A question of b-lansh

“Being afraid of the truth
You tolerate the lie,
Pick up so much garbage in your youth,
Stuff you can’t unlearn if you try...”
From The Curse of Bachchoo????????????????? ?

I found myself on the same side of an argument as Hillary Clinton, Presidents Obama, Karzai and Zardari, the Prime Ministers of Indonesia and India, some potentate or spokesman of a potentate of Saudi Arabia, as William Hague, the Tory foreign secretary of the UK — and instinctively began to doubt its soundness. Then I reminded myself of a half-remembered quote from Voltaire about not agreeing with an opponent but defending to the death his or her right to assert the disagreeable opinion. This confused me even further — not something I readily admit to in life or print.
I allude, as the reader will have guessed, to the threat by Terry Jones, the Floridan head of a Christian church, who threatened to ceremonially burn copies of the Quran on 11th of September, the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers of New York.
The government of America, from the President downwards, told the world that there was nothing legal they could do to prevent Jones from staging this demonstration except to warn and beg him not to do it. The other heads of state, not subject to the American Constitution and its provision of the absolute right to burn books and publicise controversial opinions, called on Obama to stop Jones, ban him, lock him up, try him for blasphemy, send him to Guantanamo or Siberia, declare him a Maoist and shoot him in an “encounter”... (perhaps they didn’t go that far, I exaggerate to make a point).
Nevertheless, it was enlightening to see Obama and Hillary, condemning and pleading because it demonstrated the power of the American Constitution and, in a perverse way, the strength of its democracy.
My confusion arose from my admiration for Voltaire. Had he been alive, would he have supported to the death Jones’ right to burn the Quran? He would have known, or I would have told him, that Jones and his crew would provoke riots all over and, almost certainly, through a machinery of belief to which?neither he nor I subscribe, cause the death of innocent people. I would have pointed out to Voltaireji the paradox his quote had generated — he didn’t believe that the Quran was the word of God, but he would have to defend to the death the right of those who did believe it and presumably their right to act upon that belief through rioting, mayhem and even murder.
Jones’ threat, a reaction he said to the proposal to build a mosque near Ground Zero, was misplaced. The Quran is the holy book of all Muslims and not that of terrorists. Muslims are expressly enjoined to refrain from hijacking travellers and killing them (in the days in which it was written these were caravans and not scheduled passenger flights, but the intent is clear and the principle the same). The guilt of the black sheep does not incriminate the herd, the acts of Satan, because he used to be an angel, doesn’t condemn heaven... etc.
While making an exception of the Quran and the Guru Granth Sahib, for purely pragmatic rather than theological reasons, I am not against the burning of books.
Waking up one day in London and hearing that Salman Rushdie’s book, a proof copy of which he had sent me and which I had read, was being ceremonially burnt in Bradford, I succumbed to a small fit of envy. For a week or two I contemplated the publication of my next book and thought it would be ideal if some group took against it so strongly that they bought 40,000 copies and burnt them. The book would instantly go into a second edition and the royalties would, minus my agent’s fee of course, pour in.
I was not to know then that the book burning would lead in a chain, whose logic only the believers understand, to an injunction to murder Salman. For my safely profiteering purposes, I would have to seek out a group of book-burners who would restrict their objection to demonstrations and wouldn’t escalate their opposition to a bounty on my head.
Burn, baby, burn! — but buy the copies first!
The closest I got to book-burning, apart from hostile reviews of which there have been a few, was a demonstration outside a London school against a book of my short stories called East End At Your Feet. The book, published in England, was being used in the English department of schools.
My editor at Macmillan rang one morning in a state of some excitement and despair, to say that a sizeable demonstration of parents had gathered outside a London school’s gates to protest against the use of the book, pronouncing it “obscene”.
My first thought was that that should shift a few copies.
It probably did but it also gave me my 15 minutes of fame. The next day the Daily Telegraph, edited by a very respected and senior journalist called William Deedes, devoted an editorial to my humble fiction, calling it obscene and objecting to its use in schools. The editorial provoked a TV chat show to arrange a debate between Mr Deedes and myself.
Journalist friends had used the intervening hours to dig around and they found that the parents’ demonstration had been initiated by a lady who had unsuccessfully stood as a parliamentary candidate for the National Front, the anti-immigrant fascistic British political party. Mr Deedes was either unaware of this salient fact, or had chosen to ignore it in his editorial.
I tackled him on the point. Was he aware that the demonstration may not have been occasioned by the “F” word which appeared in one of my stories in the quoted lines of a Rolling Stones song, but by the fact that all the stories featured black and Asian teenagers to whose presence in the country the National Front objected?
“Ah”, said Deedes in an upper class Churchillian drawl. “My dear boy, itsh all a kweshchun of b-lansh!”
I didn’t get it till he held up both hands as though weighing objects in each and repeated the word: “b-lansh”, with the accent on the second syllable.
He meant “balance”?and I have retained his wonderful conceit as a signal memory of that censorious episode.