Once again Jesus and Mo manage to encapsulate hypocrisy—in this case the UN’s appointing a Saudi diplomat as head of a human right council—in just four brief panels. This one stings!
The author’s addendum to the strip: “… and statutory tea-breaks for floggers.”
It’s a good joke and it raises an interesting question. Islam is the best thing ever, so it’s a human right for everyone to live under islamic rule. That’s why the Saudi’s don’t think freedom of religion is a good thing.
How to resolve this? Well, I might sound a bit like Sam Harris, but polling shows that people are happier when they have freedom of religion. The succes of a country can to a large extent be measured and theocracies are doing badly. That’s why freedom of religion is objectively better.
Yes, there are several reasonable and fair approaches to justifying a secular state. The utilitarian approach, as you point out, is a good one. So is Rawlian neutrality: if a believer would not want to be forced to follow the dictates or derivations of the laws of someone else’s God, then they are morally obliged to not impose their own theocracy on others. Such justifications rest on an assumed capacity to set aside the convictions of faith in order to come up with a plan which works for everyone, those who have knowledge of God and those infidels who do not.
Yeah, that last part is the fly in the ointment. The more sure a person is that knowledge of God is a vital, critical aspect of how to live, the more ridiculous placing infidels on common ground politically will seem. How can they? Non believers are totally out of the loop when it comes to recognizing what is and isn’t important. Faith can’t be set aside for politics any more than it can be set aside, period. It’s far too important.
That’s one reason why I think Jerry’s combined attack on the truth of religious beliefs and the life-and-self defining virtue of faith is an absolutely critical component of secularism. This bizarre decision from the U.N. looks to me like it might be fueled at least in part by an optimistic accommodationist hope that “respecting” a theocratic faith-based political system will cause the faithful to relax and be willing to compromise now. Faith is important; let’s set it aside.
It might also be fueled in part by fuel itself. Double — no, triple shame on the U.N.
Oh I think you’re being optimistic there. I think its far more likely the senior UN staff knows they won’t change. They gave them this appointment because its relatively powerless, and giving it to SA was less of a hassle than fighting off their request for a more powerful position.
Could be. Though it’s also possible that you’re right and accommodationism is part of the diplomatic strategy for selling the idea to others.
Readers may like to see the interviews with Jürgen Todenhöfer on ISIS eg (Sorry – Daily Mail link!)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2885210/Reporter-spent-ten-days-ISIS-says-West-no-concept-dangerous-group-says-want-kill-non-believers-enslave-children.html
Or
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/inside-isis-the-first-western-journalist-ever-given-access-to-the-islamic-state-has-just-returned–and-this-is-what-he-discovered-9938438.html
One hesitates to cast aspersions on any westerner brave enough to wander into Isis-controlled areas, but Todenhöfer looks like somebody far too willing to take ISIS at their word. For an exposé of their self-defeating gangster methods and their ‘hard work’ in establishing a ‘functioning state’, see below. And as for their attitude to girls’ education, does this man know nothing about what female education means in Islamo-fascism? x
eaworldview.com/2015/09/syria-and-iraq-feature-the-islamic-state-is-strangling-local-economies/ocast
Bram Fisher, Mandela’s defence lawyer, was later put in prison where he died. Badawi’s lawyer, Waleed Abulkhair, has also been thrown in the slammer for 15 years.
To be a really efficient totalitarian you have to immure not only opposition but the idea of opposition itself. x
Just when you think they can’t sink lower…
I absolutely didn’t know that, thanks!
[More or less, apparently Fisher was released just before his death:
“Following the trial he was himself put on trial accused of furthering communism. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served eleven years and was released in 1975 crippled by the disease from which he died two weeks later.” [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Fischer ]
The case of Abulkhair seems complicated, he was himself an activist. [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waleed_Abulkhair ]]
Fischer was a member of the Rivonia inner circle of the SA Communist Party.
Despite the faults of apartheid and the moral basis for resistance it is difficult to see how the courts could not have convicted the Rivonia plotters, given their support for violent acts against the state. As regards the SACP, it is fashionable to dismiss ‘paranoia’ about the Russian backed Marxist threat to Southern Africa. These were totalitarian ideologues with a ‘bullet to the back of the head’ approach to justice. Incidentally, the ANC’s MK dispensed such justice to their own. Without the military resistance from South African it is entirely possible that the situation in Southern Africa today could be far worse than it is, although things might get a bit hairy if Zuma does achieve his aim of virtual dictatorship.
First line above should read “……..and of the SA Communist Party”.
Let me guess. This includes paternity leave for the children they sire on the Yazidi slave girls in their harems? Very progressive of them!
b&
I don’t know. The author lost me in the second panel. I’m highly doubtful that the kind of Muslim “Mo” is meant to represent would accept that Saudi Arabia really does egregiously violate human rights.
Well, at a stretch, Mo could be referring to the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, which the Saudi autocracy signed. Where ‘improve’ means to get even worse, in Tariq ramadan double-speak style.
But I see you what you mean, MB: you’ve spoiled it a bit for me now. Never analyze a joke! x
Yeah, this would have been a good time to employ the barmaid to deliver some of the lines.
Note this from the US STATE DEPARTMENT website:
http://m.state.gov/md247169.htm#SAUDIARABIA
Vacuous hand waving by what is essentially an arm of the administration, not Congress, afraid of offending this scum. Where is the backbone?
Notice the number of “I don’t know about…”, and “we welcome…”. This stuff is in the headlines and he “doesn’t know”? His job to be official spokesman for the US and he “has not comment” , “no opinion”
Even Fox news can see the problems, but hot him. None so blind….
when I heard about this, I couldn’t keep my jaw off the floor. You think that madness has found it’s new maximum depth, and along comes someone and brings on a whole new level of derangement.
“No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.” –Lily Tomlin
I refer the honourable lady to the comment I made a few moments ago in the Jeffrey Tayler Pope-bashing thread.
(What we call a “parliamentary answer.”)
Glad to know you were being cynical. I hope. Though the press might give Scientology a pass…
But why “parliamentary?” I hate it when I don’t get the joke!
A frequent “stock answer” at various UK Parliament “Questions for Minister X” sessions (including the “Prime Minister”) is to “refer the questioner to the answer I gave a few moments ago” … which answer is typically something like “the PM’s diary will be deposited in the Commons library at midday”, or “the report of Committee X will be published in Hansard tomorrow.”
It’s almost poetic, like the Shipping Forecast, “Forth, Tyne, Dogger, German Bight – easterlies backing northerly 5 to severe gale 8 …”
Gotcha. 😀