No go zone

This morning in bed I was thinking of something I wanted to write about Islam and I suddenly felt afraid and changed my mind. That has never happened to me before. Advocates of homosexuality, my more usual controversial subject, are mainly harmless, except that they are destroying the country. Islamists will find your home address and cut off your head, probably with a dull knife. (I hope that’s not too xenophobic.)

I have been called a homophobe, but that is totally inaccurate. I’m not afraid of gay activists. It may be because I don’t own a bakery or a bed-and-breakfast. But I would be on less firm linguistic ground to say that I am not an Islamophobe, at least after this morning’s revealing experience. It was the merest tremor in the soul, and it passed quickly, but it sufficed to make me realize I would pull punches to save my scrawny neck.

“All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing,” said political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797). A more recent thinker, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), said that “a decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today.” The Russian and former Gulag inmate was commenting in A World Split Apart on “political and intellectual functionaries” and “depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.”

Charlie Hebdo–type satire is another thing. I will have to think more about that. On the one hand, I believe in free speech, guaranteed by our Constitution and purchased with blood. I am aware of American satire as old as Benjamin Franklin’s New England Courant. But WWJD is another question, a higher personal bar. When I asked myself whether Jesus would engage in jocular depictions of a naked Muhammad, as Charlie did, I answered myself, “No.” So “‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful” (1 Corinthians 10:23, ESV).

Speaking of Jesus, I think it is cool that the “Je Suis Charlie” (“I Am Charlie”) signs ubiquitous today on Paris’ Place de la République look like the word “JeSus” at a quick glance. Who knows? Not a few non-French speakers may see the fervor depicted in these counter-terrorist demonstrations and be brought to consider the claims of Jesus, even if at first accidentally.