Category Archives: rights

Free Speech, Images of Muhammed, and the American Press

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In the wake of the Islamic terrorist attack, sponsored, if not directed by the al Qaeda network, Charlie Hebdo (their site is down or overwhelmed as I write this) printed their next issue with an image of Muhammed on its cover.CharlieHebdoCover

Even as they cover the news of this story, though, as Howard Kurtz pointed out in his recent column, American “news” outlets refuse to print the image that is the center of this news story: Charlie Hebdo‘s cover. CNN, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, and the New York Times are among those refusing to complete their news stories by showing what it is they claim to be talking about. Kurtz wrote this about that decision:

[N]ews executives had to weigh the safety of their employees, as well as their usual practice of not running images that are gratuitously offensive to religion. (Yes, I know that some have run anti-Christian images in the past but seem to be more skittish about offending Muslims.)

The parenthetical in that cite gives the game away. News…executives…aren’t worried about safety, and they’re not concerned about gratuitous religious offense (they’re not worried about gratuitous offense at all—see the slurs and degrading stories they publish about Tea Partiers, conservative women, conservative blacks, anyone who doesn’t think like they do).

American news executives are cowards, plain and simple. And they’ve surrendered their erstwhile freedom to speak to Islamic terrorists in their cowardice.

Defending Freedom of Speech, Al Jazeera Style

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A leaked email from Al Jazeera English Editor and Executive Producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr, obtained by Fox News, had this remark, among others, in it:

Was this really an attack on “free speech?” Who is attacking free speech here exactly?

Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile.

Khadr also suggested that the slogan “I am Charlie” is

an alienating slogan—with us or against us type of statement—one can be anti-CH’s racism and ALSO against murdering people.

It may well be that being “obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile;” however, the rub is in whose definition of obnoxious, whose definition of offensive, whose definition of appropriate response to offensiveness or to obnoxiousness is to be applied. When governments make those definitions, all we have is tyranny and the arbitrary rule of a northern Korea, or a Soviet Union, or an East Germany. Or an Iran, or a Hussein Iraq. Or an al Qaeda or an ISIS.

When individuals are free to determine the appropriate sanction to be mayhem, all we have is a Hobbesian existence where the strong determine, arbitrarily, what is “right,” and the weak must obey or die.

Murdering someone—or even “merely” assaulting someone—just because the murderer or the assaulter was offended or thinks the victim’s behavior infantile is always and everywhere brutally wrong, and the deed wants the severest of responses and sanctions.

All apologists like al Jazeera do is give these murderous despotisms and barbarians cover.

If we’re to have free speech, we must be free to be obnoxious and offensive, too, else we have no freedom of speech: someone always will define a remark as out of bounds, and ultimately all speech not preapproved by the strongest becomes forbidden.

And we will have free speech—it’s a necessary part of that Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness that are an indivisible part of the fabric of every man’s very existence—Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist, etc, alike. Nor al Jazeeras, nor barbarians, nor Muslim terrorists, nor anyone else can deny us that, even though they may murder our bodies. Full stop.

It’s also true that one can stand against racism and against murdering people at the same time. But this is Khadr’s cynical strawman. There’s no racism involved here. There’s no oppression of any group of people here. Khadr will have to play with that dolly without me.

The Assault Continues

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King, NC, used to have a war memorial on its property—funded by private donations—that consisted of a statue of a soldier kneeling before a cross. Americans United for Separation of Church and State considered the memorial inappropriate, and they sued the city.

Last week, in abject surrender, the city not only settled by agreeing to remove the memorial, they agreed—agreed, mind you, no court outcome dictated this—to pay AUSCS $500,000 for AUSCS’ trouble and to pay the plaintiff represented by this atheist organization $1 for his trouble.

Both sides in this matter wish to avoid further costs,

the city said in making its excuses.

No. There’s no moral equivalence here. There’s none at all between atheists and memorials to those who’ve been killed or maimed defending the rights of the likes of Americans United for Separation of Church and State to behave as they do.

Timidity lost. And the cost to religious freedom is grievous.

Coordinated Lone Wolves?

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The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo raises a question in my mind and in many other minds. This was an isolated attack, á la a number of other isolated attacks. However, this attack also was associated in time with the murder of a woman cop on the south side of Paris and the murders of four citizens in a Jewish bakery in eastern Paris: these ancillary(?) attacks went in while French police and security units were occupied with the hunt for and capture of the Charlie Hebdo butchers.

I wonder, then, whether al Qaeda (I discount ISIS in this, for now; they seem to be focused on Syria, Iraq, and Jordan) is changing their tactics away from the larger, but harder to execute, attacks like blowing up an embassy or flying airliners into economically and militarily important facilities.

I wonder whether al Qaeda is moving toward smaller, easier to execute, coordinated “lone wolf” attacks whose purpose isn’t to stress police forces with a major one-off, but to try to overwhelm them with more, and simultaneous, attacks than a police force can handle.

Following its inability to cow the West with large, splashily destructive attacks, I wonder whether al Qaeda is moving its attacks on Western civilization toward lots of these smaller, coordinated attacks in a different effort to demonstrate our inability to protect ourselves, the impotence of our police forces, and ultimately to using that version of fear to break apart our various national societies.

I see this, though, as both a greater danger and an admission of defeat. They can’t beat us in the terrorist version of pitched battles, so they’re moving toward this. Many of these will succeed (Charlie Hebdo), but the damage done will be small in each case (if tragic for the victims). They can succeed overall, though, only if we give in to the fear. They can succeed overall only if we citizens choose not to be actively vigilant, keeping in mind that when seconds count, and the terrorists are coming, the police are (only) minutes away.

Armed, confident, and alert. They can’t beat us.