More on Danish cartoons

Further to my last blog, a few points.
I am going to publish below the most offensive of the Danish cartoons. I am not doing this to offend Muslims, though I know most Muslims will be offended; and knowing that they will be offended, I can’t do that slimy two-faced thing of turning round afterwards and saying in a surprised way, “Oh, I’m sorry if [my racist, sexist [whatever]] carelessness gave any unintended offence”.
So I know doing this will give offence. But I’m doing it anyway, because I think it’s important for two huge groups who are in conflict. On the one side are the religious, a complete spectrum of the religious from philosophical liberals who may not believe in a god at all, to pre-modern fundamentalists like George Bush and Osama bin Laden. And on the other side are post-Enlightenment modernists, who do not believe in any god, or in soul, or in life after death.
There are two broad ways of dealing with conflict. One is to say “I am right and you are wrong,” with the option “and therefore I am going to hurt you or kill you or at least if you yourself are too powerful or too well defended then I’m going to kill someone, I’m not too bothered who.” This is what you might call the bipolar approach. It is the approach of Bush and Blair and bin Laden.
The second is where we say, what we are at odds over is not you and it's not me, it is a third thing out there in the world, so let's get together and let’s look at what it is out there, explore it, and see if, though we may not in the end agree, we can find each other’s opinions and beliefs not so terribly threatening that we can’t live in peace together.
The first way, “I’m right and you are wrong and I’m going to kill you,” is the way of conflicting monotheisms, and particularly the three which stem from the patriarch Abraham, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. You can debate whether monotheism is a root cause of human violence. What is not so debatable is that in the pre-modern epoch, that time when a majority of the followers of the various religions “of the Book” believed that they and only they were in possession of the literal and only and necessary truth, there were far higher concentrations of monotheists at the scenes of most mass slaughter (Mongols excluded, though the Moghuls were Mongols) than could be accounted for by chance.
The second way, “Let’s look at this together and when we’ve got as close as we can, agree to differ,” is the way of the post-Elightenment; what there is is all there is, and that doesn’t include god or afterlife, so we’d better make the best of what there is.
This is the conflict. And I am one side of it. I think your belief in God, any god, distorts your view of how things actually are, in ways damaging to the dignity of all humanity. When you say that because I hold this view you will "butcher" me, or others, I feel deeply offended. But if you say you find my view offensive, or ridiculous, or pathetic, or perverse, laughable, obscene, then I am not offended. These are mere insults. They do not demean me for who I am, as a racist or misogynist [if I was a woman] or homophobic [if I were a homosexual] slur would demean me for who I am. They merely express your opinion of my opinion, and my opinion is not you or me. It is a third thing, out there in the world. Like this cartoon of some guy with a bomb in his turban. Which I am going to examine with you, if you will go along with me. And I am going to examine it for this reason. That if we don’t, things will only get worse, both for your lot, the committed devout of Islam; because if you pursue these fantasies, things can only get worse for you, and you are rejecting allies against your real enemies, the plutocrats of Riyadh and Washington, Jakarta, Cairo, London. And things can only get worse for my lot, because you make things easier for the extreme Right, the racists, much easier, for the thugs and fascist demagogues who say, “Get them all out of here.” And third, worse for us who care, who have Muslim friends, not close friends but well regarded and well-liked, and do not want to be driven apart.
So, there is you and there is me, and there is a thing out in the world, this drawing of a bearded man with a bomb instead of a turban. There is no caption, but there is writing on the bomb in a script which I think is Arabic, which I do not understand. The man looks to me as I imagine a fearsome Russian general out of a novel might look.
But suppose the writing on the bomb suggests that the man is Mohammed, then, two things. First, you forbid me to represent your prophet in any way. But I do not accept your proscription, your censorship, and if you threaten to kill me because I do not accept it, then you entirely lose my respect and support. But, I can understand that this representation of a great man called Mohammed is a totally false representation of a religion which, though I totally disagree with some of it tenets, central of which is the existence of God, has produced some of the greatest works of mankind - I know of no buildings more moving than the Taj Mahal and the Great Mosque at Córdoba. If this writing on the bomb tries to say that Mohammed preached the doctrine of suicide bombing, then that is a travesty, both of his teaching, and of the fact that the notion of suicide bombing can never have crossed his mind. And I think having agreed that it is a travesty, we can leave it at that. Nobody need kill anybody.
But, just a minute. Perhaps we should also look at what the cartoon is, clumsily, rudely, offensively, simplistically, half-wittedly maybe trying to say. Not that this image is of the actual Mohammed, but that it is what a dispassionate observer might feel is the image of Mohammed that suicide bombers might carry in their heads. Now this is something, to my mind, that can be debated. I think it is wrong as most generalisations are wrong. I think it is totally wrong if it applies to idealistic Palestinian youths of both sexes who feel such despair at their situation and the brute power of the Israeli state unconditionally backed by the greatest military power in the world, itself in the hands of a bellicose religious fundamentalist, that they see extreme self-sacrifice as the only way. Clearly these young men and women act out of idealism and despair. But... the London tube murderers, those British indiscriminate killers, as a representation of what was in their minds, and only as a representation of what was in their minds, then maybe this travesty of a cartoon hits a certain truth, or is even too kind an interpretation of their motivation. In other words, the image cannot be wholly dismissed, though its “truth” is marginal, partial, a travesty of the more comprehensive truth.
And maybe we can even accept that without having to kill each other. Because, and this is my opinion, it is you who will have to move the most. If you believe that you are the only righteous one, and that this allows you to kill, maim, torture, kidnap, then it doesn’t matter whether you are George Bush, Tony Blair, Osama bin Laden or the poorest acolyte screaming for vengeance, you are wrong. You are very wrong. So it would be better if you moved. And if you move towards modernity, you can begin to address the modern problems that really afflict you and all of us; which are not the will of Allah, because he, Like Jehovah and what the Christians call God, does not exist; poverty, starvation, the gap between rich and poor, imperialist capitalism, corruption, disease, global warming, and the rest of it; how we as the glorious and awful collective of human beings are going to set about dealing with these things.