That’s the title of a post by Bill Donohue of the Catholic League about the atrocity in Paris yesterday. His post has been attacked by many people, and properly so. But I don’t think it’s right to condemn the impulse behind it. Donohue is saying that it is wrong to insult other people’s religion; and this is, in my view, a relatively unobjectionable counsel of politeness and gentlemanliness. Nor is he the first prominent conservative Catholic to have made such a comment in the context of our struggle against the jihadists. When the novelist Salman Rushdie was targeted by death threats, Cardinal O’Connor expressed sympathy with the Muslims offended by his book The Satanic Verses. In the words of O’Connor’s spokesman, Monsignor Peter Finn, the cardinal expressed “sympathy for the aggrieved position that the Muslim community has taken on this publication” and “said he trusted the judgment of Catholics as being mature and recognizing the affront it poses to believers in Islam.”
So if it’s not wrong to call, in general, for civility in discussions of religion, and for restraint when it comes to giving offense to others, what was wrong in what Donohue and O’Connor said? This: It risks sending a message of dangerous moral equivalence — one side is wrong in killing and making death threats; the other side is wrong to offend religious believers. We must keep clear in our minds the moral distinction here: All people have a right not to be murdered; nobody has a right not to be offended. In a joint letter to the New York Times in 1989, Don DeLillo, Garry Wills, Andrew Greeley, and 14 other writers condemned the cardinal’s “moral insensitivity.” The last line of their missive was its most powerful. Referring to the words of the cardinal’s spokesman about the “mature” judgment of Catholics, the signatories write: “Mature Catholics do not believe that a death threat can be met with ambiguity.”
That sentence has an application far beyond the fatwa against Rushdie. Jihadism is a “death threat” to the West. It is not a terribly credible one, to be sure, in civilizational terms, but it’s credible enough to motivate scattered groups like yesterday’s thugs to murder innocent people — and if we do not confront it fearlessly, forcefully, immediately, it will only get stronger and become a serious threat to the West and the liberal values we cherish. As part of my lifelong interest in religions, I have in the past praised Islam and the Koran on NRO, and I make no apologies for doing so. But I note this: Of the many writers and e-mailers, named and even anonymous, who vilified me for those writings, none threatened my life. I am proud to live in a country and a culture in which violence is not the default response in cases of disagreement and offense.
We need to stand with all the Muslims who want to live in that kind of country, that kind of culture. And we need to fight, with all the artillery of the world’s most powerful nation, against those Muslims who want Islam to remain mired in the culture of hatred, oppression, misogyny, and terrorism that dominates it today.
(On this last point, I wish to call readers’ attention to the excellent contribution by Professor Robert Destro in our NRO symposium this morning.)