Some forms of intolerance must never be tolerated
We waste so much time demanding the scalp of an old white man who tells a bad joke that we have failed to take seriously a Muslim preacher who delivers a ‘kill Jews” sermon in Sydney.
The greatest virtue, and challenge, to free societies has always been our freedoms. We have the freedom to disagree over so many matters, even over where to draw the line when it comes to tolerating the intolerant. Those disagreements are healthy – up to a point. Philosopher Karl Popper called it the paradox of tolerance. In a free society we are meant to tolerate the intolerant. But there is a point when appeasing intolerance becomes a death wish.
The paradox, and the extremes, of our tolerance for the intolerant came to life in Bankstown’s Al Madina Dawah Centre last week when Muslim cleric Abu Ousayd delivered a sermon about killing Jews.
Ousayd is his new name. This man is better known as jihadi preacher Wissam Haddad, who previously has expressed support for terrorist groups Islamic State and al-Qa’ida.
Haddad cited Islamic scripture and parables about “the end of times” when Muslims would be fighting Jews and “the trees will speak”. “They will say ‘oh Muslim, there is a yahud (Arabic for Jew) behind me, come and kill him’,” Haddad said.
As this newspaper also revealed, Haddad has a long history of preaching hatred from Islamic centres in southwest Sydney. More recently, after the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas in Israel, he said in a sermon: “If all the Muslims in that region (the Middle East) spat on Israel, the people of Israel would drown, the Jews would drown.”
As one of freedom’s great virtues, tolerating the intolerant has proven to be one of the most difficult to navigate. Our increasing confusion about tolerance has become an invitation for Muslim clerics such as Haddad to game those freedoms.
We waste so much time demanding the scalp of an old white man who tells a bad joke or a woman who believes only a biological woman is a woman that we have failed to take seriously a Muslim preacher who delivers a “kill Jews” sermon to his followers in suburban Sydney.
In a video posted this week, Ousayd said there was “nothing to condemn” in his words and “last time I checked we were in Australia, not North Korea”.
The Muslim cleric is gaming free speech, and why not? Though Popper also said “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance”, the hard question is where to place the limits.
The challenge is twofold. In polite society, in our most elite institutions, in universities and bureaucracies, in corporations and other workplaces of influence, there are growing numbers of people who fundamentally have misunderstood the importance of tolerating things those people find deeply offensive.
In 1999 Chandran Kukathas spoke at Parliament House. This was before 9/11 but in the heyday of One Nation and amid roiling debates about multiculturalism. The former chair of political theory at London School of Economics said toleration was never meant to be easy, that it was a virtue precisely because it was not easy. “And it is not easy because it requires us to admit, or accept, or put up with, or endure, or condone, or suffer, or permit, or indulge, or stomach, or swallow things we cannot abide, or bear, or stand, or countenance, or take,” he said.
It is a challenge for free societies, as Kukathas said: “To tolerate is to put up with things (or people) we dislike or disapprove of – particularly when we are in a position to suppress them.
“This is why it is a difficult virtue; and also why it has fewer friends than many think. And this is why there is a case for making a case for toleration.”
Right now, in some quarters of polite society, it is a bridge too far to say “woman” means a biological woman. Just ask JK Rowling. Using the wrong pronoun can get you into all sorts of trouble. Check with Jordan Peterson about that. Challenge climate science in any way, even with impeccably scientific method, and you might get a bollocking, or the boot, from your university. That happened to physicist Peter Ridd.
The growing number of people favouring conformity over intellectual freedom, calling for intervention by employers and even the law, is a sure sign large swaths of our society do not understand the paradox of tolerance. These illiberal thought controllers have misunderstood that a free society must, as philosopher John Rawls says, “have the confidence to limit the freedom of the intolerant only in the special cases when it is necessary for preserving equal liberty itself”.
Tragically, we have pandered to them by creating legal remedies to complain about the merely offensive, yet turning a blind eye to what should be pursued and punished – namely violence and incitements to violence.
While the professionally offended classes are bleating about bad jokes and wrong pronouns, they – and we – seem uninterested in the few special cases where we should draw the line – namely incitement to violence. Haddad’s sermons are one of those cases.
This is our second problem. Too often we do tolerate what we should not – namely threats of, or incitement to, violence. For many, a sermon about killing Jews ranks below someone using the wrong pronoun and other breaches of trans shibboleths. Many of the same people who carry on about trigger warnings and the need for inclusive language now march in our streets proclaiming that Palestinians “should be free from the river to the sea”.
Alas, we must tolerate the idiocy of this, even though these chants on the streets of Western democracies may embolden Hamas terrorists whose fundamental objective is the destruction of the state of Israel.
But we should not tolerate a Muslim cleric preaching death to Jews from the pulpit of an Islamic centre in southwest Sydney. We have laws that criminalise incitement to violence. They should be used sparingly. And they are.
Australia, along with other Western democracies, has a long history of making accommodations for those who want to undermine our free country.
Nine years ago next month, as Sydneysiders were counting down to the Christmas holidays, Man Haron Monis murdered two Australians in the name of Islam after a 16½-hour siege where he took 18 people hostage. This man was known for his anti-West hatred. He told us about it. He was on our radar. He was known to our security services, federal police and NSW police. A month before he took innocent people hostage, he posted online his hatred of the West, he wrote about his allegiance to Islamic State. Still, we allowed Monis to roam free among us.
Even before we faced the blight of Islamic terrorism, before 21st-century wokeness translated into intellectual intolerance, Kukathas pointed out that one of the costs of being a free society is that it makes it easier for those who want to undermine it.
“The alternative, or one possible solution to this,” he said, “is to have much tougher laws, regulation, police powers, state powers, to try to suppress this, to make sure that we are never endangered by dissidents, by terrorists and so on. But of course this runs the risk of turning the society into precisely the kind of thing that you want to protect it from, from these underminers. So, what do you do? Do you let it be undermined by those who take this course, or do you, in effect, undermine it yourself?”
Kukathas said free societies had to take the risk. And that’s why free societies are always more at risk from acts of terrorism. They are open societies where people can move about freely. “Living freely, to some extent, means living dangerously,” he said. That is undoubtedly true. It’s why freedom demands that we must risk the merely offensive.
But we must not tolerate violence or the threat of it. At the moment we have drawn the line in exactly the wrong place – we tolerate incitement to violence but not behaviour that is merely offensive. Recall how people cheered section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act being used against Andrew Bolt for questioning aboriginality. Yet now it’s crickets when it comes to a Muslim preacher whose language, at minimum, winks at the killing of Jews.
Haddad may imagine he is clever enough to game our confusion. He may imagine that quoting from Islamic scripture and parables about killing Jews offers him the haven of religious freedom. Enough with the games. Clear, and different, judgments are called for now. Some forms of intolerance cross Popper’s line – they are so dangerous they cannot be tolerated, even or especially in a free society. It is good news that this week Australian Federal Police referred Haddad’s actions to a counter-terrorism squad for assessment. Our law enforcement agencies need to set this man, and the rest of the country, straight. If a person calls for Jews to be killed, that person crosses a line into intolerance that we should never tolerate.
More Coverage
Seething disdain for Israel goes right to the top at unis
Universities are not helplessly beset by mutant radical groups espousing anti-Semitism. They themselves subscribe to that anti-Semitism, albeit without the loudspeakers.
For ABC viewers, reality must come as quite a shock
The Auschwitz fail may be the last straw for our toxic, taxpayer-funded broadcaster and its warped anti-journalism.