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The Jihad Against Free Speech
The title and subject matter of this week’s entry is borrowed from Edward L. Hudgins’ cover story, “The Jihad Against Free Speech,” in the current (Winter 2006) issue of The New Individualist, the magazine published by The Objectivist Center and Atlas Society. Hudgins’ splendid essay focuses on the “clash of cultures” – the conflict between the cultures and values of the West versus those of Muslim societies – revealed by the recent controversy over the publication of some cartoons, originally in Danish newspapers, depicting the Islam’s founder, the prophet Muhammad. When certain radical Islamist leaders publicized news of the Danish cartoons, large numbers of Muslims worldwide reacted violently, raging and rioting over publications of the cartoons that, in the eyes of many Muslims, were doubly offensive, for they not only violated the taboo of depicting Muhammad but also (in their view) satirized him disrespectfully. (For example, one cartoon – perhaps the most famous, and arguably the most important one – depicts Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.) From the standpoint of Western societies (not only because they are non-Muslim but also especially because they value freedom of expression), the cartoons were serious (albeit satirical) commentary on the ideological links between Islam and terrorist violence. As Hudgins notes, “The new threats against the artists, editors, and publishers responsible for the caricatures of Islam’s founder [are] raising the level of awareness in the West, especially in Europe (where it most needs to be raised) that the civilized world is truly under assault. More and more Western commentators see the threats, the burning of embassies, the killings, and the destruction of property in the Islamic world as an insult, too: an insult to the most basic civilized standards,” which include not only freedom of expression but also toleration, even of ideas and expressions of those ideas that some might regard as not only offensive but also heretical or blasphemous. The current issue of The New Individualist also has the distinction of being the first American magazine to publish one of the controversial Danish cartoons of Mohammed on its very cover – which means it also may be censored by cowardly Americans who have decided to capitulate to Islamic complaints about “blasphemous” cartoons. In “Cartoon Journalists,” a splendid companion piece to New Individualist cover story, editor Robert Bidinotto blasts the “mainstream” media in America for their cowardly failure to publish the controversial Danish cartoons, as they capitulate to Islamist threats and intimidation. Bidinotto observes, “To my knowledge, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the New York Sun, and the Rocky Mountain News are the only significant U.S. papers that dared to publish the cartoons depicting He Who Must Not Be Shown. A few conservative publications—Human Events, The American Spectator—also did so, as did Fox News, and quite a few independent online bloggers. “But the conduct of the rest of the mainstream media has been cowardly and disgraceful. “The New York Times, America’s self-declared “newspaper of record,” editorialized against those papers which ran the cartoons, congratulating itself for its “sensitivity.” CNN, “the most trusted name in news,” similarly declared, “CNN is not showing the negative caricatures of the likeness of the Prophet Mohammed because the network believes its role is to cover the events surrounding the publication of the cartoons while not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy itself.” At the end of stories about the cartoons, the network repeated as a mantra: “CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons out of respect for Islam.” Yet, as Bidinotto adds, media sources like the Times or CNN have not shown such similar respect for other religions, particularly Christianity, or for that matter, for the American military: stories and cartoons that many Christians might consider blasphemous regularly appear in the American media, as have the “inflammatory photos from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.” His explanation: “journalists are scared. That’s right—those brave champions of First Amendment absolutism, so eager to Defend To The Death their sacred right to show U.S. soldiers abusing Muslim prisoners and Christian icons covered in excrement, are desperately trying to hide their abject cowardice behind the billowing skirts of multiculturalist sensitivity.” I agree with Bidinotto’s criticisms of the American media, but I would add that the problem goes farther than cowardice or hypocrisy: the media, unfortunately, reflect both the broader threat posed to freedom of speech by a democratic society (even in the United States) as well as the special threat posed to freedom of speech within the “intellectual elite” cultures of American higher education and the professions, including journalism. (That latter threat arises, as Bidinotto suggests, from “multiculturalist sensitivity” – in other words, from the pernicious influence of radical “multiculturalism” – as well as from the related phenomenon known as “political correctness.”)
The Radical Islamist Threat to Freedom
In my discussion of “The Islamic Threat” in my New Year’s essay, “2006: Prospects for Liberty” (Jan. 4), I maintained that the most visible or obvious threat to liberty on a global scale is Islamist terrorism. And as I further argued, “behind that threat – however un-PC it may be to say so – is the Islamic religion, a religion that is the enemy of individualism and which preaches violence among its essential tenets.” Citing Chapter 4 (“The Problem with Islam”) of Sam Harris’s insightful book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), I noted Harris’s persuasive argument that what makes Islam irreconcilable with Western liberalism is the “irrescindable militancy” of Islam, which is “undeniably a religion of conquest.” As I wrote, “Islam today is like Christianity was in the 14th century; it has yet to experience anything like the Protestant Reformation – yet alone the Enlightenment. Thus, notes Harris, most Muslims are `fundamentalist’ in the Western sense of the word – in that even `moderate’ approaches to Islam generally consider the Koran to be the literal and inerrant word of the one true God. . . . The only future devout Muslims can envisage – as Muslims – is one in which all infidels have been converted to Islam, subjugated, or killed. The tenets of Islam simply do not admit of anything but a temporary sharing of power with the `enemies of God.’ Quoting extensively from the Koran, Harris persuasively makes the case that `[o]n almost every page,’ the book `instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers.’ He maintains that `Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.’”
Muslim societies generally are theocracies, lacking in even the minimal protections that Western secular societies since the Enlightenment have given to an individual’s freedom of religion or conscience – as was poignantly illustrated by the recent case of an Afghan man threatened with capital punishment merely for converting from Islam to Christianity. Muslim nations not only recognize Islam as their official religion but also incorporate that religion into their civil law; they do more than “establish” Islam as a religion, in the Western sense, but in fact deny altogether individuals’ freedom to freely exercise their own religious beliefs (which, of course, includes the freedom to disbelieve dogma, too). That, incidentally, is why is unlikely that even so-called “moderate” Muslim regimes will make much intellectual progress in the near future. As I further noted in quoting from Harris in my January entry, “`Moderate Islam – really moderate, really critical of Muslim irrationality – scarcely seems to exist. If it does, it is doing as good a job at hiding as moderate Christianity did in the fourteenth century (and for similar reasons).’ Harris concludes, ominously, that `we should not ignore the fact that we must now confront whole societies whose moral and political development – in their treatment of women and children, in their prosecution of war, in their approach to criminal justice, and in their very intuitions about what constitutes cruelty – lags behind our own.’” In other words, from the standpoint of Western civilization, Muslim countries are still, literally, “barbarian”: they lack the values that the Western world (i.e., Europe and the Americas) generally regard as fundamental to “civilized” society, including freedom of thought, freedom of opinion and expression (on matters religious as well as political), and toleration. These are societies that simply do not value the rights of free thought and expression – the right of each individual to be free, for himself or herself, to decide what he or she believes and to express his or her opinions publicly, without fear or threat of punishment under the criminal laws for the content of one’s speech. Nowhere in Islam is this problem more evident than in fanatic Muslim leaders call for jihad (literally, “struggle,” but usually translated into English as “holy war”) against those who are guilty, in their eyes, of either “heresy” or blasphemy” – such as the death sentence declared by Iranian clerics on author Salman Rushdie many years ago. The threats made on the Danish cartoonists and the media publications that printed them by Islamists are yet another manifestation of this problem, inherent in Islam itself. As Robert Bidinotto notes, “Offhand, I can think of no other major religion whose followers habitually try to silence their opponents with censorship, death threats, or death itself. Even among today’s religious, radical Muslims stand virtually alone in their unrepentant advocacy of totalitarianism.” (Making essentially the same point, Jeff Jacoby pointed out in a February column, “Hindus may consider it odious to use cows as food, but they do not resort to boycotts, threats, and violence when non-Hindus eat hamburger or steak. They do not demand that everyone abide by the strictures of Hinduism and avoid words and deeds that Hindus might find upsetting.”) It should be emphasized that the Danish cartoons at issue were not merely iconoclastic; they were not gratuitous insults directed against Islam as a religion or against Muhammad as a revered figure. Rather, they were satire – which is a legitimate form of expression of serious ideas, as the history of political cartooning reveals. As Robert Bidinotto observed in an earlier discussion on his blog of “Islam and those `offensive’ cartoons” (Feb. 4), “Mocking the symbols of someone’s views is not the same as satirizing someone’s ideas and arguments. Clever satires of ideas can help clarify intellectual issues.” What exactly did the notorious Danish cartoons depict? As I noted earlier, perhaps the most famous (or infamous) cartoon, by Kurt Westergaard, depicted Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban with a lit fuse. Another, by Rasmus Sand Hǿyer, depicts Muhammad, scimitar in hand with a black blindfold over his eyes, and standing behind him, two Muslim women clad entirely in black with only their eyes showing. And another cartoon, by Arne Sorensen, depicts the cartoonist himself, seated at his drawing table, merely drawing a picture of Muhammad. These were among a dozen or so cartoons, in all, published in the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten on Sept. 30, to criticize what it saw as self-censorship by artists in response to Islamic pressure. As Bidinotto notes, “these cartoons are not crude mockery directed against some revered image as such. Rather, they use the image of Islam’s founder to highlight a crucially important political idea: radical Islam’s assault on human liberty” – or as he aptly characterizes it, “the Islamofascist war against freedom of speech.” As Bidinotto adds, “ironically, the violent reaction of the Islamic world to these cartoons underscores the validity of the cartoonists’ point. For daring to reject an internal dogma of the Islamic religion against portraying Muhammad, the cartoonists have had to go into hiding, fearing deadly reprisals, while Western media and governments are being attacked for even permitting such free expression.” In Pakistan, hundreds of protestors in major cities burned flags and chanted, “Death to Denmark, France, and Norway.” In Damascus, Syria, a protest that began peacefully – with demonstrators chanting, “With our blood and souls, we defend you, O Prophet of God!” – outside the Danish embassy building ended with that building in flames, along with the building housing the Norwegian embassy, 4 miles away. In Indonesia, a Muslim mob vandalized the Danish embassy building. Armed thugs surrounded the EU offices in Gaza, threatening to kidnap citizens of Denmark, France, Norway, and Germany unless those governments apologized for allowing newspapers in their countries to publish the cartoons. And in the Palestinian territories, tens of thousands of protesters marched at a demonstration organized by the newly-elected militant Hamas party, some of them chanting, “Those responsible should have their hands cut off!” Even the nonviolent reactions against the Danish cartoons starkly reveals how little regard Muslim societies have for freedom of thought and expression. Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria recalled their ambassadors to Denmark, while the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others, officially condemned the cartoons. The Pakistani parliament condemned the cartoons as “blasphemous and derogatory,” adding “This vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign cannot be justified in the name of freedom of the press.” A manifesto in Islam Online, which also called the cartoons “blasphemous,” quoted prominent Muslim scholar Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi calling for economic and political boycott of countries that printed the offensive drawings. “It is a fundamental duty of the Muslim nation to boycott goods of those who dared to insult Prophet Muhammad,” Qaradawi declared. As blogger Gary McGath has observed, emphasizing that the cartoons were not published by the Danish government, “What Qaradawi is attacking is not countries that publish unacceptable content, but countries that don’t enact anti-blasphemy laws.” (“US caves in to Islamic thugs,” Feb. 4)
American Democracy and Its Threat to Freedom
There was a time when Christian nations in Europe did punish certain forms of speech – particularly those characterized as “heresy” or “blasphemy” because they disagreed with the dogmas of the Church or were regarded as insulting to its teachings or sacred symbols – but that happened in the medieval period, before those great intellectual movements known as the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and finally, the Enlightenment helped break the intellectual and political stranglehold that Rome held over the West. (For an excellent study of the “dark ages” in the Western world, see Charles Freeman’s book The Closing of the Western Mind (2002).) Among the great philosophical advances made by Western culture, especially over the past three centuries, have been the principles of religious toleration, freedom of speech and press, and, ultimately, separation of church and state – all principles that recognize the Enlightenment idea that freedom of thought and expression, especially concerning one’s own conscience, is a natural, inalienable right of each individual human being, one that no government legitimately may infringe. Under the Constitution of the United States, the First Amendment safeguards religious freedom as well as freedom of speech and freedom of the press (the language of the Amendment prohibits Congress from passing any law that “abridges” those freedoms), and the Fourteenth Amendment (as it has been interpreted by the courts) applies those protections against the states. American courts have applied these constitutional provisions to protect various forms of speech that some might find offensive – for example, to allow a neo-Nazi group to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago; or to allow Communists or white supremacists to preach in a public square; or to allow anti-war protesters to burn the U.S. flag. (The Supreme Court’s decision protecting flag-burning, as a form of what some commentators call “symbolic speech,” was so controversial – because military veterans groups, among others, consider the flag a sacred symbol of patriotism – that it has led to several attempts, thus far [thankfully] unsuccessful, to amend the U.S. Constitution in order to circumvent the First Amendment’s protections and thus allow the government to criminalize desecration of the U.S. flag.) Notwithstanding the tremendous progress (true progress, in the literal sense of the word – as I discuss more fully in my March 16 entry on “Reactionary `Progressives’”) that Western societies, and especially the United States, have made in protecting individuals’ freedom of thought and expression, it’s also true (sadly) that protection for freedom of speech even in the United States today, in practice, falls short of our constitutional ideals. Since the early 20th century, American courts have struggled with the problem of safeguarding free speech from laws that limit it directly (by making criminal certain kinds of speech) or indirectly (by creating a so-called “chilling effect” on freedom of speech). U.S. constitutional law today, despite the high regard that most judges and lawyers have for First Amendment freedoms, nevertheless in many ways falls short of fully protecting individual freedom of expression. Whole categories of speech – speech considered “obscene” or, to a lesser degree, “indecent,” or so-called “commercial speech” (generally commercial advertisements by businesses), and even political speech, in the context of financing political campaigns – are still considered by the courts to be exempt from the protections that the First Amendment gives to freedom of speech or the press. There is a movement that declares that “hate speech” is not really speech and therefore can be suppressed without violating free speech protections; and courts have sanctioned legislatures to do this. And while the courts have sometimes bent over backwards in deferring to free speech concerns in the context of defamation lawsuits or sometimes in copyright infringement lawsuits, in many other respects the courts seem blind to the real “chilling effects” that certain laws pose for true freedom of expression. Even when U.S. law explicitly protects certain forms of freedom – for example, the First Amendment’s explicit protection of both aspects of religious freedom, both the free exercise of religion and the prohibition on its “establishment” by government – American constitutional law as interpreted and applied by the courts fails to fully safeguard the right (an inalienable, natural right – as America’s Founders saw it) of each individual to think for himself and to express his opinions, even on matters of religion. And “true believers” in religion – in the United States, they’re typically Christians – constantly try to usurp the coercive powers of government to force their beliefs on others or, at a minimum, to use government to endorse their beliefs as true and valid. Thus, notwithstanding the pervasiveness of Christianity in American society (and popular culture, despite the hysteria of chips-on-their-shoulder Christians who whine about pop culture’s “war” on their religion), some true believers continue to try, for example, to display the Ten Commandments in government buildings, or to teach “intelligent design” in public school science classes. Sadly, the courts have enforced inconsistently the Constitution’s provisions meant to safeguard against such brazen attempts to establish religion. These flaws in the American legal system may reflect, to a great extent, problems inherent in safeguarding the rights of individuals in any society that is, largely, democratic – that is, in which the ultimate political power, or sovereignty, resides in the mass of the people. (Technically, the American political system is not a democracy but a constitutional republic – that is, a representative system of government whose powers are limited by various constitutional provisions designed to safeguard individual rights. As I discuss more fully in my June 6, 2005 essay, “A Republic, Not a Democracy,” America’s Founders deliberately intended the United States NOT to be a democracy, but rather a constitutional republic – and thankfully so.) The young French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the United States in the early 1830s, wrote a classic book, Democracy in America, which warned of the threats posed to freedom and to individual rights from democracy. “As the conditions of men become equal among a people, individuals seem of less and society of greater importance,” he noted. “Every citizen, being assimilated to all the rest, is lost in the crowd . . . . This naturally gives the men of democratic periods a lofty opinion of the privileges of society and a very humble notion of the rights of individuals.” “The Americans hold that in every state the supreme power ought to emanate from the people; but when once that power is constituted, they can conceive, as it were, no limits to it, and they are ready to admit that it has the right to do whatever it pleases.” Because in a democracy, political questions are resolved by majority vote, “the majority . . . exercise a prodigious actual authority, and a power of opinion which is nearly as great,” Tocqueville warned, coining the term “tyranny of the majority” to describe this problem. One of Tocqueville’s most interesting observations concerned the way this majority tyranny was manifested in public opinion. He noted, “in America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him is he goes beyond them.” In the world of constitutional politics, for example – in considering nominees to the federal judiciary – to some politicians it is the kiss of death for a potential federal judge to have jurisprudential views outside the alleged “mainstream” of American constitutional law, as critics of Judge (now Justice) Samuel Alito alleged during the recent fight over his confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Similarly, free-thinking individuals whose views cannot be easily pigeonholed into “mainstream” categories like “liberal” or “conservative” – including myself and many of my fellow libertarians and Objectivists – often find it difficult getting, say, newspaper editors or book publishers to print their writings, again because they do not fit the perceived “mainstream.” Observing a similar phenomenon in early 19th-century America, Tocqueville reached the ominous conclusion, “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” In academics – on America’s college and university campuses – and in professions like journalism, where one would expect freedom of discussion to be given even greater value than in society generally, this problem is arguably even worse. That’s because the “mainstream” in both academics and journalism is defined by the personal views of the overwhelming majority of academics and journalists, who (as critics of both higher education and the media have been pointing out) are overwhelmingly left-liberal in their political orientation. A leftist orthodoxy pervades higher education (as documented, for example, in Alan Charles Kors and Harvey A. Silverglate in their important book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s College Campuses (1998)), as well as in journalism (as shown by former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg in his provocative books Bias (2002) and Arrogance (2003)). That orthodoxy on college campuses has resulted in various dangerous threats to freedom of speech, the most blatant of which are the “speech codes” that attempt to censor “offensive” speech on some college campuses. (For more on speech codes and other threats to freedom of speech on campus, see not only the Kors and Silverglate book but also the website of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which includes a special page reporting on current developments involving speech codes.) One of the problems with speech codes or other devices for censoring “offensive” speech is that it creates what is called the “heckler’s veto”: in other words, it allows fanatics to impose their values on others by censoring speech they dislike, whether or not it accords with the views of others (even majorities). As reported on the FIRE website, a recent example of the “heckler’s veto” in practice on a college campus involved the controversial Danish cartoons of Muhammed. At New York University, campus officials ordered that the cartoons not be shown at a public panel discussion about the cartoons. The event was held, in late March, but with easels displaying blank panels in place of the cartoons. FIRE president Greg Lukianoff, who was one of the speakers on the panel, said, “Those blank easels were a testament to campus repression and a climate of fear.” A New York Post editorial approvingly quoted FIRE, calling NYU’s decision “both chilling and absurd. The fact that expression might provoke a strong reaction is a reason to protect it—not an excuse to punish it.” Such censorship occurs on college campuses, in part, because part of the left-liberal orthodoxy that prevails on campus includes the phenomenon called “political correctness,” along with the related phenomenon of radical “multiculturalism.” Both the “p.c. police” and the radical multiculturalists insist that members of certain supposedly “victimized” or “oppressed” groups be given the power to censor speech they find offensive, simply because they believe that merely giving offense to members of these groups constitutes not just “threats” against them but also a continuation of the supposed “oppression” that they must endure in society. Among those groups who might find offense at criticisms of radical Islamist terrorism – including the criticism that was the genuine political expression behind the controversial Danish cartoons depicting Muhammed -- are not only Muslim student groups but also various leftist groups that, on this issue, might side with the Islamists simply because they’re both siding against the Bush administration or, more generally, against Western cultural values. (After all, radical multiculturalists have been pushing to move the curriculum of most college and university departments away from an emphasis on the West and instead toward an emphasis on “Third World” cultures, including Islam.)
Boycotts and Counter-Boycotts in Defense of Free Speech
In an interesting new development to the controversy over the Mohammed cartoons, Borders Books and its affiliate, Waldenbooks, have decided not to stock the April-May issue of Free Inquiry magazine because it contains the controversial Muhammad cartoons. “For us, the safety and security of our customers and employees is a top priority, and we believe that carrying this issue could challenge that priority,” a Borders spokesperson said. In other words, Borders fears that because the cartoons are so controversial, they might lead to violence at some of their stores. The magazine, published by the Council for Secular Humanism in suburban Amherst, Mass., reprints four of the drawings that had originally appeared in a Danish newspaper in September, including the one depicting Mohammad wearing the bomb-shaped turban. Borders Group, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan (which operates more than 475 Borders and 650 Waldenbooks stores in the United State), made the decision not to sell the magazine before it arrived at the company’s stores (not all of which regularly carry the magazine). In response to Borders cowardly policy of capitulation, Robert Bidinotto has written an open letter to Borders, posted on his blog site, calling upon the company to rescind its policy or else face a boycott of Borders and Waldenbooks stores, by Americans concerned about freedom of speech. As Bidinotto emphasizes, both in his original post and in his recent update (“`High Noon’ at the Borders”), what is particularly disturbing about Borders’ policy is that the company, on it own initiative – apparently with no advance warning from either the FBI or local law enforcement agencies of specific threats of violence – decided to ban copies of Free Inquiry magazine from their shelves, “to pre-emptively ward off a purely hypothetical response from potentially angry Muslims.” The policy, in other words, is not just capitulation to threats from radical Islamists: it’s capitulation to imagined threats or potential of violence. Talk about a chilling effect on freedom of speech! I support Bidinotto’s call for a boycott – I have personally chosen no longer to patronize either Borders or Waldenbooks, because of their policy on this matter – and I agree with him about why it’s important to take a stand on this issue. As he wrote in his New Individualist editorial, “To allow foreign fanatics to dictate the boundaries of political and philosophical discussion and expression here, in the West, should be inconceivable to any civilized person. Yet, as this sorry episode demonstrates, Western politicians, diplomats, cultural figures, and—most shockingly—journalists, have been only too eager to cave in to the barbarians.” Whenever they do so, we should call them on it – for the sake of freedom of expression and all our other civilized values. As Ed Hudgins concluded in his New Individualist article, speaking of Muslim fundamentalists, “We cannot and should not appease them, which will only strengthen them. Rather, we must oppose them in the clearest and most uncompromising terms. As a corollary, we must defend as absolute the rights of those here, in the West, who would criticize – no matter how crudely – these purveyors of hatred, intolerance, and violence.” I’m proud to report that The Objectivist Center and Atlas Society also have taken a stand in opposition to the boycott of Danish products that fundamentalist Muslims and their governments have been urging – simply because Denmark allows its press the freedom to criticize Islamic radicals. As the Center’s full-page ad in the current issue of The New Individualist declares, “We cannot allow this fear campaign to succeed, or it will jeopardize the freedoms of all of us living in the west. Danish companies have been thrust unwillingly onto the front lines of our confrontation with militant Islam. We must stand with them and support them.” The ad then lists various Danish companies, by category, including: Ingeborgs Chocolate, Tuborg and Carlsberg Beer, Band & Olufsen electronics products, Prince cigarettes, Ecco and Dansko shoes, Lego toys, Fritz Hansen furniture, Lindberg glasses and Royal Danish Porcelain, Skagen watches, Danish Yarn, and Nexo Fireplaces. “Support Freedom of Speech. Buy Danish!”
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, April 6, 2006 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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