The Victim-Blaming of Hamit Coskun Points to a Larger Problem

Insults are not violence and the law must not protect offended feelings

(Audio version here)

Hamit Coskun, a Kurdish-Armenian asylum seeker has been found guilty of a religiously aggravated public order offence for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London while insulting Islam. The disorder occurred when he was attacked with a knife, knocked to the ground and kicked by Moussa Kadri, enraged by the insulting of his religion. Coskun was fined £240. Kadri was charged with assault.

Discussion of this on social media has revealed a range of opinions, some of them typically unhinged. Others, however, have been better reasoned. Some people have argued that it was right for Mr. Coskun to be prosecuted because he had been deliberately and publicly trying to provoke Muslims with gross insult of their religion and ‘desecration’ of their holy text. This is the “Well, what did you expect to happen?” defence of violence which is no defence at all. One can expect unjustifiable responses to things to happen and those responses remain unjustifiable. Often the point of provoking them is to highlight the problem of their likelihood and bring this to public attention.

Other people have responded that Mr. Coskun’s traumatic experiences and those of his family members in the name of Islam that occured in Turkey justify his extreme antipathy to the religion and his actions should be regarded with compassion and not prosecuted. This is well-intentioned, undoubtedly, but ‘making excuses’ for Coskun’s protest rather misses the point. Good responses have been made to this that one should not need traumatic personal experiences to be permitted to be harshly critical of any religion or any set of ideas either publicly or privately. Commenters have also pointed out that to prosecute Mr. Coskun on such a charge amounts to the de facto reinstatement of blasphemy laws.

What stands out to me is the alarming reasoning of the judge in the case which seems to tie directly into an illiberal shift in our cultural norms in which people are no longer expected to take responsibility for managing their own emotions and the line between expression of ideas and violence has become blurred. Several commentators have been trying to bring people’s attention to bear on this particular aspect of the case and the dangerous precedent it sets, including the consistently principled Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

There’s a particularly disturbing element to this case. Namely, the judge’s justification for the conviction. The “disorderly” nature of Coskun’s protest, the judge said, “is no better illustrated than by the fact that it led to serious public disorder involving him being assaulted by two different people.”

That’s right, a man’s violent attack on another was cited as evidence of the victim’s guilt.

We must not underestimate the alarming and deeply regressive nature of the reasoning used here. It’s the same one that has been used to justify things like the “Gay panic defence” in which someone seeks to mitigate a violent assault or even murder of a gay man. The attacker claims he was not responsible for his own behaviour because the gay man had so shocked and traumatised him by indicating that he was attracted to him or even just being openly gay in his presence leading him to think he might be. “He produced these violent emotions in me. It’s not my fault.” It is the same reasoning that has been used to excuse rape or sexual assault on the grounds that the assaulted woman was dressed scantily or behaving flirtatiously causing the rapist to lose control of himself and be unable to prevent himself from inflicting terror, pain and violation on another human being. “She evoked great sexual arousal in me. I couldn’t help it.” In both cases, the violent individual seeks to exonerate himself from having any responsibility to manage his own emotions and not inflict on them on other people. He blames the victim.

This is the same reasoning that has been used as one justification for blasphemy laws impacting religious minorities, atheists and dissidents for much of history and still does in many parts of the world today. Blasphemy laws have historically been defended on the grounds that they insult God and can lead others away from God, thus damning their own souls and making the blasphemer a danger to society. In more secular times where the existence of God is not regarded as objectively true and the right to disbelieve has been established and is also the position of at least half the population , many nevertheless continue to consider religious beliefs deserving of a special kind of respect and protection. It is regarded as particularly offensive to insult or mock deeply held religious beliefs or beliefs considered ‘sacred.’ Secularists have long stood against this position and argued that religious beliefs are entitled to exactly the same degree of protection and respect as any other kind of belief which is to say, none at all. Your right to hold your beliefs, express them and live according to them is protected. The right to make other people do so or to speak of your religion with deference and respect does not exist.

It is not that it is untrue to say that people can feel deeply and genuinely hurt, offended, disgusted or outraged by somebody else saying or doing something critical or insulting of their most cherished and sacred beliefs. It is demonstrably true that they can and do, sometimes to the extent that their instinct is to react violently. This kind of extreme emotional response is undoubtedly a facet of human nature. I read an interview with a 17-year-old boy who had taken part in the murder of Farkhunda Malikzada in Afghanistan in which she was beaten, bludgeoned, run over with a car and set on fire by a mob following a (false) allegation that she had set fire to a Quran. He said that some kind of madness of rage had consumed him in which he felt that this young woman must be utterly destroyed and eradicated from the world.

It is precisely because this kind of violent, unreasoning rage and hatred of those who offend our sacred beliefs is one of the darkest and most destructive facets of human nature and is unlikely to ever be removed from our psychology that we must defend societal expectations that they will not be indulged or tolerated. To be a citizen of a liberal democracy in which you are allowed to hold, express and live by your own beliefs and maintain a system in which this is protected, you must commit to the responsibility of managing your own emotions if somebody else insults or mocks those beliefs (or simply does not share them).

Well-intentioned people who want us all to live and let live in mutual respect and understanding often look askance at those of us who defend the right to insult religion; most commonly Islam but occasionally Christianity. “But why would you want to burn Qurans or grossly insult Islam or draw crude cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad?” they ask. “Surely, the motivation behind that can only be hatred of Muslims and a wish to cause them distress?” While some people assuredly do hate Muslims simply because they are Muslims and wish to cause them distress and are deeply unpleasant people, I’d suggest most of us don’t actually want to do any of that at all. We simply want to know that we can without anybody being injured, murdered or having their property set on fire. We need to know that Muslims will commit to the same responsibility held by everybody else to manage their own feelings of hurt, disgust or outrage rather than making it the responsibility of everybody else to ensure that they never feel that way. This commitment is central to preserving the foundations of a liberal society in which people with different religious or political beliefs can live together.

In a discussion last year with a very nice young British Muslim who genuinely held values of religious tolerance and universalism (as well as some ideas about karmic energies being repaid in one’s own lifetime that I am fairly sure are not Islamic), I nevertheless found him unreceptive to the idea that tolerating the insulting of religion was a good thing. British Muslims, he said, needed to respect that they are living in a predominantly Christian country and be good citizens of it and good neighbours. They should be respectful of Christianity and of Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and all religions existing on this island but, at the same time, they had the right to expect the same courtesy in return. Violence could never be justified as a response to insulting religion but the law should prosecute deliberate, provocative insult to any religion. This, he believed, was the way to achieve a harmonious religiously diverse society. It is my perception that this is a common feeling among Muslims and a considerable number of non-Muslims in my country. Of course, violence is an unacceptable response to insulting religion but insulting religion is also hateful and divisive and just unnecessary. We should do something about it.

This troubles me considerably even though I recognise that the motivations for it are not straightforwardly authoritarian or, at least, not perceived as such by proponents of it. On a broader cultural level, it’s not even specifically about protecting religion and punishing religious dissidents. It’s about protecting feelings and punishing people who disturb the peace. This is a peculiarly British thing that is often misunderstood by Americans who misconceive it as a straightforward manifestation of authoritarian wokeness and are then confused that we have also prosecuted people for insulting British soldiers and calling the (conservative) Prime Minister a ‘coconut’ due to his lack of wokeness, as well as rounding up republicans so they could not protest the coronation of the King.

National quirks involving a dislike of ‘making a scene’ aside, however, the UK is following (and sometimes leading) an alarming trend across the Anglosphere towards conflating language with violence and expecting society to ensure that nobody has hurt feelings rather than expecting the offended individual to manage their own feelings of offendedness themselves. This ties in with what sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have called “the rise of victimhood culture.” In their model, as it pertains to insult, we have historically lived in an ‘honour culture’ where insult was taken very personally and responded to with violence to preserve one’s honour. This gave way to a dignity culture in which we understood that insults were generally better off ignored or responded to with words, and only when material harm was done should punitive action be taken and then through legal means. Their contention is that this is now giving way to a ‘victimhood culture’ in which insults are again regarded as intolerable and taken very personally and the ‘go to’ response to this is to appeal to third party authorities to punish the offender. In a Victimhood Culture, the status of ‘victim’ bestows prestige which then incentivises positioning oneself as a victim and does considerable harm to the expectations, norms and even laws of a liberal democracy which are based on a dignity culture.

I find this model of changing social norms and expectations very plausible, especially around issues of insult and the perception of a moral imperative to punish people for hurtful or offensive words or ideas and perceiving them as directly harmful, rather than expecting the individual to take responsibility for their own feelings of hurt or offense. The combination of Victimhood Culture’s approach to dealing with insult and the Honour Culture approach to dealing with it which typically underlies the Muslim objection to insults of the religion or its prophet make for a particularly toxic mix that present a legitimate threat to the continued existence not only of Dignity Culture but the liberal norms and expectations that produced it.

What Manning and Campbell describe as Dignity Culture is, I would argue, one manifestation of the philosophical principles of liberalism in practice. In order to have a society that values individual liberty, resolves conflict without violence and enables the free exchange of ideas that have been so productive of the development of scientific knowledge and human rights, we must protect those fundamental liberal principles. Although many people regard liberalism and the corresponding concept of the “Marketplace of Ideas” as too soft and cerebral a way of managing conflict and defeating bad ideas to be effective, it is nothing of the kind and history bears testament to this. The expectation that people will tolerate ideas they don’t like and criticism of ideas they themselves hold sacred, including in ways that are harsh, uncompromising, insulting or mocking and manage their feelings of outrage or hurt themselves either privately or by responding only with counterargument is a tough one. It is fundamentally difficult for humans to separate words and ideas from physical harm and tolerate the former while having no tolerance for the latter. We have never achieved this perfectly and probably never will. Nevertheless, a culture that has this expectation firmly rooted in its collective psyche and shared cultural norms will do much better at resolving conflict and enabling people with different ideas to coexist peacefully than one that does not. Given that there has never been a time or place in which a society of humans have not held different ideas and engaged in conflict over them, we would do well to protect this expectation uncompromisingly.

The case of Hamit Coskun is a symptom of a wider cultural problem that it is vital we recognise and address as it is. Arguments about whether Mr. Coskun was being deliberately insulting, whether he should have known this would be received badly by some Muslims and whether his own lived experience and those of his family offer some mitigation for his actions are utterly irrelevant to this larger issue. Mr. Coskun could be a delightful chap making an entirely warranted peaceful protest against some specific ideas or a hateful individual who wishes harm upon all Muslim people and the larger issue would remain unchanged. We should be able to be confident that we live in a society where people understand that they are expected to tolerate ideas they find hurtful or offensive, that they are not physically harmed by them, have no right of protection from them and that they have the responsibility to manage their own feelings about them themselves. The judge in this case utterly failed to recognise this important standard and we should be worried about that.