Islam

The Bill Maher Ethical Conundrum

/ Jack Marshall / 45 Comments
Wits

“One of these things is not like the other…”

 

The Bill Maher Ethics Conundrum is not what you probably think it is.

Maher, the alleged comic and anti-conservative scold who hosts an HBO program, was chosen by a student committee to be the  commencement speaker for the University of California-Berkeley’s December graduation. This was a lazy, embarrassingly juvenile and politically-loaded selection, but Maher had also just recently used his show to join fellow atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris in a condemnation of Islam, calling it  “the only religion that acts like the mafia that will fucking kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture or write the wrong book.” Later on Maher nodded approvingly  as Harris also called Islam”the mother lode of bad ideas.”

This caused Muslim students at Berkeley to prove Maher correct about their religion’s entrenched intolerance of opposition, and they have been joined by other political correctness censors in the student body—there are a lot of them—to demand that the university rescind Maher’s invitation because of his “hate speech.”A  Change.org petition—-now THAT site is the real mother lode of bad ideas—now urges students to boycott the decision and asks the campus to stop him from speaking. It has gathered more than 1,400 signatures. The committee that chose Maher, naturally, backed down, but the University, so far at least, is sticking to its decision to invite him.

Yes, yes, universities ought to be marketplaces of ideas where all views are welcome, and yes, it is hypocritical and offends the traditions of liberal education to stop Maher from stating his views on Islam, or re-telling “The Aristocrats,” or making a fool of himself, or whatever he’s going to do because some students or all students disagree with him, just as it was for Rutgers students to force Condolezza Rice into withdrawing after she was invited to speak at Rutgers. The dilemma illustrated by this flap is a classic ethics problem, which I will henceforth call the Bill Maher Conundrum, which has been long debated and never decisively settled:

Is the ethical nature of an act defined by its intent, or by an objective assessment of the act alone without reference to motive? Continue reading →

Why The Winooski Bacon Controversy Matters

/ Jack Marshall / 31 Comments

bacon signLast week, Sneakers Bistro and Cafe in Winooski, Vermont removed a sign reading “Yield for Sneakers Bacon” from a garden at the Winooski Rotary after a woman who described herself as “a vegan and a member of a Muslim household” called the sign offensive in an online post.

“Given the large number of Muslim families in Winooski, as well as many others who do not eat pork for a variety of reasons, it seems unnecessary for this insensitive business sign to be at the city’s main crosswalk,” she wrote. Sneakers, obeying the growing U.S. cultural mandate that any individual has a veto over words and conduct that he or she finds offensive regardless of 1) whether it is offensive to anyone else and 2) whether the alleged offense is certifiably bats, apologized, and took the sign down.

I am happy to support that this decision did not play well, even in ultra-liberal Vermont, and under a barrage of criticism on the web and elsewhere, the Sneakers’ management posted the following message on its Facebook page, thus making their situation worse:

“We are here to serve people BREAKFAST, not politics. We removed the sign that was located on public property as a gesture of respect for our diverse community. There were also concerns raised about safety. Removing it was not a difficult decision. We still love bacon. We still love eggs. Please have the political conversation elsewhere.”

That idiotic statement was the disaster anyone conscious should have been able to predict it would be. And let’s be thankful this is still true. Tomorrow, Sneakers’ response may be standard operation procedure, even if ISIS doesn’t take over the country while the President is breaking par. Continue reading →

KABOOM! Homophone-phobia In Utah

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

headexplode

I thought this had to be a hoax.

I prayed it was a hoax.

It’s not a hoax.

Now I’m washing my brains off the ceiling using a rag on a stick.

Behold…from the Salt Lake Tribune:

“…the social-media specialist for a private Provo-based English language learning center wrote a blog explaining homophones, he was let go for creating the perception that the school promoted a gay agenda. Tim Torkildson says after he wrote the blog on the website of his employer, Nomen Global Language Center, his boss and Nomen owner Clarke Woodger, called him into his office and told him he was fired. As Torkildson tells it, Woodger said he could not trust him and that the blog about homophones was the last straw. “Now our school is going to be associated with homosexuality,” Woodger complained, according to Torkildson, who posted the exchange on his Facebook page….”

Continue reading →

Ethics Quiz: “Ick!” Or Unethical—The Arabic Pledge Of Allegiance

/ Jack Marshall / 108 Comments
"I pledge allegiance to the flag...that the terrorists who speak this language want to tear down..."

“I pledge allegiance to the flag…that the terrorists who speak this language want to tear down…”

In the latest smoking gun example of how the administrators of public schools are widely recruited from the Homes For The Bewildered, we learn of Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins, Colorado, where the principal, Tom Lopez, and his staff agreed to let the school’s “Cultural Arms Club” lead the student body in an Arabic version of the Pledge of Allegiance, one that replaced  “under God,” the ill-advised addendum to the Pledge added by Congress when the U.S. felt under siege from “godless Communism” with  “under Allah.”

As further proof that they should be managing a street corner balloon establishment, the school’s administration professes amazement that parents and citizens are upset with this, and as more evidence yet, places the blame on the students. After all it was their idea, and if they voted to have their fellow students recite the pledge in duck voices, or Pig Latin, or punctuated with “Heil Hitler!” salutes and “der Fuhrer” in place of “God,” I’m sure that would be okey-dokey too. Continue reading →

Hall of Fame Ethics… Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,That Is

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Cat Stevens

Conservative blogress Kathy Shaidle pleaded with voters not to enshrine Yusuf Islam, a.k.a Cat Stevens, into Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and then, when they added him anyway, expressed her disgust. Her objections were not based on music criticism (as would be justified with nominees like Yes), nor on Cat’s honor blocking more worthy nominees (like, say, The Zombies). She objects to Yusuf Islam on political and ethical grounds, complaining that during his activist days and perhaps even now, he qualified as a Muslim radical.

It doesn’t matter. Cat Stevens belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because of his art, not his character. His character is irrelevant to the reach, influence and value of his art, as are his politics. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame makes no pretense of making difficult measurements of an artist’s character, unlike the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, which has come up on Ethics Alarms frequently. Baseball players are cultural icons and societal heroes, whose symbolic exploits on the field of play evoke and inspire young people as well as the rest of us, embodying positive traits like courage, perseverance, fortitude, sacrifice, team play, loyalty, honor, fairness and honesty. As derided as it is by sportswriters and jaded fans who would like to see both the baseball Hall and its rosters filled with enabled and highly paid cheaters, felons, thugs, miscreants, deadbeat dads, and worse—like those of professional football and basketball—the character clause holds baseball players, at least those who want to be remembered as great ones, to a higher standard. And that higher standard is relevant to the game they play and our appreciation of it.

The character of artists, however, are simply accompanying trivia to the artist’s contributions to society. If there was a character clause in the Crooner’s Hall of Fame, Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby might be barred from entry, meaning that it would then be the Imitators of Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby Hall of Fame. For entrance to the Classical Composers Hall of Fame, Mozart and Wagner (and a lot more) would need to buy a ticket. Don’t get me started on the Novelist’s Hall of Fame, or the Hall of Fame for American Playwrights. Beautiful, transcendent, moving and immortal works have issued from ugly, warped, cruel and diseased minds, and it has always been thus, in Rock and Roll as well as every other art form. Picking on Cat Stevens, among all the others, smacks of anti-Muslim bigotry to me. Sure, I hated Cat’s politics; I hated John Lennon’s politics too.

It’s the art, and only the art, that matters.

______________________________

Sources: PJ Media 1, 2

Lauren Green, Fox News, and Bickmore’s First Law Of Being Biased

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

Watch this, if you dare.

I have been using the phrase “Bias makes you stupid” for many years, but only recently learned that a Utah climate-change scientist has claimed the observation as his own. In fact, Barry Bickmore has a lot of useful, perceptive observations among “Bickmore’s Laws” ( Example: Bickmore’s First Law of Being Reasonable Reasonable people understand that good arguments can sometimes lead to false conclusions, and bad arguments can sometimes lead to true conclusions ), though they all were apparently devised to help him debunk the arguments of climates change skeptics. Most of them have general applicability. and that includes his version of what I once called “Marshall’s First Law”: Bickmore’s First Law of Being Biased: Bias makes you human.  Unchecked bias makes you stupid.

Which brings us to Lauren Green, and Fox News.

I have no idea whether Ms. Green is really stupid or not. I do know she is a former beauty queen, and that Fox (other networks too, but Fox is blatant about it) clearly values pulchritude over journalistic acumen and skill when making their on-air talent decisions not involving Y chromosomes. This itself is stupid, unprofessional, sexist, insulting to women, unfair to better journalists with smaller bra cups and courser features, and I must admit, when it leads to an epic live embarrassment such as Green’s, I take some satisfaction that Roger Ailes is getting exactly what he deserves for such a cynical, reckless, ratings ploy.

If Lauren Green is not stupid, then her frantic efforts to play to the core Fox audience’s presumed bias in favor of Christianity of the literal variety and related bias against non-Christians, especially Muslims, sure caused her brain to take a holiday. Or, perhaps, her own unchecked Christian biases—she is Fox’s “religion correspondent” these days—triggered a classic display of Bickmore’s First Law of Being Biased. In either case, I think her credibility is permanently shot, even at Fox. She might want to consider a different line of work. Continue reading →

What’s Wrong With The Anti-Jihad Ads?

/ Jack Marshall / 29 Comments

Mona Eltahawy, as police infringe on her exercise of the rarely invoked Eleventeenth Amendment, which protects a citizen’s right to spray any message she doesn’t want others to see with pink. paint.

The controversial ads went up in DC Metro stations today, after efforts by the city to have them blocked were declared, properly, to be unconstitutional by a sane and objective judge. The ads read,

“In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”

The controversy over the subway ads started heating up in the wake of the “Innocence of Muslims” debacle, when a crude internet trailer for a crude anti-Islam movie was used by extremists and fanatics around the world as an excuse to demonstrate against or attack U.S. embassies. The Obama Administration’s less-than-ringing defense of free speech in its efforts to minimize the violence had the undesired effect of emboldening domestic censors, among them  Mona Eltahawy, a free-lance Egypt-born journalist, who spray-painted one of the anti-jihad ads, the creation of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, in a New York subway station where it had been hung on September 24. She argued, as she sprayed, that censoring someone else’s protected speech was her First Amendment right. No, it’s not. A 2011 naturalized citizen, she needs to bone up on her American Constitution before she speaks at any more college campuses. She was arrested. Good. Continue reading →

The “Homeland” Dilemma

/ Jack Marshall / 36 Comments

In “Homeland,” Showtime’s excellent Emmy-winning drama starring Claire Danes, a G.I. named Nick Brody imprisoned for years returns to the states a hero, and, secretly, a converted Muslim and terrorist. By Season Two, which premiered last night, Brody has risen to be a member of Congress, where he is working from the inside to benefit the interests of his captors. He has kept his conversion to Islam secret from everyone but his teenage daughter Dana, who accidentally caught him praying to Mecca in the basement in the first season.

Now Brody’s name is being floated as a possible running mate for the current Vice President, who is a presumptive presidential nominee. The Veep tells Congressman Brody that if there are skeletons in his closet that his researchers wouldn’t have found—I’m pretty sure being a secret terrorist would qualify—Brody needs to air them. Brody says there aren’t any. We know better.

Meanwhile, at Sidwell Friends, the tony Quaker private school in D.C. that all the pols send their kids to, Dana is fuming because she has to listen to the  Vice-President’s obnoxious son  go on about how “Muslims aren’t like us” and “don’t respect human life.” Dana, having been admonished for insulting him, blurts out, “Well, my father’s a Muslim!” in class.  Dana’s subsequent position is that she was joking to make a point. At home, however, her outburst causes a domestic crisis, as her mother feels that Brody has been lying to her, which he has.

I’ll leave Rep. Brody out of this ethical dilemma, as he is suffering from an Islamic strain of the Stockholm Syndrome, but what about the family? From their perspective, which is that they don’t suspect for a second that Brody is a traitor, what is their ethical obligation should he announce that the Vice President is going to choose him as a running mate, and that he expects them to keep his secret?

His argument, of course, is that his religion shouldn’t and doesn’t matter. It is true that the “public would want to know,” and also that the public would probably not feel very comfy electing a Muslim these days to be a heartbeat away  from the Presidency, fair or not. The family knows he is a good man (they think) and like the idea of being Second Family; there is no reason to sink his career and their aspirations to celebrity by allowing irrational bigotry to take hold. Is there?

That’s not the whole truth, however. Brody has lied to the Vice President and to his constituents, and they do have a right to know that. In my view, both wife and daughter have an ethical duty as citizens to tell husband and father that if he accepts the nomination, they will be forced to expose him. They should also tell him that he needs to resign from Congress, or, if he’s willing, tell the public about his deception and ask for their forgiveness. I think, in short, that this is a John Edwards situation.

Is that what you would do, in their place?

And my favorite hypothetical of them all, that I refuse to believe wasn’t lurking in the minds of the writers:

Michelle discovers Barack praying to Mecca in the basement.

Tomorrow.

What would be her ethical duty?

The Egypt and Libya Embassy Attacks: So, Are We Going To Have An “Everybody Make An Insulting Film About Muhammad Day” Now?

/ Jack Marshall / 60 Comments

Why not? It’s your right!

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” said Steve Klein, a consultant on Nakoula Basseley Nakoula’s anti-Islam, Muhammad-bashing film. The film is apparently the reason two U.S. embassies were attacked yesterday, resulting in the death of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya and others. That was the “this” Klein was referring to. Nakoula and his Isreali backers set out to make a film that denigrates both Islam and its prophet, knowing what the response in Muslim nations has been to such things, as well as the deaths caused by podunk bigot pastor Terry Jones, with his Quran-burning stunts.

Now people are dead, the Arab world is inflamed, and the perpetual tinderbox known as the Middle East is ready to ignite. The online film has had almost no audience yet, but don’t worry: international violence was probably part of the marketing plan. Maybe Nakoula will be really lucky, and have his First Amendment-protected agitprop start World War III, and he can take his place in history next to Gavrilo Princip, in the coveted “Insignificant Jerks Who Started World Wars” category.

Indeed, as an American citizen, Nakoula has a sacred right to make any movie he wants, write any book, draw any cartoon, burn any book. Americans have a sacred right to be irresponsible, and thanks to electronic communication, they can now be irresponsible on a grand scale, disrupting diplomacy, inciting international unrest, fanning racial, ethnic, international and religious discord. That means that sometimes an exercise of  the right of free speech can be legal, cherished, and terribly wrong. Among those times are when you know that shooting off your metaphorical mouth has a strong probability of getting people other than you killed.

I agree that there is something amiss when “The Book of Mormon” is winning accolades on Broadway, knowing well that if the satirical musical targeted Islam instead of Mormonism the Great White Way might be running red with blood. I agree that it reeks of a double standard when columnists like Charles M. Blow can tweet about Mitt Romney’s “magic underwear” but American Muslims are immune from similar indignities because, well, they might kill us. This elevates instability, intolerance and lack of respect for human life to an asset, and that is itself intolerable—but what is the solution? Charles Krauthammer, condemning our Egypt embassy’s conciliatory response to the mob attack on it  yesterday, said that our response should be “Go to hell.” In this he was endorsing the response of the Everybody Draw Muhammad Day crowd, which decided that an organized, mass insult to Islam was the intelligent response to one Islamic terrorist intimidating Comedy Central into censoring South Park. Their reasoning: “You can’t kill us all.”

They can kill our Ambassador, though, can’t they?

Since there is no justification for hateful, intentional denigration of anybody’s religion, there should be a bright line between caving to Islamic threats over satire and humor, which is disgraceful and un-American, and not setting out to agitate the Arab street with calculated insults, which is the domain of Jones and Nakoula. The latter is flagrantly irresponsible and reckless, and should not be condoned or excused, Constitutionally protected though it is. Nakoula, it was reported, was in hiding for his life.

If so, good.

“We went into this knowing this was probably going to happen,” said his colleague. Having to fear for one’s life seems like a fair punishment for someone who knew his hateful, rinky-dink movie might get other people killed and cause mass violence, and made it anyway.

___________________

Sources:

Graphic:  No Short Corners

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.

Comment of the Day: “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Michael, who is now the Ethics Alarms all-time leader in the Comment of the Day category, scores another with a thought-provoking post inspired by the New York Times’ stunning disinterest in its columnist tweeting a religious slur about Mitt Romney. I’ll have some added reflections at the end. Here is his Comment of the Day on “Charles M. Blow’s Anti-Mormon Tweet, Chapter 2…”:

“I remember an article about this when I was in college. In analyzing how the news media treated different races, they came up with the PC Hierarchy. Anyone higher on the hierarchy can criticize or be insensitive to anyone below them. If there is a conflict between two groups, the one higher on the PC scale is assumed to be right”

PC Hierarchy of Races… Continue reading →