{"id":607,"date":"2012-09-29T05:39:43","date_gmt":"2012-09-29T05:39:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/?p=607"},"modified":"2012-10-02T17:53:50","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T17:53:50","slug":"free-speech-and-the-clash-of-civilizations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/?p=607","title":{"rendered":"Free Speech and the “Clash of Civilizations”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Slur in the eyeblack. Photo by James G., via Flickr<\/p><\/div>\n

Three hurtful words, scrawled in black circles under the eyes of a ballplayer named Yunel Escobar: Tu ere[s] maric<\/em>\u00f3n.\u00a0 The message, conveyed in the eyeblack of the Toronto Blue Jays shortstop during a recent game, means, You\u2019re a faggot. \u00a0That\u2019s hate language, and reaction was swift and stern.\u00a0 Major league baseball launched an investigation, the Blue Jays suspended Escobar for three games and enrolled him in \u201csensitivity training,\u201d and he gave the obligatory apology in front of the microphones. Few if anyone publicly complained that, hurtful or not, homophobic or not, Escobar\u2019s free speech rights trumped the concerns of others wounded by his words.\u00a0 No one said Escobar should be able to continue displaying the slur.<\/p>\n

\u201cGiven the reaction of the offended community, Escobar\u2019s punishment was absolutely justifiable and necessary to maintain order in society,\u201d wrote Stacie Brown<\/a> on policymic.\u00a0 In other words, the community came together and shut Escobar up, due to a collective sense of mutual respect for the rights of others not to be hurt by hateful speech.\u00a0 Society has forged standards of respect and unacceptability about racial, ethnic, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs.\u00a0 Rightly or wrongly, the message is:\u00a0 use certain hateful words in public, and you\u2019ll pay the price.\u00a0 So why is there a different set of values at work when it comes to the hurt caused Muslims by hateful, Islamophobic characterizations of the Prophet Mohammed, or denigrations of Islam? \u00a0Go to Salon…<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Innocence of Muslims\u201d is only the latest attack on the Prophet designed to provoke and therefore reinforce the image of Muslims as the Other, unworthy of the support and empathy of civilized peoples.\u00a0 \u201cThe obvious, outward motive of such attempts is\u2026to show Muslims as irrational, violent, intolerant and barbaric, all of which are attributes profoundly inscribed into the racist anti-Muslim discourse in the West,\u201d writes the Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah<\/a>, editor of Al Ahram Online.<\/p>\n

But whether the provocation is the \u201cInnocence\u201d trailer, which depicts Mohammed as a pedophile and \u201cmurderous thug\u201d; Danish cartoons, including one depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban; \u00a0a Florida Quran-burning; or images of naked women with verses of the Quran scrawled across their bodies, in a film whose director liked to call Muslims \u201cgoat-fuckers,\u201d the defense centers on free speech.<\/p>\n

“Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views, even views that we profoundly disagree with,” President Obama pointed out at the United Nations this week, in the continuing wake of the \u201cInnocence\u201d furor. “We do not do so because we support hateful speech, but because our founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views and practice their own faith may be threatened.”<\/p>\n

Instinctively, as a journalist, I\u2019ve always been close to a free-speech absolutist.\u00a0 After all, if we start banning things, where do we draw the line?<\/p>\n

But there are two problems with blanket free-speech protections in these cases:\u00a0 One, such universal protections don\u2019t exist in the first place.\u00a0 Laws on the books already prohibit certain hateful and provocative speech. \u00a0In Germany, it\u2019s against the law to deny the Holocaust. \u00a0\u00a0Here in the States, try advocating assassination, running an explosives seminar, defending the 9\/11 attacks, or even making a charitable donation to the wrong group in the wrong conflict zone, and see how far you get. \u00a0Some of these restrictions emanate from the USA Patriot Act, but others have been in place for decades.\u00a0 Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in 1919, argued that \u201cthe most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.\u201d\u00a0 As Sarah Chayes points out in an LA Times op-ed<\/a> titled \u201cFree Speech or Incitement?\u201d, \u201cThe Innocence of Muslims\u201d was provocative by design, and therefore may fit U.S. case law that prohibits \u201cspecifically advocating violence.\u201d\u00a0 She quotes Anthony Lewis, former New York Times columnist and eloquent free speech champion: \u201cIf the result was violence, and violence was intended, then it meets the standard\u201d for a criminal act.<\/p>\n

The second problem in the blanket free speech defense is its unequal application to Muslims and Arabs.\u00a0 \u201cI come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam,\u201d went the Disney film \u201cAlladin\u201d\u2019<\/em>s opening song, \u201cwhere they cut off your ear if they don\u2018t like your face. It\u2018s barbaric, but hey, it\u2018s home.\u201d\u00a0 Is there any other group in America for whom this kind of slur would not be roundly condemned, its offenders forced to apologize before being sent into the corner like Yunel Escobar?<\/p>\n

There is little in the public conversation that seeks to understand and explain the hurt caused to Muslims by these slurs.\u00a0 \u201cTo mock<\/em>, to denigrate<\/em>, to make fun <\/em>of, somebody who\u2019s deep…[in] the hearts of the Muslims? Really?\u201d asked Sheikh Hamza Yusuf at a packed forum<\/a> at Zaytuna College<\/a>, a new Muslim college in Berkeley, in the aftermath of the \u201cInnocence\u201d furor.\u00a0 (I was the forum\u2019s moderator.) Yusuf argued that religious denigration should be seen in the same light as racial slurs, where \u201cthere are consequences. You will lose your job!\u00a0 We don\u2019t accept racial denigration anymore. I think religious denigration has to be seen as identity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Islamophobia, and the accompanying hating on Arabs, helps provide cover for exceptional denigration.\u00a0\u00a0 At the Zaytuna forum, Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of the college, described \u201can Islamophobic production industry that is dedicated to demeaning, to speaking ill of Muslims and attempting to silence Muslims from civil discourse.\u201d This \u201cothering\u201d simply does not spur the same kind of outrage as slurs on blacks, gays, Jews, Asians or Latinos. In Hollywood especially, from \u201cRaiders of the Lost Ark\u201d to \u201cDon\u2019t Mess with the Zohan,\u201d Arabs and Muslims are the last fair game for attacks with impunity.\u00a0 Jack Shaheen, director of \u201cReel Bad Arabs,\u201d cites a\u00a0 \u201cdangerously consistent pattern of hateful Arab stereotypes.\u00a0 All aspects of our culture project the Arab as villain.\u00a0 That is a given.\u201d\u00a0 The attacks on Arabs and Muslims come with free speech arguments that often don\u2019t apply for other groups.<\/p>\n

\u201cWestern states and media,\u201d wrote Mustafa Malik<\/a> in the San Francisco Chronicle, \u201chave waived the free-speech principles\u2026in case of Holocaust denials, racial slurs, advocacy of terrorism and other expressions that could endanger Western social order or national security.\u00a0 But they have persistently refused to prevent the vilification of Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such vilifications, obviously, do not justify mayhem by the weak and besieged already enraged at the West \u2013 be it the murderers of the Dutch director, Theo Van Gogh, or the rioters who, post Innocence, have claimed the lives of dozens of people, perhaps including Chris Stevens, the U.S. Ambassador to Libya.\u00a0 (The Libyan attacks may have been pre-meditated, and the video only a pretext.)<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s time to have a conversation about whether the free speech rights are being applied evenly, and whether speech which leads to murder deserves to be protected.\u00a0 Simply saying \u201cthere\u2019s nothing we can do\u201d will only perpetuate the pattern.\u00a0 This will leave the ground clear for extremists from both sides, who, ironically, need each other to join the battle in their perceived fateful clash of civilizations.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three hurtful words, scrawled in black circles under the eyes of a ballplayer named Yunel Escobar: Tu ere[s] maric\u00f3n.\u00a0 The message, conveyed in the eyeblack of the Toronto Blue Jays shortstop during a recent game, means, You\u2019re a faggot. \u00a0That\u2019s hate language, and reaction was swift and stern.\u00a0 Major league baseball launched an investigation, the more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=607"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":610,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/607\/revisions\/610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramallahcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}