Tag Archives: Free Speech

Mark Steyn: A Joke Is a Small Thing, but It’s Our Societal Glue

09 Saturday Jan 2016

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12 Dead In French Magazine Shooting

“You know, a cartoon is a small thing. It’s not The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

It’s not a big work. People get a pencil, they do a little sketch, and it’s in the paper the next day, and they forget about it. It’s a funny thing. It makes you laugh.

And the joke is an important signifier of society. A joke is a small thing, but it’s part of the societal glue. It’s what holds us together. Jokes are about recognition. When you tell a joke, people understand the social norms that are being mocked in it…

Now we live in a world though, where they don’t just end your career. These people are so serious about jokes — cartoons, gags — that they want to kill you for it.

And the correct attitude of all those people who intervened, all the politicians who spoke up and said ‘I deplore the offense that was given by this cartoon’ is completely wrong.

You should just say, ‘Look, we’re in a free society and we don’t regulate jokes here.’ […]

My friend Ezra Levant once observed that one day the Danish cartoon crisis would be seen as a more critical event than the attacks of September 11th.

He was wrong, obviously, in terms of the comparative death tolls, but he was absolutely right in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization in the 21st century.

In the long run, the ostensibly trivial matter of some not-terribly-good drawings in an obscure newspaper… will prove to be a more important signifier of the collapse of Western civilization than a direct, violent assault on the citadels of American power in Washington and New York.

Because if you provoke on the scale of 9/11, even Western civilization in its present decayed state will feel obliged to respond.

So yes, if they blow up St. Peters, if they blow up the Eiffel Tower, then yes, they’ll get a response.

But the cartoon crisis confirmed to our enemies that at heart we don’t really believe in ourselves anymore. That we won’t defend our core liberties, and that you can steal them from us one little bit at a time.”

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Pulled from the inimitable Mark Steyn’s recent speech in Copenhagen to mark the decade anniversary of the Danish cartoon crisis. As a wise man recently noted, “It used to be that they came for the Jews first. Now it’s the cartoonists. Then the Jews.” Quite surreal, that.

I highly encourage you to check out Steyn’s speech below (and buy Charb’s newly minted, posthumously published book). Steyn is a truly first rate orator. If the pulled text gives you the sense that this is another dour, Doomsday-Is-Here rant about Western Civilization’s imminent collapse, then it’s giving off the wrong impression. Steyn is utterly hilarious, astonishingly articulate, and always fun to listen to. I think he’s the best raconteur and pure talker out there since Hitchens passed. For a sample, you can start here. Also, you can keep up with his daily output of writing — mostly on this topic, though also about his jazz cat album — at his website, steynonline.com.

Continue on:

Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in Current Events, Politics, Religion

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[Play the brief clip above]

“This is what it’s like for peaceful people to gather in a cafe and attempt to have a conversation about our basic freedoms in an open society.

You have to ask yourself: what kind of a world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want your kids to live in?

This is the world you’re living in now. And as someone who is spending a fair amount of time dealing with these issues, I can tell you that I no longer feel safe doing so… And this is not just me. I’m talking about those people in Copenhagen. I’m talking about those people in open societies everywhere, who have to deal with this growing menace of Islamic jihadism.

Unless we can speak honestly about this, unless we can resist the theocratic demands being placed on us, we will lose our way of life. In fact, we have already lost it in many respects.

We have to reclaim our freedom of speech. So if you care about living in an open society that doesn’t more and more resemble Jerusalem or Beirut, if you care about free speech, real freedom of speech, not just its political guarantee — the reality of being able to speak about what you need to speak about in public, without being murdered by some maniac or without having to spend the rest of your life being hunted by a jihadist mob…

If you care about my work, or the work of other secularists, or of other Muslim reformers like Maajid Nawaz or Ayaan Hirsi Ali; if you care about our ability to notice and criticize and correct for bad ideas, then you have to condemn [the dishonesty of the regressive left]. Please push back against this. Please lose your patience at shocking displays of intellectual dishonesty used to excuse it. Your response to this really matters.”

__________

Sam Harris’s reflections on the shooting at the Krudttoenden cultural center in Copenhagen last February, in which 40 people had assembled to discuss the state of free expression in post-Hebdo Europe.

The audio clip records the horrific seconds when a gunman burst through the door, letting off a hail of bullets that would kill one and injure several others. The woman’s voice you hear in the opening is that of Inna Shevchenko, the Ukrainian feminist activist, who had just taken the stage and was discussing the excuses many Westerners make on behalf of those who kill because of cartoons.

Today is the one year anniversary of the Hebdo massacre, and Saturday will be the anniversary of the Hypercacher Kosher supermarket shooting (but who remembers that?). I’ve just ordered the posthumously published book — completed three days before the attacks — by Charb, with a forward from Adam Gopnik, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression.

Go on:

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

Free Speech Is the Whole Ball Game

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by in Current Events, Freedom

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Salman Rushdie

“What is my single life worth? Despair whispers in my ear: ‘Not a lot.’ But I refuse to give in to despair because I know that many people do care, and are appalled by the upside-down logic of the post-fatwa world, in which a novelist can be accused of having savaged or ‘mugged’ a whole community, becoming its tormentor (instead of its victim) and the scapegoat for its discontents. (What minority is smaller and weaker than a minority of one?)

I refuse to give in to despair even though, for a thousand days and more, I’ve been put through a degree course in worthlessness, my own personal and specific worthlessness. My first teachers were the mobs marching down distant boulevards, baying for my blood, and finding, soon enough, their echoes on English streets…

‘Our lives teach us who we are.’ I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own — and such descriptions have been raining down on me, from security advisers, governments, journalists, Archbishops, friends, enemies, mullahs — then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I’ve always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I’ve lived in that messy ocean all my life. I’ve fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.

‘Free speech is a non-starter,’ says one of my Islamic extremist opponents. No, sir, it is not. Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.”

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Excerpts from a speech by Salman Rushdie which was given at Columbia University on December 11th, 1991, and later adapted into his essay “One Thousand Days in a Balloon”. You’ll find the essay in his perfectly titled collection of nonfiction Step Across This Line.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been in touch with the folks at the Danish Free Press Society, who recently hosted the free speech conference to mark the 10th anniversary of the Jyllands-Posten “Cartoon Controversy”. The process is moving slowly — the result of busy schedules, different time zones, and a language barrier — but I’m working to grow their support network into these United States. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, I point you to three speeches from the event. The first two are from Douglas Murray and Mark Steyn, two of the feistier bulldogs on this issue. Then there’s Henryk Broder, an imposing Teuton whose vision of the future of continental Europe (summarized in his 20-minute talk) is compelling and scary.

It’s more than symbolic that the three speakers, who addressed an audience of about one hundred, had to convene in the Danish parliament: it’s the only building in Denmark with enough fortification to guarantee some level of security for attendees. (If you think that’s hyperbole, listen to this bone-chilling recording.) We can’t fault the Danes on this one, however, since they can boast that six of their newspapers ran the highly relevant and globally newsworthy cartoons, while only two tiny papers in all of North America had the guts to show the public what all the fuss was about. As a result, we not only conceded to the murderers’ blackmail, but also failed to show the public just how trivial these cartoons were which precipitated the murder of over 200 people around the globe.

This isn’t a joke. The cartoons may’ve been funny, if also crude and rude, but the fact the civilized world now lives under a shoddy, mutant, violently imposed blasphemy law is alarming.

Among the near-endless blessings of the right to free speech, there is perhaps none greater than its individuating power. It’s a freedom that accentuates the identity and dignity of the individual — to challenge popular consensus, think openly, argue candidly; to demarcate her mind against mob opinion and coercion; and to come to accept or reject certain ideas by herself, for herself, and without fear. Rushdie’s opening sentences above are a sure nod to this fact as well as the ways it is chipped away as freedoms disappear.

Read on:

On the Twisted Need to Defend Pamela Geller

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Freedom, Interview

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Pamela Geller

John Podhoretz:

It’s an extraordinarily distressing phenomenon and very telling fact about Western culture now…

You know, the great battles over censorship and free expression in the course of Western history over the last three centuries have largely been about high art. The suppression of Ulysses, the suppression of Lolita. The jailing of Voltaire and Diderot. The mistreatment of Flaubert over Madame Bovary and Theodore Dreiser over Sister Carrie.

And now — a fascinating phenomenon — that it is this kind of gleefully sophomoric, you know, na-na-na stuff, that we’re now called upon to defend in the name of free expression.

But if this is where the war has been declared, we have to fight for it.

Jonah Goldberg: 

That’s why [the Hebdo massacre] was an unequivocal win for the bad guys, the whole episode. No matter how it plays out, it was a win.

Everyone’s talking about how galvanized Western Europe is, how they sold 3 million copies of the next Hebdo issue.

But there’s a reason Lenin’s philosophy was “The worse, the better.”

When you live in a moment where radicals can create a crisis mentality — and create actual crises — you force everybody to take extreme positions.

In a normal situation where Muslim terrorists weren’t murdering people, none of us would want to run the crap that Charlie Hebdo ran. But we’re left with no choice but to defend running it.

So now we all defend it and we all run to the ramparts, and I’m 100% on that side. But in a healthier society, we wouldn’t even have to do this because it is offensive.

But the problem is you simply cannot be held hostage by people who murder people over this kind of thing.

__________

Podhoretz and Goldberg, talking in the 37th episode of their excellent and embarrassingly named podcast with Rob Long, GLop.

Though I don’t find myself aligning ideologically with them all that often, I’m a listener and fan of G’, Lo’, and P’ — they’re up to date, super well read, awash in cross-cultural references, and, probably more importantly, really funny.

For barely related riffs from both speakers, pick up Podhoretz’s short book on the Hillary Clinton presidential run Can She Be Stopped? or Jonah’s The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas.

Keep on:

Douglas Murray: “I Don’t Have an Israel”

25 Wednesday Mar 2015

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Douglas Murray - writer

“There’s a book that came out at exactly the same time as the Charlie Hebdo atrocities. It’s by Michel Hollelbeq, and it’s called Submission — some of you have read about it.

There’s a point in this book which I think is extremely important for what we must think of, which is how to impart an urgent concern for free speech beyond the people in this room and to wider society.

The most critical point in this novel… not to give away the whole plot, but there’s a French professor. It’s 2024 and France is becoming a Muslim country. The Jews are all leaving, and this professor who’s not Jewish — he’s an atheist Frenchman, likes his pleasures, you know — and he’s speaking to a Jewish friend who says she’s off to Israel.

And there’s a very, very important point in the novel where this man realizes he doesn’t have an Israel.

Now, this is a very, very important thing to tell people in this country, and it goes far beyond the Jews.

I don’t have an Israel. This is it. If you care about a decent, democratic, broadly pluralistic society in which you can live the life you want to live, this is the best deal and I don’t have a get out option. Now other people need to know that.”

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(Slightly modified) remarks from Douglas Murray during last month’s panel on free speech and the future of Europe at London’s Central Synagogue.

There’s more on the topic:

The Tyranny of Silence

16 Monday Mar 2015

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FlemmingRose23

“Free speech is being challenged by two fundamental processes that are a fact of life in a globalized world.

The first thing is globalization, the fact that people move across borders in numbers never before seen in the history of mankind, and it makes every society more diverse in terms of culture, ethnicity, and religion.

The other factor has to do with communication technology and the internet. Everything is being seen everywhere when it’s published.

People may be offended by what their co-citizens are saying, and there are basically two ways to solve this challenge. One way is to say if you respect my taboo, I’ll respect yours. If you do not criticize my religion, I will not criticize your religion. If you do not criticize my ideology, I will not criticize your ideology.

I believe that that will lead to a tyranny of silence.

The other way is to ask ourselves what are the minimal limitations on speech in order to be able live together in peace and enjoy that very fundamental right. And I believe that the only limitation we need on speech is incitement to violence; we should not be allowed to call for the killing of other people. But the price we have to pay for living in a democracy is that from time to time people may say something that we find offensive.

You have many rights in a democracy — a right to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, and so on and so forth — but the only right you should not have is a right not to be offended.”

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From the Cato Institute’s series “Why Liberty”: Flemming Rose, the editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published the infamous Muhammad cartoons in 2005. He is also the author of the new book The Tyranny of Silence.

When Imams Speak English

13 Friday Feb 2015

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CliveJames

Bill Moyers: How does a liberal democracy deal with Islamic preachers who get up and preach violence against the country that protects them?

Clive James: Make them do it in English. America does a fine job. It’s easier in America, because all the Muslims that are living in the area of Detroit — that’s the biggest Muslim community outside the Islamic countries — sing the Star Spangled Banner every morning. You know, American patriotism is much easier to induce.

Australia does a pretty good job, better than Britain, and it’s largely for a single reason: because in Australia, a government spokesman — actually the Deputy Prime Minister — had the strength to get on television and say to all Muslims, ‘You’re welcome here. Of course, you are. You’re citizens. But your young people must give up the dream that this will ever be an Islamic republic. Australia will never have Sharia law, so forget about it. What you’ve got here is law. And you must obey the law.’

He actually got up and said it. This made it easier for moderate Muslims. The top Muslim imam had been preaching radical hatred for years, and he really dissed himself when he said that women deserved everything they got if they took their clothes off. Australian women take their clothes off very easily; it’s a hot country. And he said every woman in a bikini was a message from the devil. And he wanted them all treated as if they were enemies. And his own fellow imams managed to force him to step down.

What gave them courage to do that is they realized the state was unequivocally on their side.

Terror has the advantage. For example, terrorism wants to destabilize your justice system. The minute you get people proposing new laws where people can be detained forever or tortured, it means terrorism is winning. That’s exactly what terrorism wants. That will recruit more terrorists. It will turn the jails into Al Qaeda universities which is what is going to happen in Britain unless we’re very careful.

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James and Moyers, talking on Bill Moyers Journal in 2007.

Christopher Hitchens: Resisting Radical Islam 101

08 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Christopher Hitchens

“It’s coming to a place near you.

The Qurans that are given out in our prison system, to Muslim prisoners by Muslim chaplains, paid for by Saudi Arabia, are Qurans written to the Wahabi tune. They’re not just your everyday Quran; they’re the Qurans that the Wahabis want you to read, containing direct incitement.

They’re being given out with taxpayers’ money in the prison system, where militias are forming. Next you’ll have militias of this kind with their own chaplains within the United States armed forces. Are you ready for that? Are you ready to have Wahabi preachers in the U.S. armed forces?

You better get ready for it, unless you’re going to take the James Madison view that there shouldn’t be any chaplains in the U.S. armed forces to begin with, or in the prison system. People want to pray, you can’t stop them. But we cannot have state subsidized prayer. We cannot have state subsidized preachers or chaplains.

Give it up, or give it to your deadliest enemy and pay for the rope that will choke you.

This is very urgent business, ladies and gentlemen, I beseech you: resist it while you still can and before the right to complain is taken away from you, which is the next thing.

You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.

Watch out for these symptoms… The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.”

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Christopher Hitchens, riffing in a Q&A before his debate with John Lennox in Birmingham, Alabama in 2009.

“It Is Not the Function of Our Government to Keep the Citizen from Falling into Error”

26 Wednesday Mar 2014

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Robert Jackson

“Progress generally begins in skepticism about accepted truths. Intellectual freedom means the right to reexamine much that has been long taken for granted. A free man must be a reasoning man, and he must dare to doubt what a legislative or electoral majority may most passionately assert. The danger that citizens will think wrongly is serious, but less dangerous than atrophy from not thinking at all… The priceless heritage of our society is the unrestricted constitutional right of each member to think as he will. Thought control is a copyright of totalitarianism, and we have no claim to it. It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the Government from falling into error. We could justify any censorship only when the censors are better shielded against error than the censored. […]

I think that, under our system, it is time enough for the law to lay hold of the citizen when he acts illegally, or in some rare circumstances when his thoughts are given illegal utterance. I think we must let his mind alone.”

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A section from Justice Robert Jackson’s decision in American Communications Association v. Douds (1950).

Robert Jackson, who in addition to serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court also oversaw the Nuremberg Tribunal, never earned his Juris Doctor. Incredibly, he dropped out of Albany law school after only two semesters.

More from the Court:

  • Robert Jackson’s solemn, powerful opening to the Nuremberg tribunals
  • Justice Louis Brandeis explains why a government’s contempt for law is contagious
  • Brandeis describes the resilience of the American founders

Robert Jackson at Nuremberg

Above: Jackson opens Nuremberg, November, 1945.

It’s Alright to Be Offended

16 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Political Philosophy

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Salman Rushdie

“The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other’s positions. (But they don’t shoot.)

At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalize, but you have absolutely no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.”

__________

From Salman Rushdie’s piece “Do We Have to Fight the Battle for the Enlightenment All Over Again?”. You can find it and other great writing in his Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002.

This is an almost complete summation of the trade we make to live in a free society. Oftentimes people will claim to resolutely stand behind the First Amendment, only to flinch when faced with unwelcome or merely objectionable ideas and words. Too frequently we forget that the freedom of speech is worthless unless it means the freedom for those with whom we disagree.

Any totalitarian can uphold the free expression of the speaker whose beliefs he approves. It’s when the 9/11-truther picks up his pen or the Holocaust-denier opens his mouth that we are confronted with the challenge of the Bill of Rights: to allow them to say what they believe without resorting to brutality or the false security offered by a government which can silence whatever is not the popular consensus. Moreover, we should want to hear ideas contrary to our own — as John Stuart Mill so astutely pointed out — because they are the only sieve through which we can affirm or refute our own beliefs. Who would want to live in a society without argument?

The foundational claim here can be encapsulated in a phrase uttered by Rosa Luxemburg: “Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.”

Nevertheless — and this is the essential corollary — we must insist on maintaining a society and societal discourse which places a premium on values like decorum, eloquence, and mutual respect. We don’t flout the Fred Phelpses of the world by shouting over them or demanding the government muzzle their harsh cries; we do it through applying reason and moral integrity to their claims, then responding appropriately.

This is why I take issue with Rushdie’s unqualified treatment of the term “respect,” and believe it would be clarified and improved by the adjective “automatic.” It’s a crucial distinction: I should not reflexively approve or trust anyone’s opinions over my own, but I should respect them if the evidence demands. This applies most clearly in realms where credentials matter. For example, it makes sense for me to respect a person’s opinion about a subject (i.e. theoretical physics) if that person is an expert in the field (i.e. Steven Hawking), and I am not. I do not have automatic respect, however, because I first evaluate the proof for their claims, and in the case of someone like Hawking, I can weigh the evidence he provides and arguments he adduces in order to make my judgement.

In this sense, I lead with my reason, which becomes a workable heuristic for deciding how I orient myself to my interlocutor and his speech. Of course, even in the case of someone like Hawking, I still bring a healthy dose of skepticism to the table, but it’s a waste of time to approach the claims of charlatans and scholars with equal levels of cynicism.

Does this work when debating non-scientific or ethical questions? The obvious answer is not as well. But I still can and should respect opinions once I have evaluated them. Such an approach avoids the insouciance of a voice that insists, “I DON’T RESPECT YOUR OPINION.” That sounds like squabbling, not debating, to my ear.

I’ve just added the following, among others, to the quotes page:

“We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it.” — Abraham Lincoln

Read more from Salman: the first excerpt concerns anti-Americanism, and comes from an essay written immediately following September 11th, 2001. The second is one of my favorite passages from modern fiction, taken from his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

Salman and Padma

Kissing in Public Places, Bacon Sandwiches

Salman Rushdie

Why Do We Care About Singers?