by Giulio Meotti
Strange times.
At a liberal college in California, where the free speech movement was born, Salman Rushdie was supposed to speak. He is the writer who has been living under a death sentence since 1989, a $4 million Iranian fatwa, and whose eye was taken out by a Teheran hitman two years ago. But Rushdie will never speak at the Claremont college: the student groups, which have become the soft and perfidious underbelly of the West, have accused him of “Islamophobia” and of “speaking badly of the Palestinians” (“a Palestinian state would be like the Taliban” Rushdie said, rightly).
Where Khomeini’s fatwa fails, the woke censors step in.
If even the most prestigious universities in the world seem like a branch of an Islamic republic, why should the authorities act differently in defiance of democracy, freedom of speech and the rule of law?
Two years ago, in Brescia, Italy, “His Eminence Sheikh Omar Abdelkafi”, one of the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, came to harangue thousands of Muslims, with the presence of the vicar of the diocese at the Brixia Forum. Abdelkafi called September 11 and the Charlie Hebdo massacre “a comedy”, in addition to having called for the killing of “all Jews”.
“Public order reasons”: this is the reason that has just led to the expulsion from Italy of Rasmus Paludan, a right-wing Danish politician who burned the Koran in public and was supposed to attend a meeting. At Malpensa airport, Paludan was picked up and put back on the first flight to Copenhagen.
For the same reason, England has just barred entry to the writer Renaud Camus, a Frenchman writer and critic of immigration.
Paludan is not the type of person I would have a coffee with while discussing Europe, culture and freedom despite all the Danes who had “offended Islam” and who I have interviewed in recent years.
But unlike Abdelkafi, whose ideas are murderous, the Dane has not called for killing anyone, the only thing he has “hurt” is a book, while Al Qaeda has put him on the list of people to be eliminated. And the only death in the Koranic quarrel was an Iraqi Christian refugee in Sweden, Salwan Momika, murdered in live streaming and immediately silenced by the afterlife of the authorities and the media.
If we surrender to the logic of censorship, we will end up living according to Iranian rules – and we are already seeing it in Europe.
An hour’s drive separates Brescia and Varese, but the distance between the Abdelkafi and Paludan cases is not measured in kilometers, but in degrees of submission.
Ahmed Al Tayeb, the imam of al Azhar, with Pope Francis signed the “brotherhood between Christians and Muslims”, but he called for Jihad against Israel, legitimized terrorism against Israeli civilians on the basis of the Koran and called for the death of “apostates,” Muslims who convert to Christianity.
For him, as for Abdelkafi, no one thought of closing the doors of Italy.
The spirit of Orwell’s “1984” hovers today among certain progressives.
And at Sapienza University in Rome they planned to present the book of the leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, in the presence of professors from Italy’s most important university.
In this case they have invoked freedom of speech to give the floor to a mass murderer of innocents.
Public order? Incitement to hatred? Respect? It depends, then.
The “social peace” that we invoke to protect multiculturalism sounds a lot like Neville Chamberlain’s “peace for our time” on his return to Great Britain from Munich, an actwhich has gone down in history as a symbol of acquiescence or submission.
Meanwhile, I read an edifying story in the newspapers. The news of the expulsion of Kasia Wlaszczyk from Germany. She is called a “Polish citizen.” Kasia is transgender and shouts in the square “Free Palestine from the river to the sea,” as Hamas does, in addition to having called the German police “fascist.” Strange times indeed.
Pity poor Kasia, who fights on behalf of those who would strangle her without thinking twice as Sinwar did, while the “fascists” and “Zionists” she hates so much would save her life.
But freedom does not seem to be worth much in the West anymore: we are in the hands of useless people who believe that a minute of silence is enough to demonstrate courage.