| by Ruwantissa Abeyratne
( April 25, 2013, Montreal, Sri Lanka Guardian) While watching BBC world news this morning, I was struck by a report on clashes between Chinese non-Muslims and Muslims in Western China which had resulted in several fatalities. A few days ago there was a report on carnage in Myanmar, where Buddhists are slaughtering Muslims on an ongoing basis. A few days ago, the Daily News reported a clash between Sinhalese (presumably Buddhists) and Hindus during a village event celebrating the Sinhala and Tamil New Year. Earlier a Muslim shop was reported to have been destroyed in a Colombo suburb by Sinhalese Buddhist mobs.
Religious clashes seem to be the order of the day. They are however, not a new phenomenon. Religious conflict in which the Jews as a religious group were involved goes back more than 3,000 years, and is historically documented in the Jewish and Christian Old Testaments, among other records.
Back to modern times, Lana Obradovic, a student from Bosnia Herzegovina who lost many relatives in the religious conflict there during the 1990s said: “"The war changed everything in my life and I was one of thousands forced to leave during the ethnic cleansing in my city. But they did not manage to change me. I have NOT learned to hate my neighbors and I never will."
Another contemporary quote goes on to say "Intolerance breeds injustice. Injustice invariably leads to rebellion and retaliation, and these will lead to escalation on the part of both making reconciliation almost impossible. It would appear that during times of stress, despair and frustration, people become increasingly irrational, and they do things which they never think they are capable of. And so we see hideous brutality perpetrated by the most gentle people."
Datuk Seri Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, addressing the World Evangelical Fellowship on 4 May 2001 said: "Once started religious strife has a tendency to go on and on, to become permanent feuds. Today we see such intractable inter-religious wars in Northern Ireland, between Jews and Muslims and Christians in Palestine, Hindus and Muslims in South Asia and in many other places. Attempts to bring about peace have failed again and again. Always the extremist elements invoking past injustices, imagined or real, will succeed in torpedoing the peace efforts and bringing about another bout of hostility."
Inasmuch as there would be no peace if normalcy in daily human intercourse were not restored, it is incontrovertible that there will be no lasting peace if the attendant hatred that goes into human conflict is not eradicated and obviated. In this context, the classic meaning of the word “obviate” (which is to make unnecessary) is intended. Inherent in any process of racial, national or religious hatred is a certain intellectual abdication of the values instilled in a society, through a democratic process, encompassing legal, philosophical and epistemological principles. Also endemic to hatred from a religious perspective, is the preeminent role played by hate speech. It is therefore imperative that a peaceful society brings to bear an irrevocable resurgence calculated to apprehend this social phenomenon both in its individual and collective incarnations. Above all, the issue must as of necessity be addressed with an openness to unforeseen questions which may divide nationalities, religions and races and estrange them from their foundational bases.
Truth and justice are unhappily mutually exclusive. While in legal terms, legislative parameters will define acts and qualitize their reprehensibility, in truth, speech and conduct that ingratiate themselves to a society have to be addressed politically. This is the dilemma that legislators will face in dealing with religious hatred. Hate speech and hate propaganda primarily erode ethical boundaries and convey an unequivocal message of bigotry, contempt and degradation. The operative question then becomes ethical, as to whether societal mores would abnegate their vigil and tolerate some members of society inciting their fellow citizens to degrade, demean and cause indignity to other members of the very same society, with the ultimate aim of harming them? Conversely, is there any obligation on a society to actively protect all its members from indignity and physical harm caused by hatred? The answer to both these questions lies in the fundamental issue of restrictions on religious and racist speech, and the indignity that one would suffer in living in a society that might tolerate such speech. Obviously, a society committed to protecting principles of social and political equality cannot look by and passively endorse such atrocities, and much would depend on the efficacy of a State’s coercive mechanisms. These mechanisms must not only be punitive, but should also be sufficiently compelling to ensure that members of a society not only respect a particular law but also internalize the effects of their proscribed acts.
The intrinsic value to a society and perhaps to the whole world, of eschewing hatred is portrayed in the aftermath of the Holocaust - the defining event of this century. Human rights in our lifetime cannot be comprehended without touching our own conceptual proximity to this and other recent events which marred the dignity of human civilization. The result of the Holocaust was the adoption by the United Nations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which has now stood its ground over the past 50 plus years. The Universal Declaration, which has flourished both internationally and nationally, has been supplemented by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted in 1966. Both the Universal Declaration and the International Covenant have committees established to oversee their implementation. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is composed of 30 articles which asserts a human being’s just rights to civilized and dignified living. However, these articles and rights resonate just two words “never again” in their message.
Irrespective of what the community of nations could do to settle a domestic dispute in a State, there is one thing that the State concerned could do as a long term measure and that is to educate generations of its citizens on the ideals of the United Nations and the need to eschew all forms of hatred. The educational curricula in the school system should pay particular attention to the scourge of war referred to in the UN Charter and educate the youth of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It is real, in depth education and sensitizing that is needed and not just lip service to a passing concept.
It is the statesman’s job to change the people so that they would convert from hatred to love, from greed to giving, from selfishness to selflessness, from apathy to action, from jealousy to joy over someone's accomplishments, from intolerance to acceptance, from being destructive to being constructive, from fighting to peace, from killing to protecting life, from censorship to freedom, from ignorance to education, and from fearing our differences to rejoicing our variety.
A landmark case in the United States was the 1981 decision of Widmar v. Vincent where the Supreme Court held that freedom of speech forbade government from prohibiting, punishing, or penalizing speech based on its content. The court was of the view that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment thus effectively precluded government from excluding religious speakers and groups from forums for expression—or from any other benefit—on account of the religious content of their expression or the religious nature of their views or association. Furthermore, the Court went on to hold that the First Amendment did not enable the State or authorize it to practice discriminatory exclusion of private religious speakers and groups from public forums for expression, or from other public benefits.
The Widmar case was not directly in point to the subject in issue. It addressed the situation where the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), a state university, endeavored to bar a Christian student group named “Cornerstone” from using university facilities on the basis that they wished to engage in religious worship and expression. While UMKC allowed other student groups to use its facilities, the university excluded Cornerstone from doing so under a regulation forbidding the use of its buildings “for purposes of religious worship or religious teaching”.
By a vote of 8–1, the Court held that the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause protects religious speech and association by private speakers and groups, just as it protects speech by any other speakers on any other subject, and that the Establishment Clause does not authorize discriminatory exclusion of religious speech.
The Supreme Court in the Widmar case addressed only the issue of free religious speech to propagate a faith and not the issue of using free speech to vilify and denigrate a religion. In response to the public inflammation caused by the film clip President Obama made the enduring statement: “I have made it clear that the United States has a profound respect for people of all faiths. We stand for religious freedom. And we reject the denigration of any religion – including Islam”. The statement seemingly carries the message that, although legally one can invoke the constitutional right of freedom of speech, it should not be used to belittle or insult religions.
My take on this matter is that freedom of speech should not be extended to enable whoever, whether they be of the cloth or otherwise, to denigrate holy religions. The freedom should only be used to express opinions and practice investigative journalism on politics, bring forth artistic creativity and criticism, and promote intellectual discourse on all but religious faith and beliefs. I base my view on the fact that religion is a private matter, whereas politics, economics, science and art are in the public domain. This notwithstanding, no discipline, be it art or science should be used as a medium to denigrate religion, which is a personal and private issue which inevitably affects the conscience of a community, both individually and collectively. Such denigration would demean humanity and what it stands for.
Another reason for my position is the very jurisprudential nature of the First Amendment where courts have made judicial pronouncement that certain forms of speech are excluded from the right of free expression. They are obscenity; fighting words; defamation (includes libel, slander); child pornography; perjury; blackmail; incitement to imminent lawless action; true threats; and solicitations to commit crimes. The United States Supreme Court has ruled that government can indeed prohibit such speech.
Salman Rushdie concluded at an interview that religious protests against the denigration of a faith were not so much spawned by anger at the denigration of a religion but that they were the result of contrived and tendentious political maneuvers of individual persons. He may be right, as, for instance, the protests in India against his Satanic Verses were held at a time when the book had not even entered the country. The basic principle, that nothing should incite lawlessness, however founded, and nothing should incite hatred, murder and plunder has to be upheld.
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