11 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has some interesting thoughts on free expression in this morning’s paper.
Inspired by a discussion at Oxford Literary Festival with Index chief executive John Kampfner, Times writer David Aaronovitch and Guido Fawkes blogger Paul Staines, Albhai-Brown questions whether free speech should be seen as an absolute right.
She starts well enough:
Too many states use brute force to quell and gag their people. In our western democracies, governments withhold information, stop legitimate protest, control speech and even thought. All wrong, must be resisted, agreed.
And then comes the “but” that will forever plague arguments for and about restrictions on speech:
Most of us, though, will not speak with one voice on the burning of the Koran by Sion Owens, a BNP candidate for the Welsh assembly. And what about the website that sells cheeky Jihadi, al-Qa’ida baby T-shirts and maternity clothes? Tory MP Robert Halfon is apoplectic and wants the site closed down. Are you with or against him? Do we teach children that words can wound or that their entitlement to speak trumps everything else?
That last sentence is a false dichotomy. Words are powerful: words are important. Otherwise there would be little point in defending free expression. As soon as one feels comfortable placing proscriptions on speech, one leads inevitably to a position where certain speech is favoured. Moreover, there is no contradiction between free speech being a right and free speech being used responsibly.
We continue:
Some in the real world, too, are enviable absolutists who believe the slightest tremor of concern is a concession and invitation to authoritarianism. Their God is Voltaire, who decreed that even when one hates what is being said by somebody, one must “fight to the death” for the right of that person to hold forth.
Voltaire never said that. It comes from a 1906 book entitled “Friends of Voltaire”. Minor point, but something one should know if you’re writing about free expression. But lets go on.
We come to Manchester United footballer Wayne Rooney, banned for two matches for swearing at a Sky Sports camera (exacts words “What? Fucking what? What? Fucking Hell!”) after scoring a hat trick against West Ham.
The FA is deciding what to do with Wayne Rooney, who swore horridly on TV. The footballer – who has apologised – must be crying into his champagne. I hope he gets his comeuppance.
See? He’s rich, therefore all other arguments about his rights and liberties are obscured.
Rooney had just scored a hat trick. As The Streets’ Mike Skinner once put it, “geezers need excitement”. Moreover, Rooney’s job is not to be presentable on TV, or (shudder) to be a “role model”. His job is to score goals for Manchester United, and he was having a very, very good day at the office.
Next up:
In 1919, the US Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decreed that the only limits to freedom of speech were words that activate immediate danger, like a man shouting “fire!” in a crowded theatre. But what about when individuals set out calculatedly to provoke unrest and anger, which then happens? Like the burning of the Koran. Of course the offended should not rage and die for it – but that was the intention. The inciters are surely as culpable as the man in the theatre. They raise hatred, which eventually leads to violence.
The “eventually” is key here. Who is responsible for the incitement that lead to the murders of UN workers in Afghanistan? The Floridan pastors who burned the holy book? Or the imams who preached to the faithful about this insult to Islam? Alibhai-Brown does not seem to count these as the inciters. But they were the ones with the power to incite the mob in Mazar-i-Sharif.
Nearly finished:
Another thing to consider is that most of us are biased. We want some words to be free, and others not. Will the Koran burner be backed by libertarians, atheists and Muslim bashers? Or will he face the same opprobrium as those Muslims who burnt Salman Rushdie’s book? I await Fay Weldon and Ian McEwan’s beautifully expressed outrage
Two problems here: Earlier we were asked to criticise absolutists. Now we must condemn relativism.
More insidiously, there is the implication that Fay Weldon and Ian McEwan are being hypocritical and possibly even Islamophobic. But Weldon and McEwan and others, in their stand in support of Rushdie, did not attack the right of Muslims to protest against the Satanic Verses, or even to burn it. They defended a fellow novelist against a death sentence from a foreign tyrant. Not the same thing, is it?
8 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
Respected US Senator Lindsey Graham said a remarkable thing last Sunday morning on one of the weekly political round-up shows that are popular with Washington insiders.
“I wish we could find some way to hold people accountable,” the senator from South Carolina said, responding to the Koran-burning stunt by a fringe Florida pastor that prompted deadly riots in Afghanistan. “Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war. During World War II, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy.”
Americans don’t typically harken back to World War II as a model of right-headed civil liberties restraint; kitschy propaganda posters from that era are a popular attraction in the Smithsonian museum today as a quaint reminder that the US government once threatened civilians that their slightest blabber could cost entire submarines of allied lives.
Sixty years after World War II, Americans more sceptical of their government should be wary of any sentence from a powerful politician that starts, “Free speech is a great idea, but…”
Last Sunday morning, though, Lindsey Graham suggested the country might need to consider pushing back against “actions like this that put our troops at risk” – and then Bob Schieffer, the host of the CBS program “Face the Nation,” pivoted right to a question about arming rebels in Libya.
There was no follow-up on Graham’s deeply controversial suggestion. The New York Times made no mention of the comments. It garnered three paragraphs on Politico.
The oddly muted response capped a strange run for the entire Terry Jones saga. When the Florida pastor threatened last summer, around the anniversary of 11 September, to burn a Koran, hordes of media descended on his small central-Florida church, interfaith religious leaders put the pastor on speed-dial and even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called to personally plead the military’s case.
Jones finally demurred, a prime example of the theory that the best antidote to hate speech is more speech. An odd thing happened, though, when he changed his mind.
Jones caused an international stir just by threatening to burn the Koran, but when he finally went through with it on 20 March – “It’s like people forgot about us,” he whined to the Washington Post – hardly anyone in America noticed. The lone outsider present for the spectacle appears to have been an unlucky fire department official called to supervise. It took two weeks for the story to ricochet all the way to Afghanistan and back again in the form of dead UN workers before it finally made the front page.
Had no one died — had Muslims overseas not been streaming Jones’ Internet production when his own neighbours were not looking — it’s easy to imagine the incident may have gotten no attention at all.
So why was everyone so riled by the man in September and not in March? And why did the equally provocative suggestion that America curtail wartime free expression as a result go largely undiscussed?
The simplest answer is: We’ve been busy. A more patient and media-savy Jones would have known to wait for a lull in the news cycle. Right now, though, everyone from the president to TV pundits is pretty occupied trying to figure out if we’ve just entered a third war or not. And then there’s the whole issue of the federal government shutting down for the first time in 15 years amid an intractable budget dispute on Capitol Hill.
No one should be faulted for ignoring Jones this time around – in fact, ignoring hate speech before the Internet age was another good way to dilute its power. But Americans need to make time to worry about politicians hedging on the rights of free expression regardless of what else is going on. Forgetting about Terry Jones is one thing; letting Lindsey Graham off the hook is another.
After all, past wars tell the story that free speech is easiest to erode when no one’s paying attention.
5 Apr 2011 | Uncategorized
President Karzai of Afghanistan has called for the Obama administration to condemn the recent Koran-burning in Florida by Pastor Wayne Sapp. The symbolic immolation of the book led to riots that left 22 dead. Obama has obliged by describing it as an act of “extreme intolerance and bigotry”. But Karzai wants Obama to go further and “bring those responsible to justice”.
It is not clear what that would mean in the US. First Amendment free speech protection doesn’t discriminate on the basis of the content of speech short of its posing a direct threat to others. Offensive expression, including symbolic flag- or Koran-burning, is just as protected as liberal political speech-making.
To take the most famous example, the neo-Nazis who wanted to march through Skokie in Illinois in 1977, where many Holocaust survivors lived, had as much right to express their views as anyone else. Controversially, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sprang to the their defence.
In that case the marchers, having secured their free speech rights in court, were persuaded to protest elsewhere. Only last year Pastor Terry Jones also backed down from this threat to burn Korans on the 9/11 anniversary, though most experts agreed that if he had gone ahead with the burning on private property he would have been unlikely to have committed any crime.
But sometimes offensive protestors follow through and make their point as threatened in a way that triggers strong reactions. In the case of Pastor Wayne Sapp, that’s what happened, and with fatal consequences thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, where another group of intolerant people took violent and utterly inexcusable “revenge” on 22 people.
Free speech issues are rarely straightforward. Some people would like to think they are, but they aren’t. The key question is always where a society wants to draw the line, not whether there should be a line at all. But I believe strongly that explosive reactions on the part of the offended shouldn’t determine where that line is drawn.
Such a reaction would give the power to circumscribe the limits of everyone’s freedom to those who have the angriest voices, and are swiftest to resort to violence. Instead we need to protect the freedom to criticise religion and religions, both in words and symbolic actions, as a fundamental right.
Put simply, no idea or object should be sacrosanct from criticism or ridicule, and we should be clear that we condemn violence far more than we condemn the expression of offensive views. We do not want to go back to the Dark Ages of blasphemy laws, or modern equivalents of them.
4 Mar 2011 | Uncategorized
In one sense, the US Supreme Court this week did exactly what the Westboro Baptist Church has never been able to — it drew a distinction between the value of a principle (free speech) and its members’ feelings about those associated with it (in this case, a few fanatics carrying signs that say “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”). As many proponents of the ruling have recognised, it’s possible to love the right and hate those who exercise it at the same time. It may be hard, but it’s possible.
Members of the Westboro Baptist Church, on the other hand, have long exhibited a particularly odd kind of confusion, conflating dead American soldiers (who are not gay) with America’s tolerance of homosexuality (which has even less to do with the wars those soldiers died in). As more forgiving Christians like to preach: “Hate the sin, not the sinner.” This is a distinction Westboro Baptist clearly does not make (leaving aside the question of whether homosexuality is even a sin at all).
What the Supreme Court decision says is that we cannot confuse principle with personal animosity, the very offense Rev Fred Phelps and his family commit each time they demonstrate their ethical opposition to homosexuality within eyesight of a private funeral.
“Speech is powerful,” the Court ruled. “It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain. On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
In the reaction to the ruling, many Americans are having a hard time drawing this distinction, compartmentalising hatred for Westboro Baptist from support for the core American principle of free speech even for those with whom we disagree. The individuals in question are just so vile, their attacks so clearly choreographed to achieve maximum offence, prodding America’s rawest nerves at the intersection of deference to the armed forces and respect for the dead. And Westboro Baptist isn’t making it easy on those angered by the decision to see its larger wisdom. Since the ruling, church members have gloated that the court has only encouraged them to picket even more.
Hearing this — and the anguished reaction of Albert Snyder, father of the dead soldier in question — the two most prominent US veterans’ organisations, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion, have denounced the decision. So has a seeming plurality of the thousands of message-board commenters on news sites covering the story.
But in a strong sign that much of the furor is really aimed at Westboro Baptist itself — and not at the concept that people whom we dislike have free-speech rights as well — even First Amendment hardliners have found themselves caught in a moment of hypocrisy this week.
Sarah Palin, who has evoked the right to free speech in defence of everything from Laura Schlessinger’s “n-word” rants to her own metaphorically violent political rhetoric, quickly came out railing against the decision.
“Common sense & decency absent as wacko ‘church’ allowed hate msgs spewed@ soldiers’ funerals but we can’t invoke God’s name in public square,” Palin tweeted.
Tom Brokaw, a veteran broadcast journalist who should know the value of free speech (two-dozen media organisations swallowed hard and filed amicus briefs on behalf of Westboro Baptist) called the ruling “outrageous.”
Prominent Fox News talk-show host Bill O’Reilly, who regularly champions the Tea Party war cry that the federal government better not tread on individual freedoms, opposed the decision as well.
“With the rise of the Internet, cowardly sociopaths are running wild with hateful invective, outrageous smears and bullying tactics that have caused some kids to commit suicide,” he said on his show. “The Supreme Court needs to wise up. It’s not just about free speech anymore. It’s about personal destruction.”
Conservatives like O’Reilly and Palin found themselves in the awkward position of bashing a decision written by the right’s favorite jurist, Chief Justice John Roberts — and in the equally awkward position of agreeing with Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
“I am very disappointed in today’s Supreme Court decision to allow hateful extremists to attempt to sully the memories of heroes who have fought and died to protect this country, and to heap more hurt on already grief-stricken families,” Reid said in a statement. “These families have only one chance to bury loved ones who made the ultimate sacrifice. They deserve the right to mourn without being subjected to the ugly signs and slurs of fanatics.
These are visceral reactions, not well thought-out ones, and they come more from a deep-rooted desire to protect mourning military families than a necessary calculation over how to maintain the First Amendment. As time passes and the visceral unease wanes, opponents of the decision may come to see that the Supreme Court in fact showed nuanced tolerance of the kind Westboro Baptist would never be capable.
