Blasphemy as a National Security Threat

Islam is submission. If you submit to Islam, then you’re a Muslim. If you submit to a Muslim, then you’re a slave. The western blasphemy trial is not the enforced submission of an Islamic legal system that would be crude and brutal, but at least comparatively respectable, it is the enforced submission to Muslim violence. The judges who preside over our blasphemy cases do not believe in Islam, they believe in the danger of Muslim violence. This is not theocracy, it is slavery. For the moment blasphemy prosecutions still involve trying offenders on some charge other than the obvious one. Low-hanging fruit like Imran Firasat or Mark Youssef are the easiest to deal with. Any man whose freedom depends on the whim of a judge can already be locked up or deported any time without the need for actual charges of heresy to be brought. When that isn’t possible, there is always the ubiquitous hate crime which increasingly extends to anything that offends anyone regardless of consequences or intent.These trials are a contradiction, 21st Century legal codes built on sensitivity and tolerance being used to prosecute deviations from a medieval code of insensitivity and intolerance. But that very same contradiction runs through the modern state’s entire approach to Islam. It is impossible to embrace medievalism without becoming medieval. The need to accommodate Islamic medievalism is forcing the medievalization of the modern world’s political and legal systems.The conflict between the modern world and the Muslim world is being waged by the modern rules of international law and peacemaking on one side and by the medieval rules of brutal violence, insincere offers of peace and bigoted fanaticism on the other. Rather than fighting it on its own terms, the modern world is instead trying to accommodate it on its own terms by accommodating its blasphemy codes.

Trapped in a long-term war, our leaders are looking for ways of making the conflict more manageable. If they can’t win the war, they can at least limit the number of attacks. It’s not the open book kind of appeasement, but the double book kind. The open book is still patriotic, but the second book in the bottom drawer is running payments to the terrorists and finding ways to accommodate them. And anyone who runs afoul of the second book, also runs afoul of national security.

War often compromises freedoms, but it rarely compromises the freedom to hurt the enemy’s feelings. But this is a different sort of war. A war with no enemies and no hope of victory. A war whose only hope is that one day our enemies will become better people and stop trying to kill us. Our enemies are fighting to take away our freedoms and we are fighting to take away our own freedoms in the hopes that if we give up some of them to the enemy, he will settle for them and give up on the rest.

In this sort of war, blasphemy is a serious national security threat, not because it truly is, but because our leaders desperately need their Stockholm control points of appeasement, they need to believe that if they crack down on Koran burnings then they can reduce the fighting by 5 percent or 8 percent and that gives them hope that they can one day reduce it by 100 percent.

The actual numbers don’t matter. On the month after Bubba the Love Sponge did not burn the Koran, 50 percent more Americans died in Afghanistan, but the statisticians can always argue that if he had burned it, then 75 percent more or 100 percent more would have died. Islam runs on magical thinking and any effort to appease it must also embrace that same medieval magical thinking. Hoping that blasphemy prosecutions will reduce violence, is psychologically less of a strain than accepting that nothing will, that there is no magic bullet, only regular bullets.