Muslim anguish and Western hypocrisy
By Spengler

Muslims who have made their life in Western countries while adhering to Islam face a frightful dilemma. After the November 2 murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh (The assassin's master sermon, Nov 16), European authorities have demanded that resident Muslims repudiate violence. Many mainstream Muslim leaders, though, cannot bring themselves to denounce the murderer of van Gogh, whose film Submission showed Koranic verses superimposed on the naked skin of Muslim women.

Smugness oozes from European politicians who demand that Muslims repudiate violence as a precondition for residence in the West. To repudiate the death sentence for blasphemy would be the same as abandoning the Islamic order in traditional society in favor of a Western-style religion of personal conscience. The West spent centuries of time and rivers of blood to make such a transition, and carried it off badly. Whether Islam can do so at all remains doubtful.

As a matter of record, most European Muslim organizations declined to disavow the murder of van Gogh. During a November 19 radio interview, for example, Zahid Mukhtar, head of the Islamic Council of Norway, refused to condemn van Gogh's murder, creating a scandal out of proportion to Norway's small Muslim population. A Moroccan-born member of the Belgian Senate, Mimount Bousakla, received death threats after remonstrating with the umbrella organization of Belgian Muslims for its refusal to denounce the van Gogh murder. She since has gone into hiding.

In Germany, most of the country's Muslim groups refused to take part in this past Sunday's Muslim demonstration in Cologne against terrorism and violence. In fact, the Turkish government organized the 20,000-person demonstration without support from local Muslim organizations. Its sole sponsor was DITIB, the Turkish government's Muslim association headed by an appointee from Ankara. DITIB "already had tried in vain to organize a common declaration by all German Muslims against Islamist terrorism", noted Der Spiegel Online on November 19.

Muslim refusal to tolerate blasphemy has nothing to do with rage or recalcitrance. It is a theological necessity. Executions for blasphemy would attract no attention in Iran or Saudi Arabia. The trouble is that the population of Islamic countries has spilled over en masse into the West. Imams in Europe cannot pronounce differently on such matters than they would in their home countries, and blasphemy cannot be tolerated by traditional society.

"As for heretics, their sin deserves banishment, not only ... by excommunication, but also from this world by death. To corrupt the faith, whereby the soul lives, is much graver than to counterfeit money, which supports temporal life. Since forgers and other malefactors are summarily condemned to death by the civil authorities, with much more reason may heretics as soon as they are convicted of heresy be not only excommunicated, but also justly be put to death." Those are the words of the 13th-century Catholic authority St Thomas Aquinas, the most influential of all Catholic thinkers, presented by Catholic writers from Lord Acton to Jacques Maritain as the antecedent of European democracy.

An apologist for St Thomas, Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute, excused the hard line against heresy on the grounds that tough times required it:

Thirteenth-century societies were highly fragile. Beyond ties of kinship, many citizens experienced little to bind them to others. Most were subjects of a few - and one ruling aristocrat was often overturned by another ... geographical isolation was often intense, and shifting patterns of warfare, baronial allegiance, and foreign occupation awakened acute local insecurity. Under political anarchy, the common people and the poor suffered much. Under all these uncertainties, the chief consensual bond among people was Catholic faith and Catholic ritual. Virtually all unifying conceptions of relationship and social weight, meaning and order, came from that faith. [1]

What is the proper relation of Christian faith to the open society? A relation that entails the persecution of heretics is clearly repugnant to Christian faith. The special circumstances of the 13th century remain a vivid case study in what not to do. But if the profession of Christian faith is not to be constitutionally required, as certainly it should not be, just how can Christian faith escape from being merely privatized and relativized? And how can open societies themselves be saved from giving a posthumous victory to such relativists as Hitler and Mussolini, who began by stating that nothing in politics is right or wrong, that only power matters?

Divine providence extends to all things. Yet a special rule applies where intelligent creatures are involved. For they excel all others in the perfection of their nature and the dignity of their end; they are masters of their activity and act freely, while others are more acted on than acting. They react to their destiny by their own proper activity, that is by knowing and loving God, whereas other creatures show only some traces of this likeness ... To begin with, rational creatures are governed for their own benefit, whereas other creatures are governed for the sake of men. Men are principals, not merely instruments. [3]