By Timothy Garton Ash (THE GUARDIAN, 09/02/06):
Facing me in my living room, Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed says a Danish cartoonist who insulted the prophet should be tried in an Islamic court and then "he will be executed according to Islamic rules". Of course the Syrian-born Islamic cleric is not physically sitting in my living room; he's on a television screen, live from Beirut, where the Danish embassy has just been trashed by demonstrators. That makes the death threat only slightly less threatening. Imagine how it feels to be one of those Danish cartoonists.
For centuries, there has been a good rule for the coexistence of civilisations. It said: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do." Globalisation has undermined that rule. Because of mass migration, peoples and their cultures are physically mixed up together. Rome is no longer just Rome; it's also Tunis, Cairo and Tirana. Birmingham is also Kashmir and the Punjab, while London is all the world. Because of worldwide mass media, there is no longer such a thing as local offence or local intimidation. Everything can reach everyone. Competing cultures try to spread their norms around the globe: George Bush for western-style democracy, Pope Benedict XVI for Catholicism, Omar Bakri Mohammed for sharia.
How should we live in this brave new world? How can we stay free in it? Like most of my friends, I have been agonising about this over the past week. We feel this is a defining moment, for all who live in Europe. And we know that there are no simple answers. The least bad outcome will be a painful compromise between the universal right to free speech - the oxygen of all other freedoms - and the need for voluntary self-restraint in such a mixed-up world.
One thing, however, I know with certainty: violence, or the direct threat of violence, of the kind we have seen in the past few days, is totally unjustified as a response to any published word or image. That is the first thing to be said. I have been saddened to see British politicians and commentators, particularly on the left, hesitating for a long moment to say so clearly, or feeling it necessary to say other things first. (Do you want to leave the defence of free speech and non-violence to David Davis?) I have also been saddened, though hardly surprised, by the weakness of the EU's reaction to the criminal attack on the Danish embassy in Syria, which seems to have been permitted, if not actively encouraged, by the Syrian regime. We should have said: when you burn the Danish flag you burn our flag. Why weren't all EU ambassadors instantly withdrawn from Damascus in protest?
Violence or the direct threat of violence - as in those posters held by London protesters that read "Behead Those Who Insult Islam" - is both morally unjustified and, rightly, brings the threat of criminal prosecution. It is right that Abu Hamza has been convicted for incitement to murder. (Incidentally, this shows that we do not need a new offence of glorification of terrorism, since he was convicted under existing laws.) Those Danish cartoons were offensive, perhaps even abusive - and I was not in favour of their re-publication in various European newspapers - but they were not threatening to any particular group or individuals. They are in no way comparable with a death threat to individual cartoonists or torching an embassy - with people dying in the process. And let's not have any of that tired old higher nonsense about "structural violence" or "repressive tolerance".
This violence was unjustified and criminal, but perhaps it was also effective. One way of looking at the self-restraint of the British media over the past week is to say how responsible, pragmatic and sensitively multicultural they all were. Alternatively you might say they were scared of having their offices burned. Was it wisdom with a seasoning of fear, or rather fear packaged as wisdom? Throughout history, violence has often paid off, but the struggle of civilisation against barbarism is to ensure that it doesn't.
That said, the question remains: how to strike the balance between free speech and mutual respect in this mixed-up world, both blessed and cursed with instant communication? We should not fight fire with fire, threats with threats. The danger at this critical moment is that we will see the beginning of a vicious spiral, with Muslim extremists blowing wind into the sails of anti-Muslim extremists (such as Nick Griffin of the BNP, and how I wish he had been convicted a couple of days before Abu Hamza), whose violent language in turn drives more moderate Muslims to support the jihadists, and so on down. But I do not agree with yesterday's Guardian leader when it said that the BBC's Today programme was wrong to broadcast an interview with Omar Bakri Muhammad, who was also interviewed by Channel 4 news.
On the contrary, I think the British media have done exactly what they should by letting us hear the voices of Muslim extremists but setting them against moderate and reasonable Muslim voices, as well as those of non-Muslims. There was a riveting discussion on Newsnight, in which two British Muslim women calmly argued with the ranting, demagogic, but in style and accent also recognisably British, extremist Anjem Choudary, of the al-Ghuraba groupuscule. Perhaps it would have been better still if the discussion had been chaired by, say, Zeinab Badawi rather than Jeremy Paxman; but the essential point is that it provided a civilised platform on which Muslims could argue with fellow Muslims. Reporters sweepingly write of "Muslim anger" erupting across the world, but many British Muslims are as angry with the jihadist provocateurs as they are with the Danish cartoonists, as we will doubtless see in the demonstration planned by British Muslims in London this Saturday.
The temptation, to which too many are succumbing, is to see this as a showdown between Islam and Europe or the west (although, for once, the US has been somewhat out of the firing line). That is how extremists want to frame the argument, as in the poster waved outside the Danish embassy in London: "Europe is the cancer, Islam is the answer". But the real dividing line is between moderates and extremists on both sides, between men and women of reason and dialogue, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, and men and women of hatred, such as Abu Hamza or Nick Griffin. Not for the first time in recent history, the means are more important than the ends. In fact, the means you choose determine where you'll end up.
This is not a war, and it's not going to be won or lost by the west. It's an argument inside Islam and inside Europe, where millions of Muslims already live. If reason prevails over hate, it will be because most British, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Danish and altogether European Muslims prevail over their own extremist minorities. We non-Muslim Europeans can contribute to that outcome, by our policies abroad, towards Iraq, Iran, Israel and Palestine, and at home, on immigration, education, jobs and so forth. We can also contribute by cultural sensitivity and self-restraint, but we cannot compromise on the essentials of a free society. Offering platforms of civilised free speech for European Muslims to conduct their debate with each other, as the British media have done this week, is one of the best answers we can give to hate.