I’ve heard that the best way to make a successful blog is to repeatedly post on the same topic over and over until the four (maybe) people who read it get bored. And then also intersperse it with smug, pedantic commentary on trivial issues. So, anyway, about this thing in New York…

At this point, there is probably little left to be said--when Ron Paul is the voice of reason, you know things have lost any semblance of sanity--but it might be interesting nonetheless to think about one controversy with an eye toward another. No doubt you will remember the outrage expressed by many Muslims across the world when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published a series of cartoons in 2005 that depicted Muhammad (thus violating Islamic law), including one in which he wore a turban made of a lit bomb emblazoned with the shahada.

The reaction in Europe and America ranged from a didactic South Park episode (redundant, I know) that taught us all a valuable lesson about the evils of censorship to alarmist outrage about the threat of “Islamofacism”: “Today the censors may be coming for some unfunny Mohammed cartoons, but tomorrow it is your words and ideas they will silence. Like it or not, we are all Danes now.” Fuck, I wish. The general gist  these reactions shared was reaffirmation of the secular liberal values of freedom of speech and press. As conservative commentator Daniel Pipes wrote at the time:

Pipes, like many other Americans, argued that the defining characteristic of “Western civilization” was its reverence for free speech, including the right to insult and blaspheme, and therefore, censoring any speech that was intentionally insensitive, offensive, and blasphemous to a group of people would be a violation of basic liberal principles.

Yet on August 16, Pipes wrote that the Islamic Center in Manhattan should “be barred from opening” because it “carries the unmistakable odor of Islamic triumphalism” and might “give reason to worry that this center will spread Islamist ideology.” But even if concerns about the Imam at the center were not preposterously overblown, and even if it were a meeting place for ultra-conservative Muslims, would it not still fall under the very principles Pipes believes are the crux of Western civilization itself?

What is particularly fascinating is how many activists and commentators have consistently used words like blasphemous, sacred, and insensitive to describe their objections to the Islamic center. Journalist Charles Krauthammer, in a widely-published editorial entitled “Sacrilege at Ground Zero,” rather frighteningly criticizes Mayor Bloomberg for his “expansive view of religious freedom” before going on to argue that “although America is a free country” it is acceptable to prevent buildings that “offend local sensibilities”—particularly for reasons of “common decency and respect for the sacred.” Thus, one would assume here that Krauthammer believes that when a speech act or a public assembly offends sensibilities toward the sacred, it can and should be restricted.

So what did Krauthammer have to say about the Danish cartoon controversy? He criticized any Muslim felt outrage at the blasphemy, of course. Moderate Muslims who condemned violence while expressing disapproval with the cartoons were, for Krauthammer, endorsing “the goals of the mob without endorsing the means. It is fraudulent because, while pretending to uphold the principle of religious sensitivity, it is interested only in this instance of religious insensitivity.” Indeed.

In the book Is Critique Secular? anthropologist Saba Mahmood argues that, for many Muslims, the Danish cartoons were offensive less because they were blasphemous than because they insulted a person who was, for them, very tangibly real, with whom they had established a personal and loving relationship. (It is, one would suspect, the same reason that Christians tend to be upset when you drop a crucifix into a steaming bucket of piss). Even as they condemned the violence, she suggested, such Muslims nonetheless felt the sense of grief, sorrow, and anger that comes after a personal affront on a close friend or family member.

Now, to think that allowing Muslims to congregate in the general vicinity of where 9/11 victims died is an insult "to the victims and their families" is, of course, the result of incredibly ignorant Islamophobia. But perhaps this whole controversy suggests a much greater similarity between the sensibilities of “the West” and the Islamic world than the former wants to admit.