Can the West Stand Up for Free Speech?

January 15, 2015 9:01 am / 12 Comments / victorhanson

False moral equivalence and blatant cowardice threaten our tradition of free expression.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online

Charlie Hebdo returns to newsstands at the terrorist attack. (Pascal Le Segretain/Getty)

Western civilization’s creed is free thought and expression, the lubricant of everything from democracy to human rights.
Even a simpleton in the West accepts that protecting free expression is not the easy task of ensuring the right to read Homer’s Iliad or do the New York Times crossword puzzle. It entails instead the unpleasant duty of allowing offensive expression.
Westerners fight against pornography, blasphemy, or hate speech in the arena of ideas by writing and speaking out against such foul expression. They are free to sue, picket, boycott, and pressure sponsors of unwelcome speech. But Westerners cannot return to the Middle Ages to murder those whose ideas they don’t like.

“Parody” and “satire” are, respectively, Greek and Latin words. In antiquity the non-Western tradition simply did not produce authors quite like the vicious Aristophanes, Petronius, and Juvenal, who unapologetically trashed the society around them. If the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo loses the millennia-old right to ridicule Islam from within a democracy, then there is no longer a West, at least as we know it.
Unfortunately, when we look to prominent defenders of the Western faith in free speech, we find too often offenders.
Start with Bill Donohue, the president of the Catholic League. He recently made a series of silly statements about the terrorist attack in Paris. The gist was that the slain Charlie Hebdo staffers were nearly as much to blame for their deaths as were their killers, given their gratuitous blasphemy against the Islamic religion.
Does Donohue believe that satirists who poke fun at Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and Judaism — and there are many, including the editors of Charlie Hebdo — are in similar mortal danger worldwide? Would Donohue wish such crass artists and writers to be? Do atheists find Donohue’s wink-and-nod apology for the radical Islamic killers offensive to the ideals of the secular Enlightenment? If so, should they assault Donohue for his de facto attack on unfettered free speech?
Cowardice also explains the failure to defend Western free expression. The New York Daily News recently ran a photo of editor Stephane Charbonnier, who was killed in the attack, holding an issue of Charlie Hebdo, but with the obnoxious cover-page cartoon caricaturing Islam pixelated out.
Would the Daily News — usually proud of its often lurid and graphic tabloid covers — extend such an exemption to Mormons’ displeasure over the Broadway play The Book of Mormon, which trashed their religion? Is it careful not to repeat blasphemies against Christianity or Buddhism?
Of course not. The editors assume that aggrieved Mormons will not storm their Manhattan offices with assault weapons. The Western media loudly proclaims its courage in taking on everyone from the Tea Party to gun owners, but it goes silent when the offended have a bad habit of lopping off heads rather than just arguing back.
We expect the president of the United States to be the foremost defender of the Western faith of free expression. Unfortunately, Barack Obama — who has a habit of weighing in on everything from his own resemblance to Trayvon Martin to the likely Final Four — has been utterly confused about free speech.
In 2009, during the Iranian Green Revolution, Obama kept quiet when millions of Iranians hit the streets to demand freedom from theocracy. Obama, who once made a last-minute trip to Denmark to lobby for Chicago to host the Olympics, was the sole major Western leader absent from a huge rally in Paris to reiterate the West’s commitment to free expression. Sports are one thing; defending free speech from radical Islam is quite another.
So far Obama has remained mum about the remarkable Cairo speech of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who called on imams and Islamic clerics to speak out against terrorist violence in their midst and to inculcate greater tolerance among Muslims. In Obama’s own 2009 Cairo speech, he invited the illiberal Muslim Brotherhood to attend in order to hear mostly half-true claims about the historical glories of Islam, while Obama cited Western colonialism, globalization, and the Cold War as understandable incitements to Muslims.
After the September 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Obama wrongly blamed filmmaker Nakoula Nakoula for sparking the violence by posting an anti-Islamic video. Obama chose to go before the United Nations to attack Nakoula (who was conveniently jailed by a federal judge for a minor probation violation): “The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”
Actually, Mr. President, the future belongs to civilized men and women who do not murder satirists who choose while in the West to ridicule any religion they please. Islam wins no special exemption.
The issue is not whether the late editors and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were obnoxious or clever, self-destructive, or courageous — but only whether Westerners reserve the right on their own soil to express themselves as they please.
Too bad so many of our leaders do not understand that.

© 2015 Tribune Media Services, Inc.


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Western Sleepwalkers and the Paris Massacre

victorhansonJanuary 16, 2015 9:43 am

After all the brave words and feel-good marches, what significant action will be taken? 

by Bruce S. Thornton // FrontPage Magazine
The jihadist murderers are dead, after killing five more Parisians, but many Westerners, long drugged by bad ideas and received wisdom, continue to sleepwalk through the war against jihadism. This means that after all the brave words and feel-good marches, little significant action will be taken to prevent such atrocities from happening again.

In the absence of clear thinking and recognition of fact, responses to this latest example of Muslim violence reflect ideological fever dreams. “Nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” as French president François Holland said of the attacks, is a perennial favorite. Such apologists invoke shopworn Marxist bromides like colonialism, or postmodern magical thinking like “Orientalism,” the two-bit Foucauldian invention of Egyptian-American literary critic and fabulist Edward Said. This was the tack taken by an American historian of Egypt who told a New York Times reporter that Islam was “’just a veneer’” for [jihadist] anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the ‘Orientalist’ condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.”
For many apologists, though, it’s just easier to call the jihadists “crazy.” Here’s Vox’s Ezra Klein, long-time purveyor of progressive orthodoxy, opining on the Paris murders. He fingers “the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong.”
This repeats Jimmy Carter’s mistake about the Ayatollah Khomeini, whom he called a “crazy man.” But jihadists are not insane, and their violence cannot be dismissed so simply. They are proud Muslims, adherents of a 14-centuries-old faith that conquered its way to one of history’s largest empires, the warriors before whom a now dominant, arrogant West once trembled. Their faith preaches that Allah wills the whole world to be united under the rule of Islam and its illiberal, totalitarian law code. Those who resist and refuse to convert are defying Allah; they are the enemies of Islam, the denizens of the “House of War” who endanger the spiritual wellbeing of the faithful in the “House of Islam.” As such, the infidels are the legitimate objects of Muslim violence, conquest, enslavement, and dominance, an aggression recorded on every page of history. If you want contemporary evidence for the reality of jihad, look around the world today, where Muslim violence is endemic, and accompanied by theological arguments drawn straight from Islamic scripture, theology, and jurisprudence.
So contra Klein, the Paris jihadists didn’t do something “that almost no human beings anywhere ever do.” As we speak, plenty of Muslim human beings every day in Nigeria, Libya, Syria, northern Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, to name a few venues of jihadist violence, are doing “horrible” things like murder, torture, beheadings, rape, sex-slavery, crucifixion, and all the other atrocities that are also copiously documented in the history of Islamic conquest and occupation. As a brave Egyptian critic of Islam, Ahmed Harqan, asked recently, “What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” Thus it’s no coincidence that of the 7 global conflicts costing at least 1000 lives a year, 6 involve Muslims.
Yet progressive orthodoxy dismisses this evidence as Islamophobic bigotry. Unable to deny the reality of theologically inspired Muslim violence daily filling the international news, they resort to blaming Western historical crimes, or scapegoating Israel. Another tack is to invoke the tu quoque fallacy, charging that Hebraism and Christianity are just as violent as Islam.
This argument took off after 9/11 and has persisted among the jihad deniers. Historian of religion Philip Jenkins claimed, “The Islamic scriptures [about war] in the Quran were actually far less bloody and less violent than those in the Bible.” Rabid anti-Zionist and apologist for terrorists Richard Falk played the moral equivalence card: “The Great Terror War has so far been conducted as a collision of absolutes, a meeting ground of opposed fundamentalists.” Atheist gadfly Richard Dawkins complained about “fundamentalist” Christians who “fuel their tanks at the same holy gas station” as Muslim terrorists. Similarly, a few years ago, Salon ran a headline asking, “What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick.” This specious moral equivalence descended into the absurd after the attacks in Paris, when a guest on MSNBC equated “Islamic extremism,” which murders thousands a week, with preacher Jerry Falwell’s 1988 unsuccessful libel suit against Hustlermagazine.
But even right-thinking people slip into this species of apologetics. A writer atPajamas Media, in an otherwise perceptive analysis, wrote this as well: “Unfortunately, this civilizational friction between the west and Islam has ebbed and flowed across the centuries.  It is nothing new.  Islam threatened the gates of Vienna and the Crusades reached the Holy Land.” This smacks of the “cycle of violence” trope usually used against Israel. What it ignores is the fact that someone started the violence by serially invading and conquering the lands of others, and enslaving and oppressing their people. The siege of Vienna in 1683 was the last in a long history of Islamic military aggression against Europe and the centuries-long occupation of Western lands; the Crusades were an attempt to liberate from oppressive occupiers a land that had been Christian for centuries before being invaded by the armies of Islam.
Most important, however, is the simple fact that the violence in the Old Testament is, as Raymond Ibrahim points out, descriptive, not prescriptive. It reflects the brutal reality of its times, not a theology binding the faithful for all times. As for the New Testament, the only violent verses apologists can dredge up, as a New York Times article did last week, come from the apocalyptic predictions of Revelations, or these words of Christ from Matthew: “I come not to bring peace, but a sword.” Grade-school catechumens know that this is a metaphor, not a call to jihad, like the Koranic verses instructing Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them,” or to “fight those who do not believe in Allah,” or to “kill them wherever you find them.”
The whitewashing of Islam’s violent prescriptions serves another fantasy, the idea that there are vast majorities of “moderate” Muslims whose “religion of peace and tolerance” has been “highjacked” by a tiny number of “extremists.” Yet most who make this case just assert it, rather than providing empirical evidence. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, for example, quoted one of the Danish cartoonists who had to go into hiding after being attacked at his home for drawing one of the infamous Mohammed cartoons. He is hoping for “a reaction from the moderate majority of Muslims against this attack [in Paris].” Noonan then responds, “That majority actually exists, and should step forward.” This call to moderate Muslims was also made in theWall Street Journal by French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy: “Those whose faith is Islam must proclaim very loudly, very often and in great numbers their rejection of this corrupt and abject form of theocratic passion.”
But we’ve been waiting ever since 9/11 for moderate Muslims to “step forward” and “proclaim very loudly” that the jihadists have distorted their faith. A few apologists, brave critics, and duplicitous spin-doctors have spoken out, but the Muslim masses globally have been mostly silent. Of course, many Muslims have no desire to follow Islam’s precepts about waging jihad, and just want to live their lives in peace. But there have not been mass marches protesting those who murder in their name and who allegedly “corrupt,” as Eric Holder said in Paris, Islamic theology. Perhaps last Sunday’s rally of over a million Parisians will turn out to be an exception, assuming it included significant numbers of Muslims. But will there be any follow-through after the emotional high passes? Or will this moment of multicultural brotherhood dissipate, as it did following France’s 1998 World’s Cup soccer victory, when a million Parisians gathered in celebration?
This silence of the Muslim masses about jihadist terror has been the case for over a decade of such attacks. In 2004 after the brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam––another attack on free speech––only a handful of Dutch Muslims attended a public rally and memorial service. In the intervening years, after similar attacks––like the murder of 7 French Jews and soldiers in 2012, or the 3 Jews massacred in Brussels in 2014––we have not seen the kind of public, unequivocal, unqualified, mass condemnations of the jihadists one would expect if the latter were a fringe whose beliefs are so alien to traditional Islam.
What we have seen are thousands of Muslims celebrating in the streets after 9/11. We have seen riots and murders in response to Westerners exercising the right to free speech. We have seen rallies against Israel in which nakedly genocidal rhetoric is indulged––“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” is a favorite–– and temples attacked, as happened during Israel’s war against Hamas last summer. And we have seen polls consistently demonstrate that significant numbers of Muslims, including large majorities in the Middle East, continue to support an illiberal, intolerant shari’a law that codifies the attitudes and beliefs justifying such violence.
Our ancestors for centuries acknowledged the true nature of Islam, a simple fact proven by 1000 years of Muslim aggression. Alexis de Tocqueville, one of our most brilliant political philosophers, wrote in 1838, “Jihad, Holy war, is an obligation for all believers. … The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels … [T]hese doctrines of which the practical outcome is obvious are found on every page and in almost every word of the Koran … The violent tendencies of the Koran are so striking that I cannot understand how any man with good sense could miss them.”
But that was when our leaders and intellectuals, schooled by history and experience, their minds not blinded by fashionable self-loathing and incoherent cultural relativism, were “men of good sense.” Our leaders today have slipped into delusional dreams, in which people like Tocqueville or Winston Churchill––who in 1897 said, “Civilization is face to face with militant Mohammedanism”––are dismissed as ignorant bigots and racists who lack our superior knowledge and morality. Meanwhile, the bodies of jihadism’s victims continue to pile up, and Iran’s genocidal theocracy closes in on a nuclear weapon. And many in the West continue to sleepwalk through it all.