Entries Tagged 'free speech' ↓

We’re not supposed to say “the n word” in New York City anymore.

“People are using it out of context,” said Leroy Comrie, a black city councilman who sponsored the unanimously passed measure. “People are also denigrating themselves by using the word, and disrespecting their history.”

New York’s resolution is not binding and merely calls on residents to stop using the slur. Leaders of the nation’s largest city also hope to set an example.

I have never uttered “the n word” in my entire life, except on this blog: to defend freedom of speech. Now that my ferociously libertarian hackles are up, however, I just can’t stop. And I won’t stop.
Nigger.

Nigger.

Nigger.

Nigger.

Nigger.

Nigger.

Nigger.

Nigger.

That’s me. (Shhhh—don’t tell anyone. You’ll ruin my image.)

Why am I a cheap date? Because I am happy to receive this single measly gift—from Reuters of all places—for my one-year blogging anniversary: news that some prominent Europeans have not lost their minds, and that they are willing to say so in public.

The French magazine that published two of the Mohammed cartoons a year ago is having its day in court, having been sued by several Muslim groups for slander against all Muslims. 

Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val said … the lack of prompt European support for Denmark as its embassies were attacked in the Middle East also upset him.

 

Val said the cartoons targeted Islamist militants: “In no way do they express any contempt for believers of any faith.”

He rejected suggestions from lawyers for the Muslim groups that Prophet Mohammad should be beyond criticism, saying religion had no place in the political sphere and that debate and criticism were essential elements of a democracy.

“What is sacred for a religion is sacred only for believers of that religion,” he told the court. “If we respected all the taboos of all religions, where would we be?” 

Indeed. A Paris professor weighed in too:

Paris University philosopher Abdel Wahhab Meddeb said he laughed when he saw Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon. “I urge Muslims to adapt to Europe and not the other way around. That would be catastrophic,” he told the court.

So did Le Monde:

“The trial against Charlie Hebdo is one of a different age,” the daily Le Monde wrote in an editorial. “In a secular state, no religion and no ideology is above the law. Where religion makes the law, one is close to totalitarianism.”

Finally, Reuters reminds us:

Courts in France, which observes a strict separation of church and state in the public sphere, have repeatedly defended free speech rights against religious objections.

Vive la révolution!

David Carr has a bordering-on-lugubrious column in the New York Times this morning. He’s rather amazed that after starting the Valerie “Flame” Bonfire, Robert Novak is left standing without so much as a singed eyelash:

“He is like Typhoid Mary,” Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at Washington and Lee University, said of Mr. Novak. “Everybody is keeling over around him and he just keeps skipping along.”

I haven’t been following this stupid case. I’m sure it says something about me, but I’m just not interested. I am interested, however, in Carr’s description of how things have shaken out so far:

Given the outcome for the other journalists involved in the case — they fought the law and the law won — Mr. Novak’s decision not only seems self-serving but canny at a time when government is able to use subpoena power to get what it wants. He is joined on the margins of the case by Karl Rove, the president’s political aide who once looked like he might end up in the thick of things.

Excuse me: when is “government” not able to use subpeona power to get what it wants?

Is this not the very essence of the stand Judy Miller took when she went to jail?—that “government” shouldn’t be able to get what it wants from reporters, who are privileged?

Carr continues:

It’s hard to blame Mr. Novak for surviving — prospering even — but plenty of people in the media secretly do. [Well, it's not much of a "secret" anymore  --ed.] Ms. Miller and Mr. Cooper were backed, at least at the beginning, by large media organizations and squadrons of lawyers. What good would have been served by Mr. Novak going it alone against the government and drawing a line in the sand that would have ended up being blown away over time?

Indeed.

Even Mr. Corn, who has been in a prolonged debate with Mr. Novak, reserves judgment on his choice. “What he did is between him, his conscience and his wallet,” said Mr. Corn, the Washington editor of The Nation, a weekly that skews left-of-center. “There are no good guidelines for this new world we are living in, and journalists are having to ad-hoc their way through it. He chose to not get into a confrontation with the prosecutor.”

Well, they could start by not granting anonymity to every Tom, Dick, and Harry who leaks. It seems like a pretty common-sense guideline to me.

But I will say that I respect Judith Miller. So there.

Which is more effective—hate-speech laws or the race-tinged animosities broadcast across the Sceptr’ed Isle in Celebrity Big Brother? The Sun tabloid isn’t waiting around for anyone to pass a law or do a study. It addresses race and class issues head-on, if shockingly.

Graham Dudman, the Sun’s managing editor, writes:

We all need to take a stand against racism, which is why we at the Sun have put the issue on the front page.

The idea of this front page was that it was intended to shock. We knew some people would find it offensive that we had used these words. But we had the permission of the children concerned, and their parents, and went ahead after full consultation with Trevor Phillips and the Commission for Equality and Human Rights (CEHR).

The point is that, whether we like it or not, this language is in our playgrounds and on the street every day. And it is absolutely wrong. What starts with this kind of racist name-calling is that people are getting marginalised. And that breeds extremism, which leads ultimately, as we saw with 7/7, to young people being willing to cause mayhem and kill innocents by blowing themselves up.

Not everyone is buying, of course:

What then, to make of today’s Sun front-page? On one level, it deserves to be welcomed and applauded. Any message which points out the values and life that we share, that prejudice based both on background and on the colour of our skin is completely unacceptable, and that children especially are often the ones that suffer the most from the unkindness and closed-minds of their peers ought to be celebrated, especially coming from a paper with such a poor history both of promoting forgiveness and tolerance. It’s just that I don’t believe the Sun means it, and there are also far more sinister undertones beneath its apparent road to Damascus-type conversion.

Such as?

[T]he very reason for the Sun running this on their front page has to be related in no small measure to the decision of Shilpa Shetty to sell her story to [the Sun's rival] the Mirror.

Ah, the pressures the free market.

Except: there is something to be said for it, of course. And for pop culture as well, as the brilliant Charles Paul Freund noted in 2003:

A different sort of conflict broke out this summer in the Middle East — one involving reality TV [an Arab American Idol clone called Superstar]. While it offers more evidence that the region is in the grip of a liberationist pop culture frenzy (see “Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah,” June), it also demonstrates that even the region’s pop fandom can fall prey to conspiracy theories and divisiveness. …

Supposedly, the entire Jordanian army had been ordered to vote for Jordan’s contestant. Supposedly, Lebanese leaders had failed the nation by not mobilizing support for Zein. Supposedly, Syria, which controls Lebanon [not anymore, of course --ed.], had exerted itself to control Superstar as well.

And that was a good thing, said Freund, because:

as fan-based cultural identity grows in the region, it expresses itself in terms of the area’s traditional nationalist or sectarian divisions, engendering group enmity and suspicion. The effect of commercial culture, however, is to dissipate conflict by lowering the stakes. Modernist identities (drawing on such influences as fandom) are fluid and changeable; the resulting communities of interest are numerous and temporary. Zein’s fans have now contented themselves with creating a Web site in his honor.

Superstar’s winner, by the way, was Diana Karazone, the singer from Jordan.

Commercial culture dissipates conflict by lowering the stakes—that is a brilliant insight on Freund’s part and a useful one when you throw it into the mix with what Aayan Hirsi Ali and David Kilcullen have to say.
And then you start to think about things in a different way: the aura of rock stardom that, for example, Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah has created for himself and his movement: he seems to be seeking (and gaining) fans more than converts.

And then you start to think about the description “[r]ising al-Qaeda star Abu Yehya al-Libi” that Abu Aardvark used (with good reason) the other day when describing a propaganda video.

And then you remember back when France was threatening to ban head scarves in the public schools, Jeremy Harding suggested that maybe somehow the French were less culturally evolved than the British when it came to manipulating cultural “signs”:

In Britain, we know how to nurture an ironic infatuation with signs of difference, status and style. Maybe the flummery and camp of our political institutions and our enthusiastic approval of layering and posturing have helped us to achieve our multiculturalism. That we got usefully from Black Rod’s tights to Ali G’s tracksuit (probably via Dad’s Army) is not going to help us understand the French position, whose Jacobin demand for the transparent citizen is something we recoil from.

And then your head explodes.

It’s a toss-up between Sacha Baron Cohen, out of character, accepting an award for his movie Borat:

“Borat couldn’t be here. He was the guest of honor at the Tehran Holocaust denial conference.”

And Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran:

I can name a few amazing, as well as a number of disappointing, cultural events for 2006, but none can match my sense of outrage at the so-called Holocaust conference convened by the Iranian government. I felt outraged as a human being, because, like all the great human catastrophes, the Holocaust transcends its own time and place, concerning not just the Jews and those who tried to eliminate them but the rest of mankind, and when we deny it or remain silent about it, when we manipulate it for political purposes, we become complicit in the assault not only against the actual victims but against all that goes by the name humane.

As an Iranian, it was with a sense of tragic irony that I witnessed a regime that has denied Iranian citizens the right to freedom of expression and freedom of religion, and has systematically repressed, jailed, and tortured thousands of its own citizens for demanding their most basic rights, claim to provide freedom of expression for neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

I had to remind myself that, while the ruling elite in Iran convenes such an event in the name of the country’s culture and religion, many Iranians boast of the fact that more than 2,500 years ago, a Persian king, Cyrus, after the conquest of Babylon, allowed the Jewish people to return to their land and permitted the practice of all cults and beliefs of the countries he had conquered. The ancient city of Hamadan is the site of the pre-Islamic temple of the water goddess Anahita, the Mausoleum of the vagabond poet Baba Taher, and the shrine of  Esther—believed to have been the wife of the Persian king, Xerxes—and her cousin Mordecai, who together rescued the Jewish people from extermination.

These sites represent the best of the Iranian culture and tradition, its diversity, its passion for poetry, its hospitality and generosity toward others. And yet, today when we talk about Iranian culture, none of this comes to mind.

Provocative Muslim author Nonie Darwish had been scheduled to appear for a talk at Brown University about her book Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror.

Then she was disinvited by the same folks who invited her—Brown’s Hillel (Jewish) organization. You can read a very tendentious version of events here.

Here’s what I think: Whatever. It’s a free country. Invite or disinvite, it’s your business. But then don’t be surprised when the New Inquisition’s spotlight shines on you.

However, I’ll be eagerly awaiting a letter from dozens of American academics and public intellectuals condemning Brown’s Hillel organization for shutting down Darwish’s free speech. I’m sure I’ll see it in the New York Review of Books, just as I saw the letter they wrote when an event featuring Israel critic Tony Judt was canceled some weeks ago.

To me, it looks like the Polish consulate thought maybe it wouldn’t look so good to have a vociferous critic of Israel—the homeland of the Jews—appear on the premises of a consulate of a country that helped the Germans exterminate 3 million of them—half of all the Jews who were persecuted by their neighbors; stripped of rights, property, jobs, bank accounts, and all personal effects; rounded up; transported on cattle cars; and gassed and then cremated in ovens during World War II.

Likewise, it looks like Brown’s Hillel organization, on second thought, decided it would look bad—considering the anti-Semitism in the air—to invite an outspoken critic of Islam speak from a platform associated with Jews.

I wish the organizers of these events had thought about the implications of their actions (invitations) the first time. Maybe other organizers will learn to think ahead.

A while ago, Tina Brown, whose column I used to love to read in the Washington Post, asked of the New York Times after its Judith Miller debacle: “IS THERE ANYBODY HOME”? ***

Sadly, no. The deciders are all out to lunch. I wish they would decide to hold these events. We need to air our differences. What is the point of a fucking democracy with freedom of speech if we don’t talk to one another? Huh?

——–

*** Here is the full, delicious quote:

Don Van Natta’s team-reported narrative included such baffling details as Times Executive Editor Bill Keller blandly noting that, after he took her off the Iraq story because of her lead role in co-authoring the erroneous stories of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, Miller “kept kind of drifting on her own back into the national security realm.” Drifting? On her own? Is the Times after Blair some sort of trackless sea, with lone castaways afloat on rafts? To whom do reporters report? IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?

I tip my hat to those who dare to speak out against tyranny, oppression, and stupidity.

The Big Pharaoh reports and comments on the controversial remarks made about the veil by Egypt’s culture minister:

The uproar that followed the culture minister’s comments on the hair cover summarizes everything wrong with the current version of Islam being practiced today. Unreformed religious leaders, currently maintaining a monopoly over the Islamic discourse, attacked Farouk Hosni as if he blasphemed the Prophet himself. And when people who follow a certain religion get all excited over a piece of cloth that they say should be on a girl’s head then you know something is definitely wrong with how this religion is interpreted and preached, and that it’s in dire need of reform.

First, it is important to note something. If you are living in the West, you probably have heard all sorts of explanations and justifications from hijab advocates as to why Muslim women are required to wear it. The most cited justification is modesty. Muslim women (god, why does it always have to be women!) are required to be modest in their dress and not reveal too much flesh. Now that’s an absurd excuse because you can dress modestly without essentially covering your hair.

The other justification that really blows my brain off is this: the hijab protects women against evil things such as rape. This argument is even more absurd since a woman is raped every two hours in Pakistan and the gangs who harassed women in downtown*** Cairo did not differentiate between the covered and the uncovered. …
Proving that God is not stupid will only be realized once Islam meets reformation, when Muslim scholars and thinkers decide the time is ripe to dig into their holy and history books and come up with a version of the religion that is compatible with the age of space tourism and genetic engineering. Judaism, an Abrahamic faith that is close to Islam, had done it. +++ Why can’t Islam?

Read the whole thing.

——-

***BP is referring to a horrifying incident of “wilding” (mass sexual harassment of women in public on the streets) that occurred in downtown Cairo some weeks ago.

+++In fact, Judaism has its own fundamentalists (of varying degrees), and its own probems with its fundamentalists both in Israel and in the Diaspora.

John Ridley, who is black (you need to know that to get the gist of the story: sorry if anyone is offended), wrote a provocatively titled piece in Esquire, “ The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger,” extolling black high achievers.

I have no qualm about using the word nigger. It is a word. It is in the English lexicon, and no amount of political correctness, no amputation into “the n-word”—as if by the castration of a few letters we should then be able to conceptualize its meaning without feeling its sting—will remove it from reality.

So I say this: It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don’t travel their days worrying specifically about the well-being of hill billies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way. We need to start extolling the most virtuous of ourselves. It is time to celebrate the New Black Americans�those who have sealed the Deal, who aren’t beholden to liberal indulgence any more than they are to the disdain of the hard Right. It is time to praise blacks who are merely undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.

The piece was linked on HuffPo, and the response of the commenters (many of whom were so offended by his use of the word “nigger” that they didn’t read his provocative piece) prompted Ridley to follow up:

s it possible that in 2006, generations after we as a people survived slavery, an abandoned reconstruction, Jim Crow and the tumult of the civil rights era some in our community would allow themselves to be cowed by six letters and two syllables?

Yes.

And this manifestation of timidity is formed at the nexus of a gross symbiotic relationship between the paternalistic left and the racist right.

The left wants to wield the righteous sword of politically correct censorship in a hamfisted attempt to protect what they perceive as the otherwise “weak” and “helpless” black man. They wish to neuter the word nigger so that it will not shatter blacks’ fragile nature. You do not see the word in print in mainstream media. And though entertainment companies make serious bank pimping “niggaz” to middle America, you do not hear the word associated with true discourse in the media.

Yet, how many media executives or newspaper publishers who made the decision to amputate nigger into “the N-word” are people of color themselves? Or is it merely “them” deciding what’s best for “us?”

Well, yes, I would say it is a case of “us” deciding for “you.” Check out what happened to Hitchens on Hardball recently when he was talking about wordplay and political speech:

Asked by Chris Matthews on his Hardball TV show why many liberals think that Republicans are dumb, I try to explain that it goes back to John Stuart Mill describing the Tories as ‘the stupid party’. I add that the Tories used ironically to borrow this description of themselves, as indeed they did the word ‘Tory’, which was originally an insult. Warming to my theme, I list the other slanders that have been reversed by their original targets - from ‘Impressionist’ to ’suffragette’.

I also mention a famous rude word for black people that begins with ‘N’ but has been annexed back by its victims. Suddenly, there is a break and the studio fills with grim-faced executives who tell me that I’m cut from the rest of the show. I say I want it in writing. From discussing a non-story to becoming a non-story of my own is a short step.

We need more provocative ideas like Ridley’s and fewer nannies deciding what we can and cannot discuss like adults seeking to understanding one another.

The other day, Jeff Jarvis linked to the laments of a couple of comedians, Nick Tanner and Armando Iannucci, both of whom wanted to know why comedy seems to have supplanted the serious national conversation that’s supposed to be taking place in the media and by politicians in these grave times of war—as if politicians aren’t publicity whores and the media isn’t dying to give each and every one of them a roll in the hay, the consequences be damned! (For the record: There is serious debate (i.e., nutritious food for thought) for people who live in free societies and are seriously interested in informing themselves about it; it’s available from all over the globe, 24/7, at the click of a mouse. They do have to seek it out, however. If they’re expecting the media to spoon-feed it to them, they’re asking for a junk-food diet.)

War doesn’t put an end to politics—it inflames politicians. Who are knaves. Who are professional smooth talkers. Politics is amoral, if not immoral. It’s about power. It’s about those who are attempting to scale the heights or who, having attained them, want to cling to them.

For precisely that reason, comedians have always been there to comment on—and puncture—the knavery of politicians, among other evil-doers. Famously, political satire has been a most effective weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I note this obvious fact for the sake of the naive comedians who lament the fact that it’s left up to them to comment on the absurdities of the politics of the day. Ever heard of Lenny Bruce? Mark Twain? Saturday Night Live? Tom Lehrer, Vaughn Meader, That Was the Week That Was? the Smothers Brothers? Comedians, get thee an education! Your stupendous ignorance—of history and of human nature—is showing.

American power players and politicians are way ahead of you, too, as noted in an interesting piece in today’s New York Times. Ostensibly, it’s about how media moguls hire comedy writers to help them craft their lines for important image-making or image-busting public events (a subject that warrants its own post. Someday). But it speaks just as much to comedy, where the bottom line is to know the limits [emphasis mine]:

[T]here is also a small clutch of writers who specialize in the genre of media-mogul laughs. And the reigning king of such humor is Mark S. Katz, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who collaborated on Mr. Freston’s remarks.

Friends of Mr. Freston’s said that after his departure from Viacom, he initially did not want to go through with the event [Katz had been hired for]. But once he decided to do it, Mr. Katz, said, “he dove right in,” adding: “I love the guy. I’ve known him for a week, and I love him.”

The funny thing about Mr. Katz — who actually looks like a cross between a comic and a consultant — is that he takes his methods awfully seriously. (He was initially reticent about being interviewed because he does not want to appear to be diminishing the comedic chops of his clients.)

“Humor is an underutilized tool in the arsenal of strategic and crisis communications,” said Mr. Katz, who calls his consulting company the Soundbite Institute. “It’s about solving problems.”

Having written jokes for President Clinton’s shtick at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during some of the darker moments of his administration, Mr. Katz said there were similarities between presidential humor and media-mogul humor.

“The are things you can say, there are things that go unsaid and things that are unsayable,” he explained. “What humor does is move the unsaid into the said. But you can’t go near the unsayable — that is true of a president or a C.E.O.”

In Mr. Freston’s case, the unsayable would have been anything directly attacking Sumner M. Redstone, the Viacom chairman who removed Mr. Freston from the job after more than 20 years of building the company and its famous asset, MTV.

Ouch. You can kinda see why the unsayable is unsayable about Mr. Freston.

For the rest of you, here’s the bottom line: if you’re working for the mogul, or you’re working for moguls who are cozy with the first mogul, you can’t say the unsayable.

The job of the comedian, however, especially the purveyor of political humor, is to “move the unsaid into the said.”

Sounds easy enough.

If you love this non-partisan super-democratic positively Ghandi-esque advice from a commenter at CampusJ  as much as I do, please pass it on.

Tensions between Jewish and Muslim students at UC Irvine peaked recently after an incident involving vandalism with swastikas and “vulgarities” (unspecified). Half a dozen Jewish students met with university officials to discuss both the incident and an atmosphere they described as intimidating to their persons and their freedom of speech. The officials were very sincerely sympathetic. Then:

…[S]ome students asked that Drake place restrictions on where MSU events are held, saying that if their events were held in classrooms as opposed to public spaces, their effect would not be as broad. However, Chancellor Drake told Jewish students at the meeting that he cannot restrict any club, that it would be “violation of law to prohibit certain speech.”
[Vice-Chancellor] Gomez emphasized that though hate speech may be present, he would not seek to curtail it, as “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”

Here’s the genius advice from a commenter on how to respond:

Akiva M Oct 27th, 2006 at 8:25 am

My suggestion? Take this opportunity to make Mr. Gomez understand the impact of his words. Stage a rally based on them. If possible, get together with the black student union, the latin american student union, the asian american student union (or whatever the campus equivalents are), but if necessary, go it alone.

The rally should be in a public space, and it should involve loud, repeated chanting of racist slurs followed by “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education”

So:

Rally Leader: “Kike go home”
Crowd: “Kike go home”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally leader: “Monkeys Niggers, don’t belong”
Crowd: “Monkeys, Niggers, don’t belong”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally Leader: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Crowd: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”

(and so on, with slurs for hispanics, asians, etc. Then repeat from “Kike go home”)

Spend an hour chanting that on the lawn in front of his office, invite some press, and see if that doesn’t have an impact.

Akiva, my hat is off to you.

Sometimes they get it right: Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Then he went on to kick ass:

Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this week, went on television Friday to criticize the French parliamentary vote that would make it a crime to deny that the Ottoman Turks’ mass killing of Armenians constituted genocide.

In a telephone interview broadcast live on the private television network NTV, Mr. Pamuk, who faced criminal charges for his statements acknowledging the massacre, said France had acted against its own fundamental principles of freedom of expression.

“The French tradition of critical thinking influenced and taught me a lot,” he said. “This decision, however, is a prohibition and didn’t suit the libertarian nature of the French tradition.” The legislation was approved by the lower house of Parliament, but it is uncertain whether the upper house will concur.

Bravo. Hate-speech laws suck. They’re illiberal.

————

The Journalist and the Jihadi aired on HBO. Among other things, this documentary it is a portrait of the grace and courage of Daniel Pearl’s loved ones: parents, sisters, wife, and friends.

Judea Pearl: ‘We have to defeat the hatred that took Danny’s life’

Visit the Daniel Pearl Foundation site and get inspired.

———————-

Also, I’ve been listening to this:

It’s awesome. Here’s what Rolling Stone has to say:

Jerry Lee Lewis is older and tougher than you. At seventy, he could eat your liver for breakfast, sleep with your kid sister and then burn down your house after a light lunch. So rounding up twenty-one heavy hitters (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Neil Young, etc.) for a Jerry Lee Lewis duets album either means that they’re paying their respects to one of the inventors of rock & roll, the wild man of the piano who came up with the sonic explosion that is “Great Balls of Fire”- or that they’re just afraid of what Jerry Lee would do to them if they said no.

That, apparently, is the reasoning behind a Berlin opera company’s decision to srap a production of a Mozart opera that features the severed heads of the Prophet Mohammed and Jesus. Alluding to the by now familiar threat of Muslim rage, the opera house said that the security risks of staging the production would be “incalculable.”

Some German politicians strongly disagree, in forceful language:

Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, said the director had made the wrong decision to scrap the production.

“Our ideas about openness, tolerance and freedom must be lived out on the offensive,” he told the Associated Press.

“Voluntary self-limitation gives those who fight against our values a confirmation in advance that we will not stand behind them.”

Germany’s interior minister called the cancellation “unacceptable.”

How very refreshing.

Elif Shafak, the Turkish novelist who was charged with writing “un-Turkish” dialogue in one of her novels, has been acquitted. In an opinion piece in today’s Washington Post, she describes how unexpected were the charges and how relieved and hopeful she is about the outcome:

I don’t know precisely what happened in 1915. But as a writer, I’m interested in people — their stories, their silences, their pain. I believe in recognizing human grief. I find it sad that some Turks can’t talk about 1915, that ours is a society with collective amnesia. We haven’t come to grips with our past, nor have we recognized how bitter the Armenians are because their grief goes unacknowledged. I would like Armenians to forgive and forget one day, too, but we Turks need to remember first.

I had hoped that “The Bastard of Istanbul,” told through the eyes of the women of the two families, could be a bridge between Turks and Armenians, showing how similar our two cultures are, how much they share. I tried to tell my story with humor and understanding, but all this seemed to be lost on the humorless lawyers who were determined to put me on trial.

Early this month, they started circulating a vindictive notice on the Internet, labeling me — as well as many other intellectuals — sellouts and traitors. The message ended with a gallant call to “all patriotic Turks who love their nation and are aware of their patriotic duties” to be present to protest at the courthouse throughout the trial. Though I had been apprehensive before, this notice, with its alarming language of hatred, really got to me.

But their message of hate didn’t win out. At the trial, the lawyers and their supporters showed up in force. But for the first time, they were denied entry to the courthouse, which meant they couldn’t intimidate the judges and other court personnel as they had done in the past. And remarkably, they were outnumbered more than two to one by those who support freedom of expression.

This is a rare victory in the Muslim world for the values that we all hold dear—and take for granted—in the free, democratic societies of the West. Savor the whole thing. 

The New York Times predicts that the term “Islamic fascists,” having proved oh-so-unpopular, will no longer emanate from Bush’s mouth.

By Labor Day, Islamic fascists and Islamo-fascism were the hot new conservative buzzwords.

And then, just as suddenly, they were gone — at least from the president’s lips.

“The debate that we wanted to launch was about an ideological struggle against an enemy that has very specific plans, ambitions and aspirations, much like movements of the past, like fascism and Nazism,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. Addressing the term Islamic fascists, Mr. Bartlett said, “I’m sure he’ll use it again.”

But it seems unlikely Mr. Bush will use it again, given the outcry it provoked.

Muslims, both here and in other countries, were deeply offended.

We’ll see about where Mr. Bush goes with the term “Islamic fascism,” which gets across the message that there’s an ideology behind the terrorists who are threatening our way of life (a notion that progressives would rather not engage, because it leaves them with no peaceful options for dealing with terrorism).

Meanwhile, our pop culture reliably takes on politics—sooner or later. In this case sooner: an ad agency has caused an uproar by creating a radio spot for a car dealership that is said to be declaring a “jihad on the auto market.”

A car dealership’s tongue-in-cheek radio advertisement declaring “a jihad on the auto market,” will not be changed, the company said.

The ad has drawn criticism that its content is offensive to Muslims.

Several stations rejected the spot from Dennis Mitsubishi, which boasts sales representatives wearing “burqas” — the head-to-toe traditional dress for some Islamic women — will sell vehicles that can “comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back.”

Jihad is a holy war waged by Muslims in defence of Islam.

“We firmly believe the ad does not in any way disrespect any religion or culture, but we feel, I guess, that maybe poking a little fun at radical extremists is fair game,” dealership president Keith Dennis said.

“It was our intention to craft something around some of the buzzwords of the day and give everyone a good chuckle and be a little bit of a tension reliever.”

Good luck with that!

Andrew Sullivan writes here about an ugly punditocracy controversy (or blog/opinion magazine war) that erupted at the American Prospect after newly hired non-partisan Brendan Nyhan (of Spinsanity fame) apparently stepped out of bounds of the magazine’s “liberal” line by writing two posts in quick succession that “attacked” “liberal” positions, was reprimanded, and terminated his relationship with the Prospect.

Sullivan quotes Nyhan:

Why was I asked to slant my work to the liberal party line? In an email statement, TAP editor Michael Tomasky said that “[t]he Prospect is hardly averse to criticizing liberal verities” and that the magazine had no problem with my initial posts criticizing liberals, but “there were a few posts in succession that struck us as either inaccurate or an effort to draw equivalencies where none existed. The Prospect has always opposed a ‘pox on both houses’ posture, and that’s what we came to believe you were doing.”

If you want all the gory details, you should follow all the links back from Nyhan’s Time.com post, linked above. Also, if partisan rancor is your thing, there are follow-ups on his blog, here.

One of Andrew Sulllivan’s e-mail correspondents writes:

Schopenhauer’s point about taking care not to become the beast you fight is eerily apt. In their fanatical drive for unity and victory, they risk becoming what they hate.

Indeed. (I started writing about the drive for ideological purity many months ago. See here and here and here, for example. Then I just said “no” and stopped paying attention.) But something else Nyhan said caught my eye:

Today, online politics has come to be dominated by two warring camps, just like offline politics. And while many critics complain about the polarization of the blogosphere and its effect on elections, how blogs will affect the economics of opinion journalism is less well understood. In particular, partisan blogs have become so popular that they are threatening the business model — and the independence — of center-left opinion magazines, which may be forced to toe the party line to ensure their survival.

Just what media businesses need: political pressure on top of the extreme financial pressures they’re facing. But I’m not really buying the assertion that it’s all about market share. Not after finding out that Matt Welch was cast out of the Prospect family for ideological reasons in 2003 (when I wasn’t paying attention…and I wish I didn’t have to be paying attention to this now). Ugh.

Sacha Baron Cohen is a genius. Better yet: he gets results.

He has taught Kazakhstan something about freedom of speech.

“We understand that the film exposes the hypocrisy that exists both here in the USA and in the UK and understand that Mr Cohen has a right to freedom of speech.

He has also taught them something about the value of projecting a positive image (even if you don’t have one: ah, the wonders of PR).

President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.President Nazarbayev has confirmed his government will buy “educational” TV spots and print advertisements about the “real Kazakhstan” in a bid to save the country’s reputation before the film is released in the US in November.

He also drove them ape-shit by responding as Borat when initially they threatened to sue him for maligning Kazakhstan:

Baron Cohen responded to Ashykbayev in character by posting a video on the Official Borat website.

In the video, Borat said, “In response to Mr. Ashykbayev’s comments, I’d like to state I have no connection with Mr. Cohen and fully support my Government’s decision to sue this Jew.

“Since the 2003 Tuleyakiv reforms, Kazakhstan is as civilized as any other country in the world.

“Women can now travel on inside of bus, homosexuals no longer have to wear blue hats, and age of consent has been raised to eight years old.”

His blatant outpouring then prompted the Kazakh government to hire two public relations firms to counter the claims, and ran a four-page advertisement in The New York Times. [emphasis mine]

This is why I sing the praises of infotainment (pop culture by another name): because Cohen has actually brought the attention of ignorant Americans to a place outside their world: Kazakhstan, in this case, but think what other artists could do, if only they were as clever (and motivated) as Cohen.

And throughout this he’s still in character:

Cohen’s representatives refused to allow him or his alter ego to respond to the controversy because it’s not close enough to the film’s release date.

In Reading Lolita in Tehran, her passionate tribute to the imagination, and to the power of literature to make us feel and to empathize, the Iranian author Azar Nafisi relates the story of how she put The Great Gatsby “on trial” in the 1980s in her Tehran classroom after one of her Islamic revolutionary students complained to her that it was an “immoral” work:

“Ma’am, may I talk to you for a second?”… He had a complaint. Against whom, and why me? It was against Gatsby. I asked him jokingly if he had filed any official complaints against Mr. Gatsby. And I reminded him that any such action would in any case be useless as the gentleman was already dead.

But he was serious. No, Professor, not against Mr. Gatsby himself but against the novel. The novel was immoral. It taught the youth the wrong stuff; it poisoned their minds—surely I could see? I could not. I reminded him that Gatsby was a work of fiction and not a how-to manual. Surely I could see, he insisted, that these novels and their characters became our models in real life? Maybe Mr. Gatsby was all right for Americans, but not for our revolutionary youth.

There was, for Mr. Nyazi, no difference between the fiction of Fitzgerald and the facts of his own life. The Great Gatsby was representative of things American, and America was poison for us. …

Suddenly a mischievous notion got hold of me. I suggested, in these days of public prosecutions, that we put Gatsby on trial: Mr. Nyazi would be the prosecutor, and he should also write a paper offering his evidence.

…

Our discussions of Gatsby for a short while seemed as electric and important as the ideological conflicts raging over the country. In fact, as time went by, different versions of this debate did dominate the political and ideological scene. Fires were set to publishing houses and bookstores for disseminating immoral works of fiction. One woman novelist was jailed for her writings and charged with spreading prostitution. Reporters were jailed, magazines and newspapers closed and some of our best classical poets, like Rumi and Omar Khayyam, were censored or banned.

Like all other ideologues before them, the Islamic revolutionaries seemed to believe that writers were the guardians of morality. This displaced view of writers, ironically, gave them a sacred place, and at the same time it paralyzed them. The price they had to pay for their new pre-eminence was a kind of aesthetic impotence.

Personally, the Gatsby “trial” had opened a window into my own feelings and desires. Never before—not during all my revolutionary activities—did I feel so fervently as I did now about my work and about literature. I wanted to spread this spirit of goodwill…

(from pp. 124 and 136)

That is what I thought about today when I read this notice about a Turkish novel ist who is being prosecuted for writing “un-Turkish” dialogue in one of her fictional works. Here’s the item, reprinted in full from today’s New York Times’s “Arts, Briefly” section:

Turkish Novelist Faces Trial

A prominent Turkish novelist who faces trial next week for “insulting Turkishness” says the case is the first to pivot on words uttered by fictional characters, Reuters reported. The novelist, Elif Shafak, above, a feminist who writes in English and Turkish, has been charged in connection with her new novel, “The Bastard of Istanbul.” The case is being followed closely by the European Union, which says Turkey must foster more freedom of expression as a condition of membership. Ms. Shafak, 34, is scheduled to give birth during the week the trial, set for Sept. 21, is to begin. She has been charged under a provision of Turkey’s penal code that has been used against several journalists and authors. Ms. Shafak said that to date the article “has never been used against fictional characters.” “In that sense this is a new step,” she said, “and it’s quite surprising and upsetting, because if they keep doing this, no one can write novels in this country anymore; no one can make movies, even.” In her novel, Armenian characters make disparaging comments about Turks and refer to the genocide of Armenians during the Ottoman Empire, a massacre denied by Turkey.

Art is art and politics is politics, and while each contains elements of the other—and while of course art can have politics (or anything else the human brain can imagine) as its subject—the politicization of art is anathema: illiberal in the extreme.

Prescribing not only what a novelist can say but what one of her fictional characters can say is thought-control territory: political correctness run wild—totalitarian madness. If these are the kinds of debates going on in Turkey (and let us remember that we’ve been here before, with the case of Orhan Pamuk), I don’t blame the Europeans for being nervous about allowing illiberal Turkey into the EU.

Let us also remember that we’re on thought-control territory when we try to shut down a TV movie, as Democratic hero Bill Clinton just tried to do, or when we try to suppress the free speech of the president, as the Feingold the Scold just tried to do.

Free speech for me and for thee.

Russ Feingold accuses President Bush of using politically incorrect language. The term “Islamic fascists” is offensive to Muslims, so it is to be avoided, Feingold the Scold insists.

“We must avoid using misleading and offensive terms that link Islam with those who subvert this great religion or who distort its teachings to justify terrorist activities,” Feingold said Tuesday in a speech to the Arab American Institute on Capitol Hill.

The Wisconsin senator, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, said the label “Islamic fascists” makes no sense and doesn’t help the U.S. effort to combat terrorism.

“Fascist ideology doesn’t have anything to do with the way global terrorist networks think or operate,…”

Feingold is mistaken. They are fascists—motherfucking Islamofascists, to be precise—and no U.S. senator or EU representative will get me to stop saying so.

(via Publius Pundit, who covered the visit of the pestilential liar Khatami to Harvard’s Kennedy School)

Call me old-fashioned, but this is my favorite kind of battle: a war of words.***

The New York Times sets it up:

LONDON, Aug. 4 — A strip of curry joints, neon lights and market stalls in east London might seem an unlikely arena for literary jousting and high-flown debate about freedom of expression. But this narrow street is no ordinary thoroughfare.

It is Brick Lane, as in the title of the best-selling novel by Monica Ali, and the battle has set luminaries like Salman Rushdie and Germaine Greer against one another over a campaign that ultimately halted the filming of the book at that location.

In some ways, the debate has revived a much wider discussion in Europe about whether free speech may be limited by the sensitivities of people who feel affronted by it. Should old Western societies, in other words, rewrite their definitions of liberty to accommodate the sensitivities of others?

In a letter to the editor of the Guardian, Rushdie, bless him, lets it rip:

At the height of the assault against my novel The Satanic Verses, Germaine Greer stated: “I refuse to sign petitions for that book of his, which was about his own troubles.” She went on to describe me as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin”. Now it’s Monica Ali’s turn to be deracinated: “She writes in English and her point of view is, whether she allows herself to impersonate a village Bangladeshi woman or not, British.” There is a kind of double racism in this argument. To suit Greer, the British-Bangladeshi Ali is denied her heritage and belittled for her Britishness, while her British-Bangladeshi critics are denied that same Britishness, which most of them would certainly insist was theirs by right. “Writers are treacherous,” Greer says, and she should know.

***The incident that started this fracas has serious ramifications—it’s a non-violent but much more disheartening version of the Danish cartoon affair, because it shows precisely the lack of confidence in our own values and way of life that Tony Blair talked about in his speech last week: read it.

Indeed, this is a case of extreme political correctness, aka soft totalitarianism, and we are fast sinking into its embrace. It’s the easy way out—the path of least resistance. If we do not resist it, we will live to regret it. (See the quote from Milos Forman in the upper-right-hand corner of my blog or, better yet, read the second half of this speech, which he gave in the wake of the controversy over his misunderstood film The People vs. Larry Flynt, which Forman calls his valentine to the Supreme Court.)

Freedom of speech is a particular obsession of mine. I wrote a lot about the Danish cartoon affair when I first starting blogging—here and here and here.

Mel Gibson was arrested for DUI, according to CNN.

But this celebrity-gossip site, which, as I understand it, stalks celebrities wherever they go (figuring that if they’re out in public, they’re fair game [a big blech to that]), has much more inflammatory things to say. [Note: this is gossip.
But I'm passing it on anyway.]

TMZ has learned that Mel Gibson went on a rampage when he was arrested Friday on suspicion of drunk driving, hurling religious epithets. TMZ has also learned that the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department had the initial report doctored to keep the real story under wraps. …

Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, “You mother f****r. I’m going to f*** you.” The report also says “Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he ‘owns Malibu’ and will spend all of his money to ‘get even’ with me.”

The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: “F*****g Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” Gibson then asked the deputy, “Are you a Jew?” [emphasis added]

(hat tip: Andrew Sullivan, who seems to have a hate on for the same celebrities as me.)

The juiciest gossip, of course, is the kind you believe…because it so obviously could be true. Like TMZ’s claim that Gibson is a raving anti-Semite. Frank Rich had a lot to say about that in 2004:

In an interview in the current Reader’s Digest, Ms. Noonan asks Mr. Gibson: “The Holocaust happened, right?” After saying that some of his best friends “have numbers on their arms,” he responds: “Yes, of course. Atrocities happened. War is horrible. The Second World War killed tens of millions of people. Some of them were Jews in concentration camps.” Yes, mistakes happened, atrocities happened, war happened, some of the victims were Jews. This is the classic language of contemporary Holocaust deniers, from David Irving to Mr. Gibson’s own father, Hutton Gibson, a prominent anti-Semitic author and activist. Their rhetorical strategy is to diminish Hitler’s extermination of Jews by folding those deaths into the war’s overall casualty figures, as if the Holocaust were an idle byproduct of battle instead of a Third Reich master plan for genocide.

I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

—Patrick Henry

The New York Times reports that the Los Angeles Times—a news-gathering organization—has a Net Nanny.

The software blocks access to…”sex sites” and to sites that could compromise network security, and filters out spam that contains pornographic images.

Also from the New York Times: Some people at the ACLU claim that the organization doesn’t need to be transparent.

A lawyer in the New York state attorney general’s office informally warned the American Civil Liberties Union that his office had concerns about proposed standards that would limit the group’s board members from speaking publicly about policies and internal operations, according to three board members.

Sara Nelson, editor in chief of the trade magazine Publishers Weekly, addresses the moral dilemma of those booksellers who may hate the message of Ann Coulter’s book. She feels their pain:

Are some of the people involved in Team Coulter—editors, publicists, salespeople—disgusted by some of the things she is saying? You bet.

And then Nelson steps into the no-man’s-land of the benighted:

Are we all nonetheless obliged to defend her right to say them? Maybe.

One of her readers responds:

Does she (Coutler) have the right to say what she does. You say “maybe”. WHAT? Look, she’s pushing a political agenda, not advocating fire bombing elementary schools. If you support the 1st Ammendment, you must logically support HER right to say what she says, even as you dislike or despise it.

Nelson closes her piece by reminding publishers that they have a responsibility for what they’re putting out there:

In the business of shaping and selling ideas, we bear some responsibility for the ideas we choose to disseminate, and the people we choose to disseminate them. So if we have to do what’s best for business, so be it. But I have to hope that at least while we’re doing it, we all wrestle with these questions, and even lose just a little bit of sleep over what and who we’re putting out there.

I guess she forgot about Messages to the World, by Osama bin Laden, about whom an Observer (UK) reviewer wrote:

For bin Laden is a charismatic man of action, an eloquent preacher, a teacher of literature and a resilient, cunning, wonderfully briefed politician.

Another one of Ms. Nelson’s readers adds a shrewd observation:

coulter may be offensive, but so may be michael moore, who sold plenty of books and got plenty of press. do the ideas we shape and sell and disseminate have only to be liberal in order to be useful, or even tasteful? it seems that in order to get anyone in the media to take notice, authors must make a lot of ugly noise, liberal or otherwise. it is all business after all, isn’t it. [emphasis added]

Ms. Nelson doesn’t seem to want to get that. It’s too distasteful. David Carr gets it, though. And I alluded to it here.

I mentioned the other day that when I had a letter published by the New York Times a while back, they deleted a couple of words.

Just to clarify: the words they excised were “terrorist masterminds.”

I was published but censored.

Thus did I become a participant, rather than merely a lurker, in the blogosphere.

She makes me cringe. As I read her behavior, she’s trying to test the limits of her free speech…and rake in the bucks while doing so. She seems to be doing both: everyone is talking about her, which should help boost her book sales.

She has also succeeded in exposing the totalitarian impulse in some of our fellow Americans…in this case a congressman:

Rep. Rahm Emmanuel, D-Ill., said Thursday on the House floor that Coulter is a “hatemonger” and called on Republicans to denounce her: “I must ask my colleagues on the other side of the aisle: Does Ann Coulter speak for you when she suggests poisoning not Supreme Court Justices or slanders the 9/11 … widows? If not, speak now. Your silence allows her to be your spokesman.”

Voltaire is my North Star on this. So, even as I shudder at her heartlessness, I defend her right to say it.
On Coulter’s right to speak her mind rests our own right to say as we wish: free speech for me and for thee.

And—and this is especially important: the remedy for “hate speech” is more speech, not less speech.

That is what separates us from the totalitarians, for whom some ideas, words, thoughts, jokes, stories, and speech are too dangerous and must be “denounced.”
Let there be no witch-hunts. From either side of the “debate.” ***

***I’ve written about this subject a lot. Click here and here for posts on this and related subjects. I’m an Enlightenment Fundamentalist.

NYT op-ed columnist Thomas Friedman made GM execs really mad. GM has been trying to get its response published in a letter to the Times.

After some back-and forth-about the length and other editorial matters, the parties got stuck:***

*****
Wednesday, June 7, 11:09 a.m.
To: Mary Drohan [NYT]
From: Brian Akre [GM]
Mary,
With all due respect, we’re a bit perplexed as to why the Times has a problem with “rubbish.” Mr.
Friedman defamed our company and its reputation. Even he has acknowledged in subsequent
interviews that he used unusually strong words “to get their attention.” Are we not entitled to
have the strong reaction that he sought??
He can say that GM is the “most dangerous company in the world” and we cannot opine that that
is “rubbish?” Come on!
Brian
*****
Wed., June 7, 12:45 p.m.
To: Brian Akre
From: Mary Drohan
Sorry, it’s not the tone we use in Letters.
*****

Sorry, Nurse Ratched.

*** read the whole fascinating story on Akre’s GM blog.