"Rather than never dying before they get old

[Posted by reader_iam]

... they'll just read Newsweek articles declaring that whatever age they are isn't really old at all."

Creak. Ouch. Poke. Stir. And, by the way... .

Without Further Comment

[posted by Callimachus]

Because none is needed:

In the USA, Freedom of Speech seems often discussed only when certain public persons say cuss words or sexual ones, or give unpopular opinions (to and about someone) or the haterati spews.

But what about protecting ‘freedom of speech’ for what many would call ‘good words,’ ‘informative words’ ‘evolutionary words’ that take current thought and either expand it for the good, or else criticize current crimes…all for humanity’s sake? To call such, protection for ‘political speech,’ does not speak to the heart of what Zakia Zaki was doing. She was speaking for the soul.

And now she’s dead. Shot to death yesterday, seven wounds while sleeping with her 20 month old son. In her bedroom, a few miles from Kabul. Her 3 year old son was also sleeping nearby. She is the young mother of six children. The news reports say the children were not harmed. But that means physically. Without their dear mother, with unbearable memory of what occured, it cannot be said ‘the children were not harmed.’

Would that ‘importing democracy’ to Afghanistan had saved Zakia Zaki. Miss Zaki, 35 years old, started her radio career eight years ago and began speaking on Peace Radio, funded by the US Government since 2001.

Well-said.

Foolish Claws

[Posted by reader_iam]

Would you want to place your career prospects in the hands of a business--which supposedly touts its savvy with regard to how networks "work"--that could be this unplugged about an obvious network?

Netlag, indeed.

I didn't think I'd be posting just now, but I have to come out in solidarity with Kat Coble of Just Another Pretty Farce, a blogger whose blog I blogrolled at the old site relatively early, though the link there leads to her old blogspot site, from which she migrated a month ago. (Well, those who visit here but still drop in there know that I'm not exactly maintaining that site, and haven't touched the blogroll, as far as updates, in I don't know how long--a year?)

One of the reasons I included her in that blogroll was the sense of the genuine and the honest opinions she brought to her posts, a certain openness to posting her thoughts and experience, which, frankly, I both admired and, in a certain sense, envied. Apparently, that's what got her into trouble. There's a chilly wind afoot, and like all chilly winds, it's going to have a faster cooling effect on everything and everyone on the warmer side before it does on the cold-blooded, and bloody-minded. Still, if it keeps up, that nip will cut closer to every bone (to be picked), and make no mistake.

Read the original post, the source of the catalyst for the controversy, [JL Kirk Associates being the source]. (Note the comments--which, by the way, includes response from a JL Kirk employee--because they are cited in the letter from JL Kirk Associates' legal representation.) Does it strike you that it makes sense for that post to inspire the legal response?

The defensiveness, thin-skinnedness, and lack of awareness on the part of a business in an industry which relies on the reputation of superior connectedness is breathtaking.

One wonders: Had Coble's account taken the form of an interview for a newspaper article, for example, would that firm have threatened her with a lawsuit? Would it have threatened the newspaper?

And Etc.

Now, back to my own warm burrowing.

U.N. Decides It Doesn't Suck Enough

[posted by Callimachus]

Votes to Suck More.

GENEVA (AP) — Islamic countries pushed through a resolution at the U.N. Human Rights Council on Friday urging a global prohibition on the public defamation of religion — a response largely to the furor last year over caricatures published in a Danish newspaper of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad.

The statement proposed by the Organization of Islamic Conference addressed what it called a "campaign" against Muslim minorities and the Islamic religion around the world since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

The resolution, which was opposed by a number of other non-Muslim countries, "expresses deep concern at attempts to identify Islam with terrorism, violence and human rights violations."

It makes no mention of any other religion besides Islam, but urges countries "to take resolute action to prohibit the dissemination of racist and xenophobic ideas and material aimed at any religion or its followers that constitute incitement and religious hatred, hostility, or violence."

(And don't miss this).

Your Action Needed For Choudhury

[Posted by reader_iam]

In our mailbox, from Rabbi Sue Levy (I have changed case to eliminate blocks of caps):

House Resolution #64 in support of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury will be considered in the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week. The good news: The resolution has sixteen co-signers and is assured of passage on the House floor with a large majority.

The bad news: In order to move the resolution out of committee, there must be ten co-signers who are actually members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. At this time, we have only three, and we have only two business days to accomplish this. (We were only given two days notice that the resolution would be on the agenda for this week.) All the co-signers must be onboard by Tuesday afternoon.

The ACJ and the Simon Wiesenthal Center will focus on contacting the committee members in California.

I am listing the committee members whose co-sponsorship is needed below. To make this easier for you, they are listed by states.

1. Please call a member in your state or one of those with asterisks beside their names. The phone number for the house of representatives is: 202- 224- 3121.

2. Discussion points: Salah Uddin Shoiab Choudhury, moderate Muslim journalist, on trial now for sedition and treason for publishing a newspaper which supports israel - only one in islamic world, for promoting interfaith understanding and for writing about the danger of radical islam. Subject to death penalty. No jury. No defense witnesses permitted. Resolution asks to drop charges. European union has already passed a similar resolution. This is a bipartisan resolution.

3. When you reach a staff person in a congressional office, ask them to call you back the same day to say whether the representative will co-sponsor.

3. Tell that individual to be in touch with Jeff Phillips in the office of Rep. Mark Kirk, 202-225-4835, who is the point person for this resolution.

4. Let me know who you have called and the response.

5. Please forward this post to anyone who might be helpful.

MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE WHO ARE NOT YET CO-SPONSORS OF HOUSE RESOLUTION #64.

*Arkansas: John Borman
Arizona: Jeff Flake, Gabrielle Giffords

California: Howard Berman, Brad Sherman, Dana Rohrbacher, Elton Gallegher, Edward Royce, Diane Watson, Lynn Woolsey, Linda Sanchez, Jim Costa

Colorado: Thomas Tancredo

Florida: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Connie Mack, Robert Wexler, Ron Klein

*Georgia: David Scott

Illinois: Donald Manzullo

Indiana: Dan Burton, Mike Pence

Massachusetts: Bill Delahunt

*Missouri: Russ Carnahan

*Nebraska: Jeff Fortenberry

New Jersey: Christopher Smith, Donald Payne, Albio Sires

New York:
*Gary Ackerman, Chairman, Subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia
Elliot Engle, *Gregory Meeks

*North Carolina: Brad Miller

*Ohio: Steven Chabot

Oregon: David Wu

*South Carolina: Joe Wilson, J. Gresham Barrett, Bob Inglis

*Tennessee: John Tanner

*Texas: Ruben Hinojosa, Ted Poe, Ron Paul, Michael Mc Call

Virginia: Jo Ann Davis

Washington: Adam Smith

Please do what you can, and note the deadline for signatories (Tuesday afternoon).

Use It Or

[posted by Callimachus]

Here's what I like. This column by Frank Furedi, which discusses the business of intolerance of "denial" speech (a 21st century phrase if I ever saw it) by reference to the sacred cows -- everyone's, all of them, the whole barnyard:

Many influential figures have a cavalier attitude to free speech, believing that ‘dangerous’ ideas should be repressed. Disbelief in today’s received wisdom is described as ‘Denial’, which is branded by some as a crime that must be punished. It began with Holocaust denial, before moving on to the denial of other genocides. Then came the condemnation of ‘AIDS denial’, followed by accusations of ‘climate change denial’. This targeting of denial has little to do with the specifics of the highly-charged emotional issues involved in discussions of the Holocaust or AIDS or pollution. Rather, it is driven by a wider mood of intolerance towards free thinking.

When you start out that way, you get somewhere. Rather than damning someone else's right to deny, then yowling when someone cracks down on your own pet denial fixation. Niemöller's famous poem ought to be re-written with more repugnant victims, even to this level: "When they came for the Holocaust-deniers, I said nothing ...."

Rights are hard things, cold in the hand. Not candy and easy answers. They're as fragile as lightbulbs, too, as Furedi's column notes:

One of the most disturbing developments of past two decades is the loss of support for freedom of speech amongst the wider public. This was confirmed in the recently published British Social Attitudes Survey, which indicated that a larger section of the British public (64 per cent) support the right of people ‘not to be exposed to offensive views’ than support the right for people to ‘say what they think’ (54 per cent). The report concluded that the ‘general public is generally less convinced about civil liberties than they were 25 years ago’. Only a small majority of the public takes free speech seriously. The survey also suggests that these illiberal attitudes pre-date the war on terrorism, and therefore cannot be blamed on the political atmosphere created post-9/11.

That's Britain; I wonder how different the numbers would be here in the U.S. Among the many seeming contradictions you can find in me is my horror that America has effectively wrecked its original Constitution in the period 1850-1920, and now is literally a driverless car, since the original balanced and mixed government was dismantled. But I rarely write much about that. I'd rather people didn't think that way, or that they realize what I see is true, if it is true. Better we believe we're living under the Constitution, and are bound by it, at least by such parts of it as are left. You'd never get them passed into law today.

Revive la France

[posted by Callimachus]

Christian Delacampagne, a professor of French literature and philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, writes about Robert Redeker, a small-town French high-school philosophy teacher who published an op-ed article in "Le Figaro" responding to the controversy over Pope Benedict's remarks about Islam. Redeker wrote of Islam’s attempt “to place its leaden cloak over the world.”

If Jesus was “a master of love,” he wrote, Muhammad was “a master of hatred.” Of the three “religions of the book,” Islam was the only one that overtly preached holy war. “Whereas Judaism and Christianity are religions whose rites reject and delegitimize violence,” Redeker concluded, “Islam is a religion that, in its own sacred text, as well as in its everyday rites, exalts violence and hatred.”

Having been posted online, the article was read all across France and in other countries as well, and was quickly translated into Arabic. Denunciations of Redeker’s “insult of the prophet” spread across the Internet. Within a day after publication, the piece was being condemned on al Jazeera by the popular on-air preacher (and unofficial voice of Osama bin Laden) Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi. In Egypt and Tunisia, the offending issue of Le Figaro was banned.

As for Redeker himself, he soon received a large number of threats by letter and e-mail. On an Islamist website, he was sentenced to death in a posting that, in order to facilitate a potential assassin’s task, also provided his address and a photograph of his home. Fearful for himself and his family, Redeker sought protection from the local police, who transferred the case to the national counter-espionage authorities. On their advice, Redeker, his wife, and three children fled their home and took shelter in a secret location. Since then, they have moved from city to city, at their own expense, under police protection. Another teacher has been appointed by the French Ministry of Education to replace Redeker, who will probably never see his students again.

It spirals downward from there. Delacampagne's lament is not over the Islamic reaction (or the lack of an audible counter-view from that community), which may say as much as anything about the state of the world. It is for the general reaction of the French elite class. I'm glad to say André Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy spoke up for fundamental French liberties. As did, to his credit, Dominique de Villepin.

But the vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. The Communist mayor of Saint-Orens-de-Gameville, echoed by the head of Redeker’s school, deplored the fact that he had included his affiliation at the end of the article. France’s two largest teachers’ unions, both of them socialist, stressed that “they did not share Redeker’s convictions.” The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his “irresponsible declarations” and “putrid ideas.” A fellow high-school philosophy teacher, Pierre Tévanian, declared (on a Muslim website) that Redeker was “a racist” who should be severely punished by his school’s administration. Even Gilles de Robien, the French minister of education, criticized Redeker for acting “as if he represented the French educational system”—a bizarre charge against the author of a piece clearly marked as personal opinion.

Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,” implying that the founder of Islam must be treated even by non-Muslims in a non-Muslim country as an object not of investigation but of veneration.

To be sure, Redeker’s language had not been gentle. But since when has that been a requirement of intellectual discourse in France? One can often find similarly strong language in, say, Les Temps Modernes, the journal founded by Jean-Paul Sartre and on whose editorial board Redeker has long served. Yet, to judge by the response to his “offense,” large sectors of the French intellectual and political establishment have carved out an exception to this hard-won tradition of open discussion: when it comes to Islam (as opposed to Christianity or Judaism), freedom of speech must respect definite limits.

How did France reach this point?

He goes on to give an answer. I urge you to read it.

Necessary Blasphemy

Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University, opens his defense of offensive free speech with a simple absolutist statement that I wholeheartedly share: "Freedom of speech is important, and it must include the freedom to say what everyone else believes to be false, and even what many people take to be offensive."

His very next sentence is a slam against religion, as a "major obstacle to basic reforms that reduce unnecessary suffering." His list of religion's faults is the usual one for a left-side American secularist: it includes contraception, abortion, stem-cell research, and homosexuality. (It closes with "the treatment of animals" which seems an odd outrider in this posse.) "In each case, somewhere in the world, religious beliefs have been a barrier to changes that would make the world more sustainable, freer, and more humane."

What sustainable means in such a case eludes me; it is a value-neutral word (you can sustain evil as well as good) but when certain people use it it seems to have been pre-packed with a set of meanings (perhaps ecological) like a gag store's spring-loaded "snakes in a can" toy.

Singer and I start at the same mountaintop of ethics and proceed down different paths. But do we end up at the same place?

In this article, yes. The logical next stop, in such a discussion today, is the Jyllands Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. And while we both find the outcome of the controversy tragic, we both agree that this was a valid expression of free speech, though for slightly different reasons.

"In hindsight," Singer writes, "it would have been wiser not to publish the cartoons. The benefits were not worth the costs."

I'm not sure freedom of any sort is the kind of thing you measure on a cost-benefits basis. If there's to be a measure of it, I'd say the one that matters is the personal courage required: Nobody's going to cut your head off for mocking American fundamentalist Christians who oppose physician-assisted suicide. That's hardly a test case for free speech. It's more important to hold up a candle in the demon-haunted darkness than in broad daylight.

But, Singer adds, "To restrict freedom of expression because we fear such consequences would not be the right response. It would only provide an incentive for those who do not want to see their views criticized to engage in violent protests in future." And a hearty hear, hear to that.

And I think he's right in the main thrust of his article, which is not the Muhammad cartoons but the jailed Holocaust-denier David Irving.

I support efforts to prevent any return to Nazism in Austria or anywhere else. But how is the cause of truth served by prohibiting Holocaust denial? If there are still people crazy enough to deny that the Holocaust occurred, will they be persuaded by imprisoning some who express that view? On the contrary, they will be more likely to think that views people are being imprisoned for expressing cannot be refuted by evidence and argument alone.

Exactly. Irving should be freed, not because he's right, but because being wrong in words ought not to be a crime. Singer, before going further, lays out his credentials as a grandson of three Holocaust victims. This is a poignant, but unnecessary, aside. This is not a Jewish issue; it is a freedom issue, and as such it affects every person in a free society.

Irving, 67, is a formidable amateur historian who has worked from primary sources to build up his picture of a Third Reich in which Jews certainly were mistreated and died in large numbers, but not by a methodical genocide ordered by Hitler.

He already has been financially ruined and professionally disgraced by his persistence in Holocaust denial. But he should not be in jail; he should be out in the public arena trying to prove his case and seeing it shreded by the historical record. Like Jefferson, we are willing to “tolerate error as long as reason is free to combat it.”

In history as in all intellectual activities, questioning and probing makes a strong case stronger. The truth need not fear a Devil’s advocate.

There's a flaw in Singer's argument, however: He overlooks the difference between Europe and America in this matter, and he seems inclined to extend American ideas to European realities. Americans have steeled ourselves to an ugly truth: Our commitment to free expression means we must tolerate freedom of expression for people we despise, or else it means nothing. It's a daily battle to maintain that, as the brouhaha over the "South Park" blasphemies revealed. But generally the principal of free speech comes out on top.

But Europe is different. Public Holocaust denial is a crime in 10 European countries, from France to Lithuania. All of them not only suffered under Nazi occupation but were, in some degree, complicit in the deportation and killing of Jews during the war.

After the war, laws were enacted that banned Nazi insignia and the stiff-arm salute. It was not just a question of muzzling Jew-baiters; the European nations remember that fascists came to power within the mechanism of democratic electoral systems and with a great deal of popular enthusiasm. The laws were meant, in part, to prevent the rebirth of a lethal political movement.

As Hajo Funke, a German historian, put it: “We can’t afford the luxury of the Anglo-Saxon freedom of speech argument in this regard. It’s not that I don’t understand it, it’s just not for us. Not yet. Not for a long time.”

Hence the 1992 Austrian law Irving was convicted under, which applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse the National Socialist genocide or other National Socialist crimes against humanity in a print publication, in broadcast or other media.”

It's an unfortunate side-effect of Irving's trial that Islamists around the world have been able to point to it as proof of hypocrisy in the Western commitment to freedom of speech as invoked in the case of the Danish cartoon drawings of Muhammad. That's the point Singer wishes to make, too:

[E]ven while the protests about the cartoons were still underway, a new problem about convincing Muslims of the genuineness of our respect for freedom of expression has arisen because of Austria's conviction and imprisonment of David Irving for denying the existence of the Holocaust. We cannot consistently hold that it should be a criminal offense to deny the existence of the Holocaust and that cartoonists have a right to mock religious figures.

Aside from the curious "we" (perhaps Sinbger is uncomfortable with the idea of being an American hectoring Europeans about freedom) that's a strong argument. Irving’s writings feed the Islamists’ warped ideology, which run a close parallel to Hitler’s. But jailing Irving only adds the martyr’s halo to his sad career. It’s an unfortunate side-effect of Irving’s trial that Islamists around the world have been able to point to it as proof of hypocrisy in the Western commitment to freedom of speech as invoked in the case of the Danish cartoon drawings of Muhammad.

I would not go as far as Singer in saying "In the current climate in Western nations, the suspicion of a particular hostility towards Islam, rather than other religions, is well justified." For one, the Europe-America distinction remains important here. But I understand such suspicion, even if I don't find it "well-justified." And Singer and I agree in this:

Only when David Irving has been freed will it be possible for Europeans to turn to the Islamic protesters and say: "We apply the principle of freedom of expression evenhandedly, whether it offends Muslims, Christians, Jews, or anyone else."