June 25, 2005

West: Twisted 'tolerance'

Diana West gives us some more clear thinking, comparing Douglas Wood with Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot in the Washington Times:

The cases of the kidnapped engineer and the "guilty" pastors are not really parallel. The Victoria state court is not a murderous gang of jihadis. But there's something similarly outrageous about the coercion brought to be bear on these men -- coercion at gunpoint in Iraq, or on pain of prison time in Australia -- to revoke the precious and essential Western liberty to speak freely.

Such liberty is what compelled both pastors to flee their native Pakistan, where "blasphemy" against Islam can be a capital offense. And there's another connection: The Islamic doctrine of jihad that inspires the terrorists in Iraq is precisely what lies at the core of the Australian pastors' lectures and teachings, which are based directly on verses of the Koran and other Islamic texts.

What is car-wreck fascinating here is Judge Michael Higgins' conclusion that simply pointing out what the Koran says now constitutes outlawed speech in Victoria. During court proceedings, when Mr. Scot began to read verses from the Koran that denigrate women, a lawyer for the Islamic Council of Victoria, the plaintiff, cut him off, explaining that reading such verses aloud is itself an act of vilification. "How," wondered Mr. Scot, can it be vilifying to Muslims in the room when I am just reading from the Koran?"

How, indeed. As Robert Spencer has pointed out, at another point in the trial, the Australian judge was affronted that Mr. Scot had said that "the Koran promotes violence, killing and looting." Mr. Spencer writes: "In light of Koranic passages such as 9:5, 2:191, 9:29, 47:4, 5:33 and many others, this cannot seriously be a matter of dispute. Muslims have pointed to verses in the Bible that they would have us believe are equivalent in violence and offensiveness, or have claimed that the great majority of Muslims don't take such verses literally; but it takes a peculiarly strong resistance to reality not only to deny that such verses are there, but to charge one who pointed them out with religious vilification."

Mr. Nalliah, who plans to visit Great Britain to campaign against a similar vilification law now under consideration in Parliament, calls Victoria's shockingly totalitarian statute "sharia law by stealth." And so it is. In outlawing criticism of Islam -- which, so far, is the effect of the law -- Victoria has not only codified a peculiarly strong resistance to reality, but it has also adopted the practice of sharia-ruled states. This makes for a startling spectacle of free people placing a muzzle on speech, a limit on faith and a damper on inquiry.

Douglas Wood lost his freedom at gunpoint; Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot lost theirs by court-ordered political correctness. We know who rescued Mr. Wood; who will save the pastors?