The outbreak of swine flu should be renamed “Mexican” influenza in deference to Muslim and Jewish sensitivities over pork, said an Israeli health official Monday. Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman said the reference to pigs is offensive to both religions and “we should call this Mexican flu and not swine flu,” he told a news conference at a hospital in central Israel. Both Judaism and Islam consider pigs unclean and forbid the eating of pork products.
Let’s set aside for a moment objections that the virus in question – a mongrel strain of H1N1 – has more to do with pigs than with Mexico as a whole, or indeed with Mexicans, as some might infer from the suggested renaming. Let’s also set aside the fact the virus has been found in the US, Canada, Spain, New Zealand and the UK, and has genetic elements of at least three other animal flu viruses found in North America, Asia and Europe. Let’s put that out of our minds and grapple with the much more pressing issue: When did the mere “reference to pigs” – i.e. the word “swine” – become such a trial for the devout? Will the indignity never end? And is the aforementioned “sensitivity” something to do with the fact that transmission from pigs to humans suggests a genetic commonality of some kind? I think we should be told.
Ophelia Benson is pondering the word “pussy” and its connotations. In response to this Jesus and Mo cartoon on protecting deities from ridicule, a commenter writes,
I’ve always wondered [why] the gods of today, especially the god of Islam, is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work.
The god of Islam “is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work” – meaning women are weak cowardly parasites.
Oh. What happened there? How did we get from this:
I’ve always wondered [why] the gods of today, especially the god of Islam, is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work.
To this?
meaning women are weak cowardly parasites.
I realise the ambiguities of the word “pussy” may vary on the other side of the Atlantic, where the dubious sexual connotations are perhaps more often emphasised and have a less whimsical air. (Maybe it’s a generational thing, or a gay man thing, or a trash sitcom thing, but when I hear “pussy” in a sexual context, if anything at all comes to mind it could well be Mrs Slocombe from Are You Being Served?) On the very rare occasions I’ve used the word – ironically and with a terrible American accent – I’ve used it to denote a kind of feebleness. Naïve soul that I am, I took the intended meaning here to be that Allah appears to be a sissy, coward or weakling, perhaps rather pampered, like a house cat; not that Allah in some way resembles the female genitals, or that the aforementioned body parts are contemptible, or that all women are contemptible. (Conceivably, some female non-Muslims may take exception to the suggestion – if one were made – that their ladygarden is in any way similar to the befuddled deity of Islam.)
But Ophelia – who is, I think, American and perhaps more accustomed to hearing the vulgar, sexual usage – remains unconvinced:
Here’s a thought experiment. Suppose you were talking to the barmaid [who often appears in the cartoon] – would you say to the barmaid, “The god of Islam is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work”? Maybe you would, maybe you would. But I wonder. I don’t think it’s accidental that none of my male friends and correspondents ever use “pussy” or “twat” or “cunt” that way in conversation or correspondence with me. If there’s a reason for that… then perhaps there’s something wrong with the terminology; perhaps that something is that it’s sexist.
Well, I don’t regard myself as particularly sexist and I understood the intended meaning as unobjectionable – unless, that is, one believes Allah is the creator of the universe and a top-notch guy. I’ve heard at least two women use the word “twat” with pejorative gusto to describe a man, and I’ve talked to women who used the word “dick” in its derogatory sense without taking umbrage personally or on behalf of menfolk everywhere. (I was, of course, assuming they weren’t talking about me.) And though I’d be mindful that the word “pussy” has other, very different, meanings from the ones I mentioned above, I’m not sure one can assume that its usage, as above, necessarily signifies some objectionable intent or basis for indignation.
Ophelia Benson recently aired some thoughts on the sly redefinition of “defamation” – a term now being used by those whose vanity is such they presume to take umbrage at things that are unflattering but true. I’ve touched on this subject before and noted how the language of religious supremacism is routinely couched in the rhetoric of personal injury. As when the preposterous Islamophile Yvonne Ridley declared: “My faith is my nationality and when you attack it you are being racist.”
Presumably, Ms Ridley would have us believe that it is simply wrong to dislike Islam, or any part thereof. There are, apparently, no good reasons for doing so. But this opportunist victimhood is hardly flattering or deserving of sympathy. The spread of pretentious grievance does harm to liberal culture. Those who can claim to belong to some Designated Victim Group can use political leverage to silence their critics by depicting them as oppressors who, in the interests of “fairness,” must be silenced by the state. As when the pious souls at Cambridge Mosque conjured “hate speech” and “incitement to religious and ethnic hatred” from an innocuous student cartoon, with the result that those responsible found themselves interrogated by Cambridgeshire police. But what is unfair – really unfair – is the demand for unearned deference and unilateral exemption from the testing of ideas. Those who regard hurt feelings, or claims thereof, as denoting virtue by default may see a weaker party facing unfair attack and rush to their defence. In practice, they may simply be excusing the party with the weaker argument. Political deference to such demands leads to dishonesty and unrealism on a sociological scale. In the interests of “fairness,” so conceived, judgment must be blunted. As I said in one of my very first posts,
Religious “freedom” is now presumed to entail sparing believers any hint that others do not share their beliefs, and indeed may find them ludicrous. There is, apparently, no corresponding obligation for believers to embrace ideas that are not clearly risible, monstrous or disgusting.
R Joseph Hoffmann adds some thoughts of his own and ponders the conceit that religion – and one in particular – now has “human rights” too.:
According to Pakistan’s ambassador, Zamir Akram, “Defamation of religions is the cause that leads to incitement to hatred, discrimination and violence toward their followers.” That is stuff and nonsense of course. It is like saying that impugning General Motors workmanship is the cause of a car wreck. If religions, by a stretch, are products of culture, then the fact that they are sometimes “defamed” (read: criticised) might just have something to do with quality control and less to do with the insidious intentions of their detractors. To resituate the causes of religious violence and hatred from its source to the “defamers” is a standard tactic redolent of the Victim’s Handbook available at your local Discourse and Broomsticks Bookstore.
Related: Jeff Goldstein ponders advice to mind one’s language in certain company.
In my experience, the exceptionally clever are not ‘crazy’ in any meaningful sense of that word, at least not the functional ones. They are just not particularly good at office politics, which is something you need to be brilliant at in modern academia to avoid being marginalised. To be good at something requires you to be interested in it. Being interested in (say) the frontiers of theoretical physics is relatively incompatible with being interested in the machinations of a professional hierarchy. And vice versa – which may be why modern scientists tend to be dull, if by ‘dull’ you mean incapable of having an original thought.
Ophelia Benson notes how “defamation” is being slyly redefined.
Critics of Islam, however reasonable, also know they are likely to fall foul of people who have, as Kenan Malik says, internalized this idea that criticism of Islam is (1) taboo and (2) in and of itself ‘defamation’. As I mentioned, the copy editor for Does God Hate Women? flagged up ‘possible defamation’ in eight places. What I didn’t spell out (but you probably guessed) is that all the items cited were simply criticism, with arguments and evidence, of a kind that is utterly taken for granted in ordinary public discourse. They were not in any normal sense ‘defamation’ – it’s just that they were not flattering. The copy editor seems to have made exactly the leap that some protectors of religion would like everyone to make, and equated frank criticism of religious ideas and practices with ‘defamation’. The copy editor seems to have drawn the conclusion that frank criticism of Islam (as I noted, there were no such queries about other religions, which got their share of criticism) is somehow illegitimate.
These are clearly not the writings of a rational mind. Deranged by religious delusions, the author or authors of these passages would no doubt be considered mentally ill or psychologically unbalanced were this ‘holy’ book to be written today. Yet, as a religious text, the Qur’an is all too often given a special exemption from normal criticism, and we are told that we must show it ‘respect’, despite the hateful attitude it takes towards those who do not accept Islam. Around the world, children are taught to revere the Qur’an as the very words of the creator of the universe, as a perfect book with a timeless message, yet how can texts like those I have just cited do anything but instill a negative or contemptuous attitude towards non-Muslims? And why would anyone in their right mind claim that this book should be held up as the most important book ever written, or even as a great work of literature?
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