long-standing issue I’ve been wanting to address, when the time is right, when the atmosphere is less feversish, but that time never comes. Now of course it’s a mainstream media topic again, whilst Israel and Iran are also lobbing ordnance at each other, so here goes a first draft, a placeholder. Many parts of this topic have already featured here, but I’ve not pulled together the whole before.
First place to start is from the rights and freedoms end, and secondly to recognise a consistent approach to all religious and secular cultures. Why we call it phobia when it’s Islam and antisemitism when it’s Judaism is historical circumstance, and making this about a choice of words and their definitions isn’t going to cut it. I say that because the party line now is to drop the term Islamophobia and replace it with anti-Muslim-hatred. At least it highlights that hatred is distinct from critique, and it does quite rightly talk of free-speech (but wrongly, not limiting it). [Zionism and Palestinians?]
The UN enshrines the freedom of expression, thought and belief including but not only religious belief or none at the highest level. But freedom of expression is not itself unlimited, whether the topic is religion or otherwise, something I’ve written about many times and captured in my [Rules of Engagement?]. Freedom runs on rails. Having the right to express anything doesn’t mean it is right or appropriate to do so, anywhere, anytime [Flag-shaggers?]. There are rules of civilised discourse involving respect for fellow humans and good faith in the expressed motivation, the why? [Hate Speech?].
Speaking from the position of a free democracy, as opposed to a theocracy, this is about secular humanism, about equalities of rights and freedoms independent of the ideologies of those religions or indeed any “isms” held by individuals and their self-identified religious and/or ethnic cultures. The topic of the diversity of cultures within the given society is front and centre. Multiple cultures without the “ism”. [Kenan Malik?]
The nexus of this collection of knotty issues is in the freedom of expression beyond language and media. The freedom to express religious identity in cultural practice. Freedom of belief and thought – linguistic and cultural – is greatest in private between good-faith consenting adults. It is most limited in public secular contexts, except in public “holy-day” situations in an otherwise secular society. [Misogyny] [Identity Politics]
In a nutshell: The primary culture and values & laws of the host secular free democratic society sets limits on freedoms of behaviour of any religious or other sub-cultures within it. We need a society that tolerates – welcomes – multiple religious sub-cultures, but not multiculturalism as the culture. Public displays of our sub-cultures need to be discreet and limited. Jews and Muslims in particular flout this limitation in public presentation and behaviour. As a secular humanist the public displays and demands of your religious culture can offend my secularism. A sub-culture cannot adopt a public identity based solely on that religious (or otherwise) sub-culture – othering themselves explicitly from everyone else, the majority in the host culture – without there being a sense of othering seen the other way? The problem is the othering, leading to blamin g others, in the sense that once there are any legitimate grievances of any unrelated kind within a society, the others become convenient targets of blame even when illegitimate in any causal sense. The problem starts with the othering.
[Which sounds a bit like Deutsch’s pattern, the impulse to legitimise the othering, which itself can become the immoral justification in action. My focus is on Judaism and Islam in secular cultural-Christian societies, but not say Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, which may share some of the “public identity” aspect, but not the sibling rivalry over the same “one God” as the Abrahamic monotheisms. With these, the abstract othering impulse can bump up against more concrete morally doctrinal distinctions too, even in a secular society?]
Hate Speech, Zionism and Palestine are holding topics above – the former very much part of the general rules of free speech (elsewhere) and the latter two covered extensively (elsewhere) as “the middle-east problem”. The Hate Speech aspect is also relevant to messages associated with otherwise legitimate protests. In this space in recent years there have been a whole series of pro/anti-Palestinian vs pro-anti-Zionism with a side order of antisemitism, thanks to the ever increasing complexity of the “middle-east problem” especially since the US switched roles from global-NATO-policeman to court-jester, and worse, a very poorly motivated court-jester at that. There are messages in otherwise legitimate protests or demonstrations on behalf of deserving groups – Oct7 victims and Gaza victims say – that are themselves illegitimate. Hate Speech IS illegal for good reason, not least since it feeds the impulse to legitimise “hurting” the hate target(s) [Deutsch]. The mixture of legal demonstration and illegal messaging is a very tough knot to police. Morality rules, and pragmatism applies.
[Coda – obviously “the” culture of a host society evolves over time and can adopt values and practices of sub-cultures it is exposed to, but only on free, secular, democratic terms. Sub-cultural practices cannot be allowed to undermine the free-democratic apparatus of the secular host, the tyranny of a minority.]
Will be updated and expanded [placeholders], but feedback welcome any time. The complexity of the Middle-East / Zionism tangle with Islamism and antisemitism (and more), isn’t getting “fixed” without good-faith efforts aimed at exactly that complexity. Constant binary simplifications only stoke and extend the problem(s).
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“It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.” — Robert Heinlein
TOL – The thing we identify with should be something of arbitrary pragmatic value to living and running everyday life as part of humanity as a whole – like a nation state, with delegated power to deal with fellow nation states? Strong divisions lightly held? Dichotomies are unavoidable in any ontological model, the deepest internal / personal / fundamental distinctions should NOT be the ones used to organise human life. Organisational distinctions become divisions / divisive.
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No disagreement here. My only addition is that I dislike the labelling of principled positions as ‘phobias’ per se. Much as I dislike the trend to pathologise increasingly minor differences of personalities with diagnostic labels, so too with differences of opinion. The difference being that the former potentially overextends the reach of medicine, the latter that of law.
Yes, thanks Mark for the like too.
“Identity” politics is indeed part of the problem with labels and people identifying with them (themselves or others). I mention identity but ddidn’t flag it as a placeholder for elaboration – thanks.
Phobia was always the weaker term – quite deliberately so from the political tolerance perspective.