In Praise of Offensive Speech
by Lorna Salzman
Caution: may contain some strong language
Here are two scenarios to think about:
1)You have just been fired and you think to yourself: "typical arrogant Jew".
2)You have just been fired and you say out loud: "typical arrogant Jew". People are shocked and angry.
None of these is punishable by law. And that's as it should be, because there is no difference between #1 and #2. Speech is
uttered thought. To punish "hate speech" is to punish thought.
If you think #2 is a crime, then you should be on the front lines opposing the Muslim Students' Association, CAIR and the routine preachings of Muslim imams in mosques as well as the Muslim Brotherhood and the qu-ran as well as the sayings of Mohammed, the hadith. However nasty these preachings, you will not have any basis for having the speaker arrested. Last year the MSA at the University of California-Irvine disrupted a talk by Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the US at the time, shouting him down until the event was abruptly cancelled. The MSA chapter was suspended for a semester. Recently local police announced their intention to bring charges against the disrupters. This should not be done.
The students said they were asserting their "right to free speech", which is nonsense; they were depriving the speaker of HIS rights. Disciplinary charges against them were fully justified and one hopes they will not repeat the offense (on that campus at least; elsewhere other universities have not been so ready to penalize Muslim attempts to silence free speech and at times college administrations have even supported the silencing of speakers by forcing cancellation of the event so as to appease Muslims ).
Several years ago Danish cartoons about Mohammed caused riots worldwide and intimidated American publishers and newspapers to the point where they refused to republish the cartoons for their readers even as they wrote news articles about them. In this country only Free Inquiry, published by the Center for Inquiry, published them, but Borders Books then pulled all of its copies of Free Inquiry off their stands. At the Yale University Press, the editors forced the author of a book on the cartoon controversy to remove the actual cartoons from the book. Thankfully the cartoons were freely available on the internet.
I have personally witnessed attempted suppression of free speech by none other than PEN, the writers' organization that defends writers everywhere. As I was distributing my report on Muslim suppression of free speech at a PEN/ACLU sponsored conference featuring Tariq Ramadan last spring, a PEN staff member asked me to stop and blocked my way. She called over another staff person and stated that it was "their" conference and I had to stop. I looked her in the face and said: why don't you call the police? She backed off. I had a similar experience at the New School at a small meeting to launch a short book on artistic freedom. The moderator stopped me from handing out a statement on free speech and made me remove the copies from the table. So I took them and went downstairs and stood in front of the elevator, handing them to people arriving for the meeting. I wrote a letter of complaint to the New School but never got an answer.
Recently, the liberal Alternet blog posted an article about the harassment by anti-sharia protesters near the White House of a Muslim man praying: a deplorable act but one wonders just why Alternet and other liberal blogs have NEVER reported on the harassment tactics of MSA and others on campuses, including Brown University and Rutgers University, where they have silenced prominent Muslim critics of Islam such as Nonie Darwish....much less the MSA at Irvine in shutting down Michael Oren's lecture. ... or the raucous screams of Muslims at a San Francisco rally chanting "the Jews are our dogs", or the "honor" killings of Muslim teen-age girls in this country.
So much for the liberal and left media's independence and objectivity. One must dig hard and deep to find anything critical of Muslim violence and suppression of free speech, including the National Coalition against Censorship (NCAC), PEN, the international writers' group and the American Civil LIberties Union, who continue to decry any statements critical of Islamism or sharia law as bigoted demonization of all Muslims. The NCAC just issued its own condemnation of Cong. Peter King's hearings on Muslim radicalization. If that isn't opposition to freedom of speech, nothing is.
Muslims have zero tolerance for anything that criticizes them or their religion, yet they demand the right to vilify, slander, insult and threaten non-Muslims whenever they please. It is imperative that this double standard for free speech be abolished and that Muslims' rights to criticize others must be extended to everyone.
A New York Time editorial of March 3rd praised the eight-justice Supreme Court majority for upholding the protection of hurtful, hateful or offensive speech. It said that "even deeply flawed ideas must be defended because they are part of the public debate on which this country depends". Equally important is the defense of sound ideas that are distasteful to some people because they are the only way that dissent and journalistic integrity can be expressed.
In this realm is included an expose of the real meaning of sharia law, the fundamental code for Muslims that dictates every aspect of their daily life. Sharia is not a holy book nor a religious doctrine but a totalitarian dictate intended to control Muslims' personal life and behavior in all realms, and prevent deviation from what the religious interpreters of Islam decide is correct, as supported in the qu-ran. Transgression of some parts of sharia law mandates stoning, amputation and the death penalty. Modern Catholicism has, however, decided that losing church adherents is not such a good idea and consequently has chosen confession booths as the better part of doctrinal valor.
Mohammed claimed to have received the qu-ran directly from God (who, one assumes, spoke Arabic) but a close look at it by scholars of Islam such as Ibn Warraq and Andrew Bostom reveals some curious things, not least the fact that most of it was plagiarized from the Old Testament and even from Zoroastrianism, which was the prevalent religion in Iran. Scholars have noticed the numerous contradictions and different voices in the qu-ran (which most Muslims outside the middle east have never read in the Arabic original anyway, especially the second generation of Muslims brought up in non-Muslim countries who don't know Arabic and are at the mercy of the translator). This is because later scholars, living hundreds of years after the death of Mohammed in the 7th century CE, kept adding their own two cents over the years and paid no attention to how these conflicted with others. The same was true of the hadith, the sayings of Mohammed, because no one recorded these during Mohammed's lifetime so they were reconstructed - actually invented - in the centuries that followed.
In any case, it proved useful for Muslim religious leaders as well as for Muslim governments today to find such ancient justification for the oppression and stoning of women, amputation for thieves, and death for apostates. Curiously, the modern-day anti-Jewish crusade of Hamas and radical Muslim groups committing them to the slaughter of all Jews is not part of the qu-ran. The qu-ran specifically allows Christians and Jews to live among them provided they choose one of these options: conversion to Islam; or dhimmitude, the abasement before Muslims and payment of tribute. These other religions are considered to be "people of the book" since they honor the same prophets as Islam does, Jesus included.
Today, the plague of Political Correctness continues to spread as the media willingly adopt self-censorship in order to prove they are not Islamophobes. But a phobia about the imposition of a violent, repressive code of behavior is the only rational response. As someone has pointed out, the Cold War fear of Communism without a description of what Communism was and how it operated would have been impossible. Would it be possible to fear fascism or Nazism without describing their philosophy and modus operandi? Would it be possible to instill in the public a fear of the H1N1 virus or AIDS without describing their symptoms? Of course Muslims will screech when anyone criticizes sharia law. It isn't in the interest of a religion that calls itself a religion of peace to let its true character of violence, hatred and retribution be widely known.
Nonetheless, Muslims and many liberals insist that criticism of the religion of Islam represents hatred of Muslims. Nothing could be further from the truth. No Catholic has, in the face of church's continuing pedophile scandal and the naming of the pederast priests, suggested that the exposure of these implies anti-Catholicism. The fact is that it isn't the wearing of burqas or prayers five times a day or eating halal food per se that disturbs people. What disturbs them is the subjugation, abuse and stoning of women, honor killings, forced child marriages, anti-Semitism, threats to kill all Jews, and the attempts to suppress freedom of expression, a freedom they claim for themselves alone. Opposing these is the only sane and rational response to this latest totalitarian doctrine. Just because it poses as a religion makes no difference.
PS: we found John Galliano's really bad manners and anti-Semitism to be hors combat, not to say declasse, but we defend his statement to the lady in the Paris cafe: "Your boots are of low quality". This is exactly the kind of offensive speech that needs protection, even when it is in French and makes someone feel desolee. As for the women protesting the Frederick MacMonnies statue of "Civic Virtue Triumphant Over Righteousness" (Virtue, male with fig leaf, is trampling a couple of women), we suspect that the woman complainer at City Hall couldn't recognize allegory if it bit her in the face; maybe she was the model for one of the trampled women.
Lorna Salzman