Fresh from abusing some Americans, Times columnist now praises them

A week after his anti-Bush opinion piece appeared in The Times, Anatole Kaletsky has something nice (mixed in with visions of stereotypical Americans) to say about the country. What brought him around: the vitriol he received because of the original piece. He explains:

[...] Within hours of publication I received nearly 500 e-mails from American readers. About a quarter of these emails were split between praise and rational disagreement. However, the vast majority — some 300 — were abusive to the point of obscenity (homo Arab ass-f*****, Commie Jew-boy, Nigger-lover and so on). What opened the sluices on this flood of electronic sewerage was neither the offensiveness nor the originality of my article. [...] It seems, however, that an article in a foreign newspaper full of condescending derision for the US President touched a raw nerve in America’s conservative heartland — and that is why, with the Muslim world apparently in turmoil over some mediocre cartoons in a little-known Danish paper, I return to this subject. [...]

Despite the hypersensitivity of the Americans who showered me with linguistic ordure, nobody would dream of suggesting that insulting America and its President should be banned. These 300 right-wing nuts wanted me sacked for my ignorance; they wanted The Times used as toilet paper, but none of them would suggest that I should be legally prevented from saying that President Bush was a fool.

How different from the paranoid religiosity of the Muslim fundamentalists who insist that “insulting religion” should not be a question of taste or of judgment, but a subject for criminal law. Yet this obvious distinction between what is offensive and what should be illegal is deliberately ignored by the Blair Government, which wants to make insulting religion a criminal offence.

The second, and related, distinction is between verbal abuse and physical violence. Returning to my self-selected sample of nutty Americans, none of them threatened me with physical harm, or suggested that such harm might be my just desert. How different from the violence of the Muslim rent-a-crowds whose banners portray their enemies beheaded. Yet this obvious distinction between verbal abuse and physical violence is deliberately overlooked by British police, who have refused to prosecute Muslim demonstrators threatening their enemies with hideous violence. Meanwhile, British judges have sentenced Abu Hamza, convicted for inciting multiple murders, to just seven years. Presumably this means that religiously motivated murder is less serious in the eyes of our learned judges than such offences as drug-dealing or fraud.

This brings me to the third and most important distinction that Americans seem to understand much better than we in Europe. This is the distinction between religion and other beliefs. Why should religions be entitled to legal protection from “insults” and “attacks”? Would anyone suggest that communists and fascists or, for that matter, Tories and social democrats, should be protected from insults? Yet the first two of these movements were all-embracing secular religions and their believers, who numbered in the hundreds of millions, believed in them every bit as passionately as Christians, Jews and Muslims believe in their religions.

Far from commanding any special respect or protection from the State, religions must be exposed to relentless criticism, like all non-rational traditions and beliefs. Some religions will survive this contest between tradition and modernity, between reason and revelation, as Christianity, Judaism and Islam have done for centuries. Others, such as Marxism and Scientology, will fall by the wayside. In America, the Constitution, with its prohibition against the establishment of any state religion and its absolute defence of free speech, demands a robust competition between faith and reason and among the religions themselves. And in the end, as America’s surprisingpiety clearly shows, it is not just society but also religion that emerges stronger from the refiner’s fire of competition, criticism and even insult.

I wouldn't go that far. Nevertheless, he is correct in noting that criminalizing insults to one's religion is wrong. Aside from the fairness of not protecting religion more than other deeply held ideas, criminalizing insults would lead to a legal nightmare. Where would one draw the line between free exchange of opinion and deliberate insult?