Rex Murphy Bits & Pieces
Post
23/09/06, Rex Murphy, Adrienne Clarkson: the personal and the political, (Source).
22/09/06, Rex Murphy, Tolerance must flow two ways, (Source).
23/09/06, Rex Murphy, Adrienne Clarkson: the personal and the political, (Back).
Heart Matters by Adrienne Clarkson
Viking Canada, 257 pages, $38
But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
The quotation is from Christopher Marlowe, and the word "regiment," on which it turns, here carries a meaning of "authority," "sway," " rule" and, quite possibly, something close to our modern terms "status" and "prestige." Regiment in this context is a constellation of all of these meanings. The authority of a real king was always a fasces of tangible power -- command over life and death, the control of armies, unquestioned rule -- and the invisible but equally mighty influences of dread and reverence.
It's no news that kings (or queens) aren't what they used to be. Their regiment has decayed and vanished. Modern-day royals, most emphatically the set at Buckingham Palace with which Canada has historical and constitutional associations, exist in a twilight of anachronistic significance, tabloid-feeding celebrity and lower-rank pop-star acclaim.
All of which may be disappointing to those who struggle to hold the monarchy in esteem, and may be poignant, too, but none of it is news to the least-engaged consciousness. It raises the question now, more forcefully than at any other period, about our "ties" to the monarchy, of the value of those ties, particularly the utility and prestige of the one office in our country still bearing the imprimatur of its royal origins: the governor-general.
The case for the governor-general is what I take to be the burden of Adrienne Clarkson's Heart Matters. It is a divided book. It is a memoir of Clarkson's interesting and distinguished life. Its earlier pages are at times an affecting recounting of her family's progress from difficult beginnings and wartime peril, their arrival in Canada, her growing up, the complex, painful yet always affectionate relationship with her mother, her pride in her father, and his in her.
But from the moment the book takes up her adult career, the days of CBC's Take Thirty all the way through to Adrienne Clarkson Presents (to my mind, a real foreshadowing of how she saw herself in the governor-general's office), the book takes on a drier, brisker tone. We depart from subdued recollection and memoir to more bristling justification and defence.
In the old days of luxuriant titles, this section of Heart Matters might have carried the scroll: An Apology for the Office of the Governor-General of Canada and My Contributions to It, Together with Some Observations on the Worth of Politicians, the Male of the Species, the Conduct of Some Others in Lesser Office, and a Return of Fire to the Last Prime Minister But One, Mr. Paul Martin. for His Imperfect Treatment of the G-G.
Clarkson thinks very highly of the office of governor-general, an opinion that any reading of Heart Matters will confirm is not entirely unhinged from the fact that she held it. She seems to believe that this last echo of Canada's colonial beginnings under an imperial flag has a merit and vitality crucial to the understanding, perhaps even the survival, of the glorious experiment we call Canada. This is a high-voltage estimation of what is at best a decorative, expensive, ceremonial survival.
In the 21st century, royalty has been decanted of all its mystique, seriousness and point. Insofar as the office of the G-G is presumed to be a surrogate representation of the "real thing" in Great Britain, of what possible value can it be? The British royals have become vessels of the most ordinary clay, and set an almost Alpine standard of dysfunction, vulgarity, selfishness and self-absorption. All regiment is gone. So the office of G-G is only a second-hand, down-market edition of something that has lost its function and place. We have the shadow of the tattered shadow.
Clarkson romanticizes both the life and function of Rideau Hall, and seems to think its pious protocols and dusty duties are of real power, that the advice of a G-G to a prime minister, or where a cabinet should be sworn in, are matters on which the edifice of the modern state may depend.
All the hymns, I suppose, however boring, are lovely if you're the bishop of the cathedral. And a five-year stint at the top of the social order -- one area in which the charisma of royal surrogacy still has cogency -- must be a very pleasant interlude. Rideau Hall is still an address to conjure with, and the position of governor-general has the considerable charm of being the cynosure of a continuous garden party. The governor-general gets to open Parliament, drive around in a barouche, host literati and distribute medals, meet the interesting of foreign nations, and take first rank at every occasion of national ceremony.
There is not one of these duties or recreations that would be diminished one whit, jot or tittle were it to be performed or exercised by a ceremonial head of state who owed nothing to the Crown or its by-now very mixed traditions..
Heart Matters offers some not encouraging illustrations of Clarkson's judgment. The first is that there is a Heart Matters at all. So much of the argument stands on the importance of certain traditions and codes that adhere to the office of governor-general -- from the vital secrecy imposed on those invited to hold the office until the invitation is confirmed, to the necessity of swearing in cabinet officers at Rideau Hall, and the propriety of consultations by a given prime minister with the G-G herself -- that it is a shock that Clarkson has violated the deepest sanction of them all. She has turned publicist while her imprint is still warm on those vice-regal cushions.
Does not discretion adhere to the office so late venerated and vacated? Nannies to Donald Trump may write tell-alls in the age of faux-celebrity (and I think they should be encouraged to do so). I applaud "personal assistants" to tyrannous and mouth-breathing rock stars who launch rockets of steamy prose at the bottoms they so ravenously kissed. Politicians who have been "passed over" by their leaders may strike deadly blows in return.
We now know how highly she thinks of Jean Chrétien and his wife Aline, and begrudge her none of that obliging warmth. But the gratitude describes a self-serving loop. Chrétien appointed her, and it would be a rude doyenne of Rideau Hall who did not see the wisdom of the man who set her there. I wonder, now that an ex-governor-general has set the illustrious example, how long we shall have to wait for the aides, valets, caterers and assorted functionaries of Rideau Hall to oil up their laptops and give us the view from below the stairs of the Clarkson-Ralston Saul era.
The loyalty to Chrétien wanders into something like an outright attack on his successor. It is evident that Clarkson does not like Paul Martin, and I am wondering why all of Canada should know this now. She obviously sees him, and those who assisted him, as tacky and vulgar. They want a different venue for their swearing-in. Clarkson will have none of it. And when the G-G's wishes prevail over the elected prime minister's, some of these rubes show up at Rideau Hall in sneakers and T-shirts.
Clarkson has great confidence in herself as an observer. This may be a byproduct of her time as a journalist. I am not sure that confidence is buttressed by a passage in which she speaks of her ability to see the large view of things "in the way that Tolstoy saw the whole field in describing the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace." This passage comes at the tail end of an account of the great PR difficulties that surrounded the expensive and crowded "circumpolar junket" of the G-G and 35 or so Canadian worthies. Whatever may have been at stake in that ruckus, I feel it's less in the territory of Tolstoy than of P. G. Wodehouse.
I find my faith in her judgment further estranged by the near-risible certitude of a few of her observations on politicians and men. She adverts at one point to the clotted speculations of Carl Jung, and I feared for a paragraph of two we were on a Ferris wheel of outdated misogyny. If Clarkson believes what she thinks she understands from this Jungian mush, I fear for us all -- men, I mean. Apparently, she does. "My personal view is that the world of politics is like this because it is a male world, with male values -- the worship of triumphalism, contempt for weakness, and distrust of compassion. All of these are male feelings and attributes . . ." There goes half the country. This isn't the world of politics, or the world of journalism, or commerce, or science. It's a five-cent version of adolescent feminism.
It might have been useful to have something a little closer to reality and experience, some reflections on politics and journalism, the showbiz quotient of both, and what advantages those who know the media give and take from each other. What did Chrétien receive from Clarkson? Among other gifts, her celebrity. Canadian celebrity may be low-voltage compared to its U.S. archetype, but there is some virtue for the politician who can call upon someone already known to Canadians.
Clarkson, however, emphatically says, "I despise the idea of celebrity." Coming from one of our most famous people, this is a curious turn. I may offer it as a personal axiom that people do not choose television for a career because they wish to consolidate their anonymity. Before she became G-G, Adrienne Clarkson was a very big name. She was almost as famous as Don Cherry.
As governor-general, she refused to give autographs because, "I could not see giving a movie-star kind of quality to an office that should inspire respect." I fear she freighted the office with a more austere conception of its dignity than it can bear. Authors give autographs and literature staggers on.
And the "movie star quality" of the G-G's office may be the only real lever to extending its decaying impact in a media age. Clarkson's successor, Michaëlle Jean, is going to be a powerful presence simply by virtue of the fact that her innate "star quality" now has a stage on which to exert itself.
Finally, Heart Matters itself will not suffer at the bookstores because it is something of a tell-all written by a celebrity who occupied the nation's highest constitutional office.
Heart Matters is, as I have said, a divided affair. The portion of it that is family and personal memoir has considerable charm. It shows those qualities of confidence, application, ambition, intelligence and familial affection that established Adrienne Clarkson as a successful broadcaster and made her a national presence admired by many.
Its other half, on the significance of Rideau Hall as a fulcrum for national enlightenment, with its laboured esteem for the prime minister who awarded her with placement within its gilded walls, and her aggressive broadsides against the less enlightened one who succeeded him, is a disappointment and a contradiction.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
22/09/06, Rex Murphy, Tolerance must flow two ways, (Back).
It is not often that lectures on the finer points of theology and philosophy, delivered from so retired a venue as the University of Regensburg, turn the world, or at least a good part of it, on its ear. But it must be said as well that not every lecturer is the Bishop of Rome.
In Pope Benedict XIV's lecture, one that may be fairly characterized as both subtle and erudite, we have a talk whose explosiveness was almost entirely determined by a few words in it, and the fact it was the Pope who gave it.
Most of the Pope's address was a nuanced exploration of the relations between reason and faith. A good sense of the tone and nature of his talk, which is readily available in full on the Internet, may be taken from this sentence, which contains, as I see it, its central thesis: “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”
Hardly a red-flag item, even for the most excitable bull.
It was a few words of that address, which were cited by His Holiness to assist in the illustration of an elegant argument, a quotation from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, that ignited, or at least has been the occasion for igniting, a great storm across parts of the Muslim world. The quotation and the words leading to it are these: “he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
That one-sentence quotation of an ancient emperor, from an otherwise quiescent address, has set off a fury of anger and outrage. Churches were attacked in the West Bank, there have been demonstrations, and the Pope reviled as another Hitler or Mussolini.
Pope Benedict has invited Muslim envoys for talks, and has twice expressed his regret for the reaction to his lecture, but — and this is not the same thing — he has not apologized for his talk. Nor should he.
The fury in the Muslim world following the Pope's talk seems similar in two respects to the greater fury that followed the publication of those now famous Danish cartoons. The first similarity is that the volume and spread of outraged response gives every evidence of having been mobilized or concerted. That there is here, in other words, a “determination” to display outrage, less as evidence of profoundly wounded religious sensibility, than as political leverage against the West.
Not that I question some Muslims may well have taken deep offence in both instances, but that the offence taken has been magnified, and perhaps manipulated, for secondary motives.
The second point uniting these episodes, the point that I think the more consequential, is the expectation from some Muslim authorities that their sensibilities and beliefs are owed, as of right, a singular respect and immunity from all negative comment and remark. It is more than curious that those who don't believe in Islam should be expected to uphold the same codes of respect as those who do.
There attends this expectation, sometimes phrased as a demand, a further one: that should “offence” be taken, then whatever violence should ensue — be it rioting, the burning of churches, or death threats — must be laid at the door of the parties who “insult” Islam, not those who undertake violence in response.
These considerations are troubling. First, because the respect and privilege claimed by some Muslims is not afforded religions other than their own in their societies. There is a magnificent mosque in Rome close to the Vatican. Do I need to say there is no basilica in Mecca? One religion should not claim rights it will not afford to all others. In too many Muslim countries, Christianity is institutionally — and this is a kind word — disadvantaged.
Secondly, the rhetorical violence visited on Christianity and Judaism (“apes,” “pigs,” “crusaders,” “infidels”) by various Muslim spokespeople is both fervid and frequent, and in some of its expression, utterly eclipses in its ferocity and deliberateness either the bywords of the Pope here, or the famous cartoons.
Tolerance, like its elder, respect, is very much an equal current that flows between two parties. I cannot see how burning churches — as happened in the West Bank — or crude attacks upon, and threats against, the Pope, provide a foundation to calls for “greater sensitivity toward Islam.”
There are precious things in the West, too, two of which are freedom of speech and critical analysis. Storms of outrage, and almost predictable violence after every perceived slight, leaves me feeling that the cardinal values of the West will wait a long time for a portion of that respect that parts of the Muslim world insist upon, immediately and in full, as their due.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
(Back)
22/09/06, Rex Murphy, Tolerance must flow two ways, (Source).
23/09/06, Rex Murphy, Adrienne Clarkson: the personal and the political, (Back).
Heart Matters by Adrienne Clarkson
Viking Canada, 257 pages, $38
But what are kings, when regiment is gone,
The quotation is from Christopher Marlowe, and the word "regiment," on which it turns, here carries a meaning of "authority," "sway," " rule" and, quite possibly, something close to our modern terms "status" and "prestige." Regiment in this context is a constellation of all of these meanings. The authority of a real king was always a fasces of tangible power -- command over life and death, the control of armies, unquestioned rule -- and the invisible but equally mighty influences of dread and reverence.
It's no news that kings (or queens) aren't what they used to be. Their regiment has decayed and vanished. Modern-day royals, most emphatically the set at Buckingham Palace with which Canada has historical and constitutional associations, exist in a twilight of anachronistic significance, tabloid-feeding celebrity and lower-rank pop-star acclaim.
All of which may be disappointing to those who struggle to hold the monarchy in esteem, and may be poignant, too, but none of it is news to the least-engaged consciousness. It raises the question now, more forcefully than at any other period, about our "ties" to the monarchy, of the value of those ties, particularly the utility and prestige of the one office in our country still bearing the imprimatur of its royal origins: the governor-general.
The case for the governor-general is what I take to be the burden of Adrienne Clarkson's Heart Matters. It is a divided book. It is a memoir of Clarkson's interesting and distinguished life. Its earlier pages are at times an affecting recounting of her family's progress from difficult beginnings and wartime peril, their arrival in Canada, her growing up, the complex, painful yet always affectionate relationship with her mother, her pride in her father, and his in her.
But from the moment the book takes up her adult career, the days of CBC's Take Thirty all the way through to Adrienne Clarkson Presents (to my mind, a real foreshadowing of how she saw herself in the governor-general's office), the book takes on a drier, brisker tone. We depart from subdued recollection and memoir to more bristling justification and defence.
In the old days of luxuriant titles, this section of Heart Matters might have carried the scroll: An Apology for the Office of the Governor-General of Canada and My Contributions to It, Together with Some Observations on the Worth of Politicians, the Male of the Species, the Conduct of Some Others in Lesser Office, and a Return of Fire to the Last Prime Minister But One, Mr. Paul Martin. for His Imperfect Treatment of the G-G.
Clarkson thinks very highly of the office of governor-general, an opinion that any reading of Heart Matters will confirm is not entirely unhinged from the fact that she held it. She seems to believe that this last echo of Canada's colonial beginnings under an imperial flag has a merit and vitality crucial to the understanding, perhaps even the survival, of the glorious experiment we call Canada. This is a high-voltage estimation of what is at best a decorative, expensive, ceremonial survival.
In the 21st century, royalty has been decanted of all its mystique, seriousness and point. Insofar as the office of the G-G is presumed to be a surrogate representation of the "real thing" in Great Britain, of what possible value can it be? The British royals have become vessels of the most ordinary clay, and set an almost Alpine standard of dysfunction, vulgarity, selfishness and self-absorption. All regiment is gone. So the office of G-G is only a second-hand, down-market edition of something that has lost its function and place. We have the shadow of the tattered shadow.
Clarkson romanticizes both the life and function of Rideau Hall, and seems to think its pious protocols and dusty duties are of real power, that the advice of a G-G to a prime minister, or where a cabinet should be sworn in, are matters on which the edifice of the modern state may depend.
All the hymns, I suppose, however boring, are lovely if you're the bishop of the cathedral. And a five-year stint at the top of the social order -- one area in which the charisma of royal surrogacy still has cogency -- must be a very pleasant interlude. Rideau Hall is still an address to conjure with, and the position of governor-general has the considerable charm of being the cynosure of a continuous garden party. The governor-general gets to open Parliament, drive around in a barouche, host literati and distribute medals, meet the interesting of foreign nations, and take first rank at every occasion of national ceremony.
There is not one of these duties or recreations that would be diminished one whit, jot or tittle were it to be performed or exercised by a ceremonial head of state who owed nothing to the Crown or its by-now very mixed traditions..
Heart Matters offers some not encouraging illustrations of Clarkson's judgment. The first is that there is a Heart Matters at all. So much of the argument stands on the importance of certain traditions and codes that adhere to the office of governor-general -- from the vital secrecy imposed on those invited to hold the office until the invitation is confirmed, to the necessity of swearing in cabinet officers at Rideau Hall, and the propriety of consultations by a given prime minister with the G-G herself -- that it is a shock that Clarkson has violated the deepest sanction of them all. She has turned publicist while her imprint is still warm on those vice-regal cushions.
Does not discretion adhere to the office so late venerated and vacated? Nannies to Donald Trump may write tell-alls in the age of faux-celebrity (and I think they should be encouraged to do so). I applaud "personal assistants" to tyrannous and mouth-breathing rock stars who launch rockets of steamy prose at the bottoms they so ravenously kissed. Politicians who have been "passed over" by their leaders may strike deadly blows in return.
We now know how highly she thinks of Jean Chrétien and his wife Aline, and begrudge her none of that obliging warmth. But the gratitude describes a self-serving loop. Chrétien appointed her, and it would be a rude doyenne of Rideau Hall who did not see the wisdom of the man who set her there. I wonder, now that an ex-governor-general has set the illustrious example, how long we shall have to wait for the aides, valets, caterers and assorted functionaries of Rideau Hall to oil up their laptops and give us the view from below the stairs of the Clarkson-Ralston Saul era.
The loyalty to Chrétien wanders into something like an outright attack on his successor. It is evident that Clarkson does not like Paul Martin, and I am wondering why all of Canada should know this now. She obviously sees him, and those who assisted him, as tacky and vulgar. They want a different venue for their swearing-in. Clarkson will have none of it. And when the G-G's wishes prevail over the elected prime minister's, some of these rubes show up at Rideau Hall in sneakers and T-shirts.
Clarkson has great confidence in herself as an observer. This may be a byproduct of her time as a journalist. I am not sure that confidence is buttressed by a passage in which she speaks of her ability to see the large view of things "in the way that Tolstoy saw the whole field in describing the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace." This passage comes at the tail end of an account of the great PR difficulties that surrounded the expensive and crowded "circumpolar junket" of the G-G and 35 or so Canadian worthies. Whatever may have been at stake in that ruckus, I feel it's less in the territory of Tolstoy than of P. G. Wodehouse.
I find my faith in her judgment further estranged by the near-risible certitude of a few of her observations on politicians and men. She adverts at one point to the clotted speculations of Carl Jung, and I feared for a paragraph of two we were on a Ferris wheel of outdated misogyny. If Clarkson believes what she thinks she understands from this Jungian mush, I fear for us all -- men, I mean. Apparently, she does. "My personal view is that the world of politics is like this because it is a male world, with male values -- the worship of triumphalism, contempt for weakness, and distrust of compassion. All of these are male feelings and attributes . . ." There goes half the country. This isn't the world of politics, or the world of journalism, or commerce, or science. It's a five-cent version of adolescent feminism.
It might have been useful to have something a little closer to reality and experience, some reflections on politics and journalism, the showbiz quotient of both, and what advantages those who know the media give and take from each other. What did Chrétien receive from Clarkson? Among other gifts, her celebrity. Canadian celebrity may be low-voltage compared to its U.S. archetype, but there is some virtue for the politician who can call upon someone already known to Canadians.
Clarkson, however, emphatically says, "I despise the idea of celebrity." Coming from one of our most famous people, this is a curious turn. I may offer it as a personal axiom that people do not choose television for a career because they wish to consolidate their anonymity. Before she became G-G, Adrienne Clarkson was a very big name. She was almost as famous as Don Cherry.
As governor-general, she refused to give autographs because, "I could not see giving a movie-star kind of quality to an office that should inspire respect." I fear she freighted the office with a more austere conception of its dignity than it can bear. Authors give autographs and literature staggers on.
And the "movie star quality" of the G-G's office may be the only real lever to extending its decaying impact in a media age. Clarkson's successor, Michaëlle Jean, is going to be a powerful presence simply by virtue of the fact that her innate "star quality" now has a stage on which to exert itself.
Finally, Heart Matters itself will not suffer at the bookstores because it is something of a tell-all written by a celebrity who occupied the nation's highest constitutional office.
Heart Matters is, as I have said, a divided affair. The portion of it that is family and personal memoir has considerable charm. It shows those qualities of confidence, application, ambition, intelligence and familial affection that established Adrienne Clarkson as a successful broadcaster and made her a national presence admired by many.
Its other half, on the significance of Rideau Hall as a fulcrum for national enlightenment, with its laboured esteem for the prime minister who awarded her with placement within its gilded walls, and her aggressive broadsides against the less enlightened one who succeeded him, is a disappointment and a contradiction.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
22/09/06, Rex Murphy, Tolerance must flow two ways, (Back).
It is not often that lectures on the finer points of theology and philosophy, delivered from so retired a venue as the University of Regensburg, turn the world, or at least a good part of it, on its ear. But it must be said as well that not every lecturer is the Bishop of Rome.
In Pope Benedict XIV's lecture, one that may be fairly characterized as both subtle and erudite, we have a talk whose explosiveness was almost entirely determined by a few words in it, and the fact it was the Pope who gave it.
Most of the Pope's address was a nuanced exploration of the relations between reason and faith. A good sense of the tone and nature of his talk, which is readily available in full on the Internet, may be taken from this sentence, which contains, as I see it, its central thesis: “Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true?”
Hardly a red-flag item, even for the most excitable bull.
It was a few words of that address, which were cited by His Holiness to assist in the illustration of an elegant argument, a quotation from a 14th-century Byzantine emperor, that ignited, or at least has been the occasion for igniting, a great storm across parts of the Muslim world. The quotation and the words leading to it are these: “he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness which leaves us astounded, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: ‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”
That one-sentence quotation of an ancient emperor, from an otherwise quiescent address, has set off a fury of anger and outrage. Churches were attacked in the West Bank, there have been demonstrations, and the Pope reviled as another Hitler or Mussolini.
Pope Benedict has invited Muslim envoys for talks, and has twice expressed his regret for the reaction to his lecture, but — and this is not the same thing — he has not apologized for his talk. Nor should he.
The fury in the Muslim world following the Pope's talk seems similar in two respects to the greater fury that followed the publication of those now famous Danish cartoons. The first similarity is that the volume and spread of outraged response gives every evidence of having been mobilized or concerted. That there is here, in other words, a “determination” to display outrage, less as evidence of profoundly wounded religious sensibility, than as political leverage against the West.
Not that I question some Muslims may well have taken deep offence in both instances, but that the offence taken has been magnified, and perhaps manipulated, for secondary motives.
The second point uniting these episodes, the point that I think the more consequential, is the expectation from some Muslim authorities that their sensibilities and beliefs are owed, as of right, a singular respect and immunity from all negative comment and remark. It is more than curious that those who don't believe in Islam should be expected to uphold the same codes of respect as those who do.
There attends this expectation, sometimes phrased as a demand, a further one: that should “offence” be taken, then whatever violence should ensue — be it rioting, the burning of churches, or death threats — must be laid at the door of the parties who “insult” Islam, not those who undertake violence in response.
These considerations are troubling. First, because the respect and privilege claimed by some Muslims is not afforded religions other than their own in their societies. There is a magnificent mosque in Rome close to the Vatican. Do I need to say there is no basilica in Mecca? One religion should not claim rights it will not afford to all others. In too many Muslim countries, Christianity is institutionally — and this is a kind word — disadvantaged.
Secondly, the rhetorical violence visited on Christianity and Judaism (“apes,” “pigs,” “crusaders,” “infidels”) by various Muslim spokespeople is both fervid and frequent, and in some of its expression, utterly eclipses in its ferocity and deliberateness either the bywords of the Pope here, or the famous cartoons.
Tolerance, like its elder, respect, is very much an equal current that flows between two parties. I cannot see how burning churches — as happened in the West Bank — or crude attacks upon, and threats against, the Pope, provide a foundation to calls for “greater sensitivity toward Islam.”
There are precious things in the West, too, two of which are freedom of speech and critical analysis. Storms of outrage, and almost predictable violence after every perceived slight, leaves me feeling that the cardinal values of the West will wait a long time for a portion of that respect that parts of the Muslim world insist upon, immediately and in full, as their due.
Rex Murphy is a commentator with CBC-TV's The National and host of CBC Radio One's Cross-Country Checkup.
(Back)
Home