Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression Read Free Page A

publish a collection of all the hate mail I’ve received at Charlie Hebdo from Catholic fascists and Muslim fascists. The main argument against blasphemy is just plain stupid: after our death, God will really stick it to us. Wouldn’t it be perfectly normal for certain sensitive souls to develop a phobia of religions that threaten them? A phobia of God?
    By these lights, the main Islamophobes are the believers themselves. They’re shitting themselves at the thought that their vengeful God will punish them for the least slip-up.
    Being afraid is a right
    Being afraid of Islam is no doubt moronic, absurd, and plenty of other things as well, but it’s not a crime. Likewise, you can demonstrate your fear of Christianity or Judaism without disturbing a judge and setting the whole legal system in motion. In any case, an adherent himself may well have a phobia of other religions. He has been taught that his religion is the best of all—no, not the best, the only True One! By declaring that the texts he holds sacred tell the truth, he implies that the others tell fibs. It’s easy to imagine him terrified by the prospect of mass conversions to the false religion. Or, more precisely, of a mass exodus of the clientele to the competition. There’s nothing surprising about a Catholic being Islamophobic or a Muslim being Cathophobic—that is precisely what their religious shepherds ask them to be. Disapproval of the other guy’s religion is the daily bread of clerics of all creeds, and nobody seems to be bothered by it. Priests, imams, and rabbis have the right to be Islamophobic, Judeophobic, or Cathophobic without reprimand.
    Let us recall, too, that a religion does not exist without believers. A text becomes sacred and, ultimately, dangerous only when some fanatic decides to take his bedside reading literally. You have to be really gullible to swallow the foundational texts of any of the great religions word for word, and you’d have to be a true psychopath to try to reproduce their teachings at home. In short, the problem is neither the Koran nor the Bible—tiresome, incoherent, and poorly written novels though they may be—but the faithful who read the Koran or the Bible the way you read the assembly instructions for an Ikea bookcase. If you don’t do exactly what it says on the paper, the universe will blow the fuck up. If I don’t slit the infidel’s throat along the dotted line, God will banish me from Club Med when I die.
    Take any cookbook, declare everything written in it to be the Truth, and apply it to the letter, for yourself and others, as prescribed in these new Holy Scriptures. The outcome? A bloodbath. Your neighbor cooks gluten-free pancakes because he’s allergic? The Holy Book makes no provision for such behavior! Put your blaspheming neighbor to the torch! He butters his pie dish too liberally? Kill! Kill!
    You can do the same experiment with any book. Try it out with a Stephen King novel, for a laugh.
    All currents of thought may be criticized
    “Sacred” texts are sacred only to those who believe in them. While some Muslim and Catholic institutions have been working for years to have the crime of blasphemy recognized and actionable under French law, no one is in danger of going to jail for criticizing such or such religious dogma (except in Alsace-Moselle, which we’ll get back to).
    A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning for him. A nonbeliever, no matter how hard he tries, cannot blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.
      
    For example, no communist would ever consider identifying anti-communists as communistophobes, or prosecuting them on the grounds of anti-communist racism. No matter how hard you try to bend