In Solidarity With a Free
Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons
By Glenn Greenwald
January 10, 2015 "ICH"
- "The
Intercept"
- Defending
free speech and free press rights, which
typically means defending the right to
disseminate the very ideas society finds
most repellent, has been one of my
principal
passions for the last 20 years: previously as
a
lawyer
and
now
as
a
journalist. So I consider it positive
when large numbers of people loudly invoke
this principle, as has been happening over
the last 48 hours in response to the
horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Usually, defending free
speech rights is much more of a lonely task.
For instance, the day before the Paris
murders, I wrote
an article about multiple cases where
Muslims are being prosecuted and even
imprisoned by western governments for their
online political speech – assaults that have
provoked relatively little protest,
including from those free speech champions
who have been so vocal this week.
I’ve previously covered
cases where Muslims were imprisoned for many
years in the U.S. for things like
translating
and posting
“extremist” videos to the internet,
writing scholarly articles in defense of
Palestinian groups and
expressing harsh criticism of Israel,
and even
including a Hezbollah channel in a cable
package. That’s all well beyond the numerous
cases of
jobs being lost or
careers destroyed for expressing
criticism of Israel or (much more
dangerously and rarely) Judaism. I’m hoping
this week’s celebration of free speech
values will generate widespread opposition
to all of these long-standing and
growing infringements of core political
rights in the west, not just some.
Central to free speech
activism has always been the distinction
between defending the right to disseminate
Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one
which only
the most simple-minded among us are
incapable of comprehending. One defends the
right to express repellent ideas while being
able to condemn the idea itself. There is no
remote contradiction in that: the ACLU
vigorously defends the right of
neo-Nazis to march through a community
filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie,
Illinois, but does not join the march; they
instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas
as grotesque while defending the right to
express them.
But this week’s defense of
free speech rights was so spirited that it
gave rise to a brand new principle: to
defend free speech, one not only defends the
right to disseminate the speech, but
embraces the content of the speech itself.
Numerous writers
thus demanded: to show “solidarity” with
the murdered cartoonists, one should not
merely condemn the attacks and defend the
right of the cartoonists to publish, but
should publish and even celebrate those
cartoons. “The best response to Charlie
Hebdo attack,”
announced Slate’s editor Jacob
Weisberg, “is to escalate blasphemous
satire.”
Some of the cartoons
published by Charlie Hebdo were
not just offensive but bigoted, such as
the one mocking the African sex slaves of
Boko Haram as welfare queens (left). Others
went far beyond maligning violence by
extremists acting in the name of Islam, or
even merely depicting Mohammed with
degrading imagery (above, right), and
instead contained a stream of mockery toward
Muslims generally, who in France are not
remotely powerful but are largely a marginalized
and targeted immigrant population.
But no matter. Their cartoons
were noble and should be celebrated – not
just on free speech grounds but for their
content. In
a column entitled “The Blasphemy We
Need,” The New York Times‘ Ross
Douthat argued that “the right to blaspheme
(and otherwise give offense) is essential to
the liberal order” and “that kind
of blasphemy [that provokes violence] is
precisely the kind that needs to be
defended, because it’s the kind that clearly
serves a free society’s greater good.” New
York Magazine‘s Jonathan Chait
actually proclaimed that “one cannot
defend the right [to blaspheme] without
defending the practice.” Vox’s Matt Yglesias
had a much more nuanced view but nonetheless
concluded that “to blaspheme the Prophet
transforms the publication of these cartoons
from a pointless act to a courageous and
even necessary one, while the observation
that the world would do well without such
provocations becomes a form of appeasement.”
To comport with this new
principle for how one shows solidarity with
free speech rights and a vibrant free press,
we’re publishing some blasphemous and
otherwise offensive cartoons about religion
and their adherents:
And here are some
not-remotely-blasphemous-or-bigoted yet very
pointed and relevant cartoons by the
brilliantly provocative Brazilian
cartoonist Carlos Latuff (reprinted with
permission):
Is it time for me to be
celebrated for my brave and noble defense of
free speech rights? Have I struck a potent
blow for political liberty and demonstrated
solidarity with free journalism by
publishing blasphemous cartoons? If, as
Salman Rushdie said,
it’s vital that all religions be subjected
to “fearless disrespect,” have I done my
part to uphold western values?
When I first began to see
these demands to publish these anti-Muslim
cartoons, the cynic in me thought perhaps
this was really just about sanctioning some
types of offensive speech against some
religions and their adherents, while
shielding more favored groups. In
particular, the west has spent years
bombing, invading and occupying Muslim
countries and killing, torturing and
lawlessly imprisoning innocent Muslims, and
anti-Muslim speech has been a vital driver
in sustaining support for those policies.
So it’s the opposite of
surprising to see large numbers of
westerners celebrating anti-Muslim
cartoons - not on free speech grounds but
due to approval of the content. Defending
free speech is always easy when you like the
content of the ideas being targeted, or
aren’t part of (or actively dislike) the
group being maligned.
Indeed, it is self-evident
that if a writer who specialized in overtly
anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been
murdered for their ideas, there would be no
widespread calls to republish their trash in
“solidarity” with their free speech rights.
In fact, Douthat, Chait and Yglesias all
took pains to expressly note that they were
only calling for publication of such
offensive ideas in the limited case
where violence is threatened or perpetrated
in response (by which they meant in
practice, so far as I can tell: anti-Islam
speech). Douthat even used italics to
emphasize how limited his defense of
blasphemy was: “that kind of
blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs
to be defended.”
One should acknowledge a
valid point contained within the Douthat/Chait/Yglesias
argument: when media outlets refrain from
publishing material out of fear (rather than
a desire to avoid publishing gratuitously
offensive material), as
several of the west’s
leading outlets admitted doing with
these cartoons, that is genuinely troubling,
an actual threat to a free press. But there
are all kinds of pernicious taboos in the
west that result in self-censorship or
compelled suppression of political ideas,
from prosecution and imprisonment to career
destruction: why is violence by Muslims the
most menacing one? (I’m not here talking
about the question of whether media outlets
should publish the cartoons because they’re
newsworthy; my focus is on the demand they
be published positively, with approval, as
“solidarity”).
When we originally
discussed publishing this article
to make these points, our intention was to
commission two or three cartoonists to
create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign
sacred figures to Jews the way Charlie Hebdo
did to Muslims. But that idea
was thwarted by the fact that no mainstream
western cartoonist would dare put their name
on an anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for
satire purposes, because doing so would
instantly and permanently destroy their
career, at least. Anti-Islam and anti-Muslim
commentary (and cartoons) are a dime a dozen
in western media outlets; the taboo that is
at least as strong, if not more so, are
anti-Jewish images and words. Why aren’t
Douthat, Chait, Yglesias and their
like-minded free speech crusaders calling
for publication of anti-Semitic material in
solidarity, or as a means of standing up to
this repression? Yes, it’s true that outlets
like The New York Times will
in rare instances publish such
depictions, but only to document hateful
bigotry and condemn it – not to publish it
in “solidarity” or because it deserves a
serious and respectful airing.
With all due respect to
the
great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is
simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo “were
equal opportunity offenders.” Like Bill
Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives,
mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is
something they
will
rarely (if
ever) do. If forced, they can point to
rare and isolated cases where they uttered
some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the
vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for
Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews.
Parody, free speech and secular atheism are
the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the
primary goal and the outcome. And this
messaging – this special affection for
offensive anti-Islam speech – just so
happens to coincide with, to feed, the
militaristic foreign policy agenda of their
governments and culture.
To see how true that is,
consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the
“equal opportunity” offenders and defenders
of all types of offensive speech -
fired one of their writers in 2009 for
writing a sentence some said was
anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged
with a hate crime offense, and
won a judgment against the magazine for
unfair termination). Does that sound like
“equal opportunity” offending?
Nor is it the case that
threatening violence in response to
offensive ideas is the exclusive province of
extremists claiming to act in the name of
Islam. Terrence McNally’s 1998 play “Corpus
Christi,” depicting Jesus as gay, was
repeatedly cancelled
by theaters due to bomb threats. Larry Flynt
was
paralyzed by an evangelical white
supremacist who objected to Hustler‘s
pornographic depiction of inter-racial
couples. The Dixie Chicks were
deluged with death threats and needed
massive security after they publicly
criticized George Bush for the Iraq War,
which finally
forced them to apologize out of fear.
Violence spurred by Jewish and Christian
fanaticism is legion, from abortion doctors
being murdered to gay bars being bombed to a
45-year-old brutal occupation of the West
Bank and Gaza due in part to the religious
belief (common in both the U.S. and Israel)
that God decreed they shall own all the
land. And that’s all independent of the
systematic state violence in the west
sustained, at least in part, by
religious
sectarianism.
The New York Times‘
David Brooks
today claims that anti-Christian bias is
so widespread in America – which has never
elected a non-Christian president – that
“the University of Illinois fired a
professor who taught the Roman Catholic view
on homosexuality.” He forgot to mention that
the very same university just
terminated its tenure contract with
Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he
posted during the Israeli attack on Gaza
that the university judged to be excessively
vituperative of Jewish leaders, and that the
journalist Chris Hedges was
just disinvited to speak at the
University of Pennsylvania for the Thought
Crime of drawing similarities between Israel
and ISIS.
That
is a real taboo – a repressed idea – as
powerful and absolute as any in the United
States, so much so that Brooks won’t even
acknowledge its existence. It’s certainly
more of a taboo in the U.S. than criticizing
Muslims and Islam, criticism which is
so frequently heard in
mainstream circles –
including the U.S. Congress – that one
barely notices it any more.
This underscores the key
point: there are all sorts of ways ideas and
viewpoints are suppressed in the west. When
those demanding publication of these
anti-Islam cartoons start demanding the
affirmative publication of those
ideas as well, I’ll believe the sincerity of
their very selective application of free
speech principles. One can defend free
speech without having to publish, let alone
embrace, the offensive ideas being targeted.
But if that’s not the case, let’s have equal
application of this new principle.
Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty
Images; additional research was provided by
Andrew Fishman
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