Unequal fallout of free speech
The wave of protests against an antiMuhammad movie made in America is said to prove, yet again, the unbridgeable gap between the West and the world of Islam.
Don’t we laugh off insults to Jesus? Haven’t even the Mormons taken the satirical Broadway musical The Book of Mormon in their stride? But Muslims, they are different. They get all worked up — into paroxysms of violence, as seen after the Danish cartoons, the inadvertent burning of the Qur’an in Afghanistan, the deliberate burning of the book in the U.S., and now over the Muhammad movie and 30 Muhammad cartoons in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
But the divide over free speech is far less clear-cut than it is made out to be, as recent events show.
The BBC apologized to the Queen after one of its reporters revealed that she once told him how “pretty upset” she was about a radical Muslim cleric in London, whom the government wanted to deport. The secrecy demanded by palace protocol trumped the public’s right to know their subsidized monarch’s thinking on an important issue.
A French court ruled against a magazine for publishing pictures of a barebreasted Kate Middleton, and imposed a fine of $12,700 a day if it didn’t remove them from its website.
The British tabloid Sun was criticized for printing a photo of a nude Prince Harry in New York.
The royal private bits are off limits, even if they give much enjoyment to many. But it’s fine to show the Prophet Muhammad as a sex fiend, as the film does, or portray him in crude, lewd and nude poses, as does Charlie Hebdo, even if that upset tens of millions.
These different approaches reflect the differences in jurisdictions, sure. Still, in Europe and North America, both legal strictures and social pressures work disproportionately against Mus- lims and Islam.
A court in New York allowed a proIsraeli group to put up crude antiMuslim posters in 10 subway stations. Citing the First Amendment, it overruled the Metropolitan Transit Authority policy of banning derogatory ads. Similarly citing free speech, Google, owner of YouTube, rejected a White House request that the Muhammad movie not be shown. Yet Google bowed to public pressure and removed an android app that plugged the antiSemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
French Foreign Mnister Laurent Fabius urged Charlie Hebdo to reconsider publishing those cartoons: “Is it really sensible or intelligent to pour oil on the fire?” His request was rejected. But his government blocked Muslim demonstrations against the cartoons. No freedom of speech or assembly for them.
Blue Jays shortstop Yunel Escobar was pummeled — by the team management, the league and the media, in lead editorials, no less — for sporting an eyeblack with the word maricon (faggot). No free speech for him, including the right to stupid speech.
In the U.S., the Smithsonian Channel cancelled showing a documentary on a 4th-century papyrus fragment that suggested that Jesus had a wife. The channel wants to ensure the authenticity of the document. No similar authentication was deemed necessary for the factual contents of the Muhammad movie.
At the recent UN General Assembly, leaders from Indonesia and Pakistan, the world’s two largest Muslim nations, as well as those from Egypt and Yemen, advocated curbing hate-mongering that might incite hostilities and disrupt peace between nations.
Their idea was derided as alien. In fact, it is the same principle we apply in libel laws or anti-hate statutes — in Canada, under the federal Criminal Code and provincial human rights codes. In Europe, laws make it a crime to deny the Holocaust or spread hate, rightly so.
In India, a cartoonist was recently jailed on charges of sedition for drawing parliament as a fly-infested bathroom. The case was not an aberration. There are usually dozens of cases in court against writers, artists, books and movies for offending some religious group.
In the U.S., where there’s ostensibly no limit on free speech, there is.
The permissible zone of debate in the U.S. is so small that you get a suffocatingly narrow range of views, especially on American foreign policy. Post-Sept. 11, the American media dished out too much jingoism, too little journalism.
Different peoples have a different sense of the sacred and also of what is or is not sayable. Not just that. Nations draw the line at different points for different people. Such is life. But pretending otherwise is to be blind or hypocritical. hsiddiqui@thestar.ca