Keeping us quiet, for heaven’s sake

The Maronite Church should have allowed Al-Manar and NBN to continue showing an Iranian television series on the life of Jesus Christ, based on the so-called Gospel of Barnabas. The program was discontinued last week due to Christian discontent.

Bishop Bechara al-Rai of Jbeil described the television series as a “distortion” of Christianity, and he was right with respect to Catholic orthodoxy. The Gospel of Barnabas, which the Church doesn’t recognize, denies the resurrection of Christ and the crucifixion, and has been picked up by Muslims, or some Muslims, to conform with Islamic doctrine. Muslims consider Jesus to be a prophet, but not divine, and they believe that someone else died on the cross.

However, the details of the Gospel of Barnabas were not the real issue. Something much simpler was: the right to free expression.

Recall that such freedom was curtailed in early summer 2006, when the Bas Mat Watan satire show on LBC show poked fun at Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah. Almost immediately, Nasrallah’s supporters took to the streets of the southern suburbs and closed the airport road, while others marched on non-Shia areas, fighting with Christian youths (among them Sami Gemayel) in Achrafieh. The incident was a coordinated effort by Hezbollah to intimidate its political rivals, but was defended by party sympathizers as a spontaneous reaction to a perceived insult against a religious figure.

This episode came only a few months after mainly Sunni protesters set fire to the building housing the Danish Embassy, following the decision of a Danish newspaper to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Then, too, the event almost degenerated into a sectarian confrontation. The embassy was also in Achrafieh, which not a few of the rioters evidently mistook for Copenhagen, as they vandalized shops and buildings, and insulted inhabitants.

The reasoned response to the two incidents among many people was that things had gone a bit far. And of course they had. But there was disagreement over whether the initial anger was justified or not. For some people, the Shia and Sunni protesters were right to be irate, even if they were wrong in resorting to violent action. For others, probably fewer in number, it was the anger itself that was unjustified. They argued that if freedom of speech was reined in every time someone risked becoming annoyed, particularly on religious matters, Lebanon would never truly develop as a place of free expression.

I admit to belonging to the second group. Free speech and expression should mean, at least most of the time, not having to say you’re sorry.

However, even in liberal societies there have always been exceptions to that rule. France, for example, makes Holocaust denial a punishable offense. In many Western countries, free speech stops at the threshold of public disorder. And in a more absurd instance, this time in the United Kingdom, a woman was legally accused of engaging in anti-social behavior months ago because she frequently became vocal when having sex, disturbing the neighbors.

Rai echoed the public order argument when he observed that the television series “undermines the foundations of every religion and creates strife.” Then he almost immediately tempered this by saying “we don’t burn tires [but] we won’t keep silent.”

That was an interesting way of putting it. In other words, he, or the Christians in whose name he was speaking, would not resort to aggressive behavior, but they would register their displeasure. Isn’t that precisely the essence of civilized protest? But the thing is that Rai, implicitly or explicitly, really just wanted the series to be taken off the air, which is rather different. What he should have done instead is request air time – let’s say after the broadcast – to explain his church’s views of Jesus and the Gospel of Barnabas. That means he should have engaged in an open exchange with the public.

What purpose would this have served? For a start, there is not a very great difference between burning tires and urging television stations to censor a program one doesn’t like. Both aim to silence a specific viewpoint. Somehow societies are much healthier when ideas can be discussed without the sword of restriction hovering overhead.

It makes no sense for Christians to condemn the Bas Mat Watan demonstrations and the burning of the Danish Embassy, then to turn around and claim that a television show, no matter what its content, must be terminated because it has offended their sensibilities. The key point is that public order, as Rai himself admitted, was not under threat. Allowing the show to continue would have led to no serious repercussions. But by the same token, those behind Al-Manar and NBN, like everyone else, should be prepared to suck it up when one of their paragons, religious or secular, is attacked or mocked.

Will this tradeoff occur? Obviously not. Lebanon is still a country where religion retains an archaic, asphyxiating hold on society; where the clergy is a citadel of intellectual and spiritual pettiness, even bone-headedness. However, the clergy also reflects the society it thrives in, and until the Lebanese draw red lines around their men of religion, we will have to prepare for the possibility of violence in the streets and censorship on the air, all in the name of God or his servants.