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Date: Wed, 1 Mar 2006 20:48:51 -0500 (EST)
To: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
From: James W Mickens <jmickens &AElig eecs.umich.edu>
Subject: Re: free speech infringement alert (fwd)
Status: O

>> It's a good thing I took down the Danish cartoons because you're right, I 
>> would have been consistency-bound to post Irving's racist tracts too.

I don't think that this is true. The Irving trial and the Muhammed 
cartoons deal with two distinct areas of free speech. The Irving trial 
deals with civil free speech, i.e., the extent to which a government can 
limit the free expression of its citizens. The controversy over the 
Muhammed cartoons is different. Nobody seriously expects European 
governments to make satire of Islam illegal. Instead, the cartoon 
controversy is about chilling effects on free speech. To what extent can 
non-Muslims critique Islam without fear of retaliation, retaliation that 
comes not from government interference, but from non-state actors behaving 
in extra-legal, often violent ways?

My previous posts have given examples of such chilling actions, e.g., 
death threats, defenestrations, etc. As an example of chilling effects in a 
different scenario, consider the following comments from Jonathan 
Zimmerman, a history professor at New York University:

----------------------------
"During the civil rights era, reporters from the North received frequent 
threats from Southern white supremacists. Like the rioters in the Middle 
East today, these bigots claimed that newspapers were insulting their way 
of life. The newspapers should cease and desist, the racists said, or 
else.

'We wouldn't be having all this ... trouble if your Northern newsmen 
didn't come down here and stir ... [things] up,' a Mississippi businessman 
told The New York Times's Claude Sitton in 1964. Mr. Sitton was 
investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers, who would 
soon be found dead. Unless he left town, Sitton was told, he'd be killed 
as well.

Most of the time, news organizations stood up to these threats. Now and 
again, however, they capitulated. As Taylor Branch recounts in his 
recently published opus, 'At Canaan's Edge,' CBS television interrupted 
its coverage of a 1965 civil rights rally after white viewers complained 
about it. The problem? Cameras had shown Mary Travers - of the folk trio 
Peter, Paul, and Mary - giving Harry Belafonte a peck on the cheek. A 
white woman kissing a black man! On national television! That was too 
offensive for sensitive white audiences - especially in the South - to 
handle. You see, white Southerners are 'different.'

Of course, this surrender demeaned the very people it was meant to 
protect: Most Southern whites could handle these images, despite a 
minority who could not. The same goes for Islam today. By refraining from 
publishing the controversial Danish cartoons, all in the name of fostering 
religious tolerance, American newspapers are feeding the bigoted notion 
that all Muslims are raving, violence-addled hooligans."
----------------------------

It does not make sense for someone to reprint the Muhammed cartoons for 
fear that the Danish government is restricting civil free speech. It 
*does* make sense for someone to post the cartoons to show that the West 
will not cease its traditions of satire and intellectual criticism in the 
face of intimidation from fundamentalist Islamists. In the same way that 
it made sense in the 1960's for the American North to analyze and satirize 
the racist elements of the American South, it makes sense for people to 
reprint the Muhammed cartoons within the larger context of the debate 
about Islam and Western ideals of freedom.

Because the Irving trial and the cartoon controversy involve distinct free 
speech issues, one need not take the same attitude towards both cases. I 
think that this is an important point. For example, a religious 
libertarian might support Irving's right to publish controversial 
historical studies without government censorship, but attack the Muhammed 
cartoons as unnecessarily blasphemous. A secular European liberal might 
support the Muhammed cartoons as an example of the Enlightenment-era 
concepts of satire and religious critique; however, the European liberal 
might oppose the publication of Irving's work on the grounds that it is 
morally and intellectually criminal to deny a genocide with such a large 
and inescapable historical record. My point is that it is unnecessarily 
reductionist to construe free speech in such a way that one must either 
support both Irving and the Muhammed cartoons, or reject both Irving and 
the Muhammed cartoons. It's not as simple as that.

~j