Section 14

The prosecution in France’s Muhammad cartoons trial has dropped all charges against Charlie Hebdo magazine, which republished the Jyllands-Posten cartoons along with some of its own - including a cover picture of Muhammad saying “It’s tough being loved by idiots.”

Charlie Hebdo was prosecuted for inciting hatred but the trial brought a huge backlash from the defenders of free speech and the prosecution has asked that the magazine be cleared of all charges.

“Free speech is not the issue here. The issue is that, in France, racism is not an opinion, it is a crime,” said Francis Szpiner, lawyer for the Grand Mosque, which has sued along with the Union of French Islamic Organisations (UOIF).

“Two of those caricatures make a link between Muslims and Muslim terrorists. That has a name and it’s called racism.” During the cartoon controversy, offended Muslims demanded an apology and a ban on criticising Islam.

President Jacques Chirac accused Charlie Hebdo of willfully provoking Muslims.

On the side of Charlie Hebdo was an array of philosphers, intellectuals, and politicians:

Even [Interior Minister Nicolas] Sarkozy defended Charlie Hebdo, which typically portrays him as a nightstick-swinging policeman or a rabid pitbull terrier. But Sarkozy - stumping this year as a candidate for president from the conservative UMP party - characterized himself as a critic of “every form of censorship” in a written statement to the court. Sarkozy argued it was better to have “too many cartoons” than “no cartoons” and defended the “right to smile.”

Hat tip: Foreign Policy.

Wafa Sultan, speaking on Danish Television, makes the point that the Danish cartoons furore was good for Islam. She says that the hyperbolic response to the cartoons was to be expected because Islam is a culture that hasn’t questioned itself for fourteen hundred years; that Islam is a prison that traps Muslims and the only way out of that prison is for the walls to be broken down from outside; that the cartoon controversy is a crack in the wall.

Free speech is unheard of in Islamic culture because Islam brooks no criticism. Sultan says that Islam is not just a religion but also a political ideology “that applies its agenda by force”. She believes that by publishing the Mohammed cartoons Western newspapers are helping Muslims to get used to being criticised, essential because without criticism Islam cannot be transformed.

Sultan believes that change is possible and says that she remains optimistic about positive change in the long term. With Wafa Sultan’s voice heard on Al-Jazeera and over the Internet in interviews like this one, she may hint at the answer to Eric Schmidt’s question of what will happen when the next billion internet users come online.

Hat tip: Not PC.

Sheik Feiz Mohammed’s call for his followers to “have children and offer them as soldiers defending Islam” has attracted deserved outrage in the days since his “Death Series” DVDs were posted on YouTube (they have since been removed).

Sheik Mohammed is already under investigation for his links to a group arrested in Sydney during an anti-terrorism operation and is now being investigated in conection with these videos. Australian officials are calling for the DVDs to be banned and for Sheik Mohammed to be prosecuted for incitement to violence, inciting racial hatred, sedition, or presumably whatever else can be made to fit.

Idiot/Savant at No Right Turn rightly points out that

Prosecuting Mohammed is likely to [turn him into a martyr for freedom of speech, and give his views far more prominence and credibility than they deserve], with the added bonus of symbolising Australia’s hatred of Muslims - something which is not exactly going to help in the battle for “hearts and minds”.

Freedom of speech cuts both ways, and applies to views you don’t like as well as those you do. Sheik Mohammed’s views are vile and hateful, but they do not in and of themselves harm anyone. They are offensive, but giving offence is not harm.

I/S also makes an “obvious” comparison to the David Irving case. I don’t think the comparison is as obvious as I/S makes out and it downplays Sheik Mohammed’s evil. Irving promotes a demostrably false version of history that many, particularly Jews, find offensive. As noted above, “giving offence is not harm”.

Sheik Mohammed, while causing no direct harm himself, calls for others to do just that:

“Teach them this: there is nothing more beloved to me than wanting to die as a mujahid. Put in their soft, tender hearts the zeal of jihad and a love of martyrdom.”

I.e., brainwash your children to kill themselves and murder others.

It is important that these words are said out loud, in public. Not so that people can follow his instructions, but so that we can truly understand the nature of freedom’s enemies; so that those who would claim that Islam isn’t that awful feel compelled to make their case in public.

The incitement to violence here is not direct enough to warrant a ban. There is still room to think between the impulse and the response. And the educational value of having the views of these so-called “leaders” aired in public is immense.

UPDATE 26/01/07: Dr Mirko Bagaric, head of the Deakin Law School in Melbourne and NZ Herald guest columnist, agrees in part.

Mozart’s Idomeneo was performed at Deutsche Oper Berlin last night after being cancelled in September due to fears of violent reprisals from Muslims upset by the opera’s depiction of a decapitated Mohammed.

Deutsche-Welle reported in September:

The Deutsche Oper in Berlin announced Monday “with great regret” that it had scratched Hans Neuenfels’ version of the Mozart opera “Idomeneo” from the program this season because certain scenes presented an “incalculable security risk” for the theater.

“To avoid endangering the public and its employees, the Deutsche Oper in Berlin has decided to refrain from showing “Idomeneo” in November,” the opera house said.

Last night the opera opened to heavy security and there was only a minor disturbance during the scene in question.

After a great deal of sturm and drang about artistic freedom, opera fans and politicians attended the controversial Hans Neuenfels production of Mozart’s Idomeneo opera. The holy heads rolled, but the night was otherwise peaceful.

Let’s hope others take strength from this decision and choose not to be cowed by hyperbolically violent, thin-skinned Islamic protesters.

Iran yesterday opened a conference questioning the Holocaust. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has tried to claim that the conference makes Iran a champion of free speech, inviting speakers who have served jail time in Europe for expressing their opinion that the Holocaust did not occur or has been exaggerated.

As discussed at Not PC last week, the state sponsorship of a particular point of view at the expense of others can be just as damaging to free expression as state censorship. While France and Germany’s laws that punish holocaust denial are reprehensible, state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Iran is hardly the answer.

The real free speech lesson in Iran yesterday came from Ahmadinejad’s opponents.

Dozens of Iranian students burnt pictures of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and chanted “death to the dictator” as he gave a speech at a university inTehran.

The protest, during a speech at Amir Tabir University unrelated to the Holocaust meeting, will be embarrassing for Mr Ahmadinejad. He has portrayed Iran as a champion of free speech in hosting the two-day Holocaust conference, which has attracted revisionist historians who have served jail sentences in Europe, and American David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

But the conference has embarrassed many ordinary Iranians who are aware of the damage such events are inflicting on their country’s image. Some Iranians point out that they have much less freedom to debate pressing issues such as Iran’s nuclear program, which has brought the threat of international sanctions.

Despite being a total Islamic state Iran has an active reform movement, although its strength has waned since Ahmadinejad came to power with several opposition newspapers closed down, increased restrictions on Internet use, and continued arrests of journalists and bloggers. It’s very encouraging to see active opposition to the regime from inside the country.

In the previous post I talked about today’s Dominion Post editorial Chipping away at freedom of speech, which explored the contrast between Nicky Hager’s book, whose publication was prevented by legal injunction, and O.J. Simpson’s book If I Did It, whose publication was prevented because the publisher belatedly and after public badgering grew a sense of good taste.

A third example that should be added to this comparison is Scholastic Australia’s decision not to publish Army of the Pure, a children’s thriller about Afghan terrorists plotting to blow up Sydney’s Lucas Heights nuclear reactor. (Hat Tip: Pacific Empire)

Scholastic’s general manager, publishing, Andrew Berkhut, said the company had canvassed “a broad range of booksellers and library suppliers”, who expressed concern that the book featured a Muslim terrorist.

“They all said they would not stock it,” he said, “and the reality is if the gatekeepers won’t support it, it can’t be published.”

In the cases of both If I Did It and Army of the Pure the publishers voluntarily halted publication. In both cases the decision was a commercial decision. In neither case (as far as I know) were threats of violence made against anyone. I think the decision not to publish If I Did It was sound, although I don’t feel strongly either way, but the decision not to publish Army of the Pure is spineless, and bodes ill for the future. So what’s the difference?

If I Did It is simply in poor taste. It looks like an attempt by O.J. Simpson to make money out of murders that many people still believe that he committed and got away with. People are rightly revulsed and have said they won’t buy it.

Army of the Pure is a victim of the chilling effect - the self-censorship that occurs when people fear harm from others’ reactions to what they say. While no violence has specifically been threated against shops or libraries that stock this book, clearly that fear is there. Muslims have, in the very recent past, reacted with violent self-righteous fervour whenever anyone has dared criticise or mock Islam or Mohammed. Witness the extreme reaction to the Danish Mohammed cartoons, in which embassies were burnt down and perhaps 150 people were killed in riots.

The pulling of Army of the Pure is not because of concerns about poor taste, or the quality of the story-telling. It is because booksellers and librarians feel intimidated by previous acts of violence from volatile Muslim protesters and would rather voluntarily silence themselves than have rioters attempt to silence them by force. The appeasers are doing the oppressors’ work for them.

We must not be cowed by these protestors’ hyperbolic reactions and their exaggeratedly thin skins. Jihadists demand that everyone submit to Allah or face the sword. We must defend our freedom to think for ourselves and to voice our thoughts. We must not willingly surrender our freedoms in the hope of avoiding a fight.

There’s an interesting Bob Brockie World of Science column in this morning’s Dominion Post (p B5). Entitled Muslim Science in Doldrums, it summarises a series of Nature articles about the state of science in the Islamic world.

Muslim countries only have one-tenth the number of scientists that Western countries do, spend next to nothing on science, and register virtually no patents. The picture is consistently dismal from the most poverty-stricken backblocks of Africa to the oil-rich Gulf. The only notable exception is Turkey, which has rapidly rising scientific output and a university that made the world top 500 list. Turkey is also a notable exception in being a constitutionally secular state.

Brockie (and Nature) put the problem down to limited freedom of expression:

Political leaders in the Muslim world are notoriously intolerant of dissent and don’t encourage independent, sceptical thought - a necessary part of the scientist’s tool kit.

The Nature writers conclude that science gets a bum rap in Muslim countries; that scientists can’t expect any improvement from new Islamic politicians; that further restrictions on freedom of expression are likely and, given today’s trends, the situation of science in Islamic countries can only get worse.

I’ve received a reply from Reporters Sans Frontières about why New Zealand’s press freedom index rank slipped this year.

RSF preface their comments by saying that in the past New Zealand’s ratings have been “especially good, even perfect”. The two reasons given for our drop are

1. tensions and pressure around the Mohammed cartoons [when Helen Clark attacked the Dominion Post and The Press for printing the cartoons, saying the issue “is not one of freedom of the press but of taste and judgement and the cartoons will do nothing to bring communities together”], and
2. TVNZ’s Board being hauled before Parliament’s Privileges Committee during the Ian Fraser affair.

RSF gave New Zealand black marks for having Parliament interfering in the running of TVNZ (interference from the politically appointed Board was Fraser’s original reason for resigning) and then, when the TVNZ Board punished Fraser for what he’d said to the Select Committee, the Greens defended Parliament’s punishment of TVNZ’s Board on freedom of speech grounds.

Both of these comments are about government meddling in the media. The temptation to meddle will always be there for politicians who think they know best, but clearly the meddling is more effective when the medium in question is state-owned.