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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: Freedom of Expression

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

09 Saturday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Speeches

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

Tags

Blasphemy, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Copenhagen, Ezra Levant, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Islam, Mark Steyn, speech, terror, Terrorism

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.”

__________

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:

  • John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg riff on why defending freedom of speech often means defending controversial speakers
  • Salman talks about why it’s normal to be offended sometimes
  • Douglas Murray discusses why we have to defend liberty at home first

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Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

07 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Speaking Freely when the Guns Go Off

Tags

Adam Gopnik, and the True Enemies of Free Expression, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Charb, Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen, extremism, free expression, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Hypercacher, Islam, Islamism, Islamophobia, liberty, Maajid Nawaz, Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Podcast, Sam Harris, terror, Terrorism, Waking Up Podcast

[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:

  • Flemming Rose, editor of the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, talks about “the tyranny of silence”
  • A brief reflection on 25 years of the Salman Rushdie fatwa
  • Douglas Murray shows us some strangely uncontroversial cartoons

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

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Free Speech Is the Whole Ball Game

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Freedom

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Cartoon Crisis, Copenhagen, Danish Free Press Society, Death Sentence, Douglas Murray, Fatwa, Free Speech, Freedom of Expression, Freedom of Speech, Henryk Broder, Iran, liberty, Mark Steyn, Muhammad, New York Times, One Thousand Days in a Balloon, religion, Salman Rushdie, Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002

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.”

__________

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:

  • Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose coolly explains why liberty is so critical
  • Neil Gaiman discusses how defending free speech will take you out of your comfort zone
  • On life with a death sentence: reflections on 25 years of the Rushdie fatwa

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