Putting free speech behind bars

Four radical Islamists have recently been imprisoned for participating in last year's demonstrations against the Danish cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Shockingly, three have been sentenced to six years, and the fourth to four years. However objectionable these men's opinions are, and however obnoxious their means of expressing them, they have essentially been jailed for several years for taking part in a non-violent protest.

How is this possible? The three men sentenced for six years were convicted of soliciting murder. This is patently ridiculous. Whose murder did they solicit? Whom did they expect to carry it out? Their conviction might have been defensible if the men had corralled impressionable youths into carrying out suicide bombings, or hired a contract killer to take someone out. In fact, what they did was stand outside the Danish Embassy shouting stupid slogans about killing British soldiers and bombing Britain and Denmark. The fourth man was convicted of incitement to racial hatred. Incitement is a dubious enough concept, which assumes that those 'incited' have little or no moral agency of their own. But the notion of 'soliciting' is even worse: it attributes the accused with direct responsibility for crimes that never happened, where there can have been no reasonable expectation that any crime would ensue.

No doubt the sentences were meant to be shocking, to 'send a message' to other radical Islamists that their hateful ranting will not be tolerated. The rest of us should be shocked too, for the message is loud and clear: you can now be locked up for several years for nothing more than hateful ranting. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to think of other situations in which such a liberal interpretation of criminal responsibility might condemn other non-violent protesters with very different political views. The threat to free speech is clear and present.

Dolan Cummings

It's a Shoah-down!

To those searching for the new political battleground of the 21st century - I've found it! The intellectual artillery of the forces of progress and reaction will be fired over... wait for it... er... the speaker's roster at numerous public lectures across the world(!) Armies of Jewish terrorists and Muslim Zionists [sic], dubious academics and free-world vigilanties will square-off over who is allowed to speak where and to whom (and how the promotional material is to advertise the event).

I'll cite a few random recent examples:
- David Irving, professional Holocaust denier, was recently asked to leave a Polish book festival.
- Last week the leader of the New Black Panther Party (a man apparently prone to anti-Semitic conspiracy-mongering) provoked outrage in Toronto's Jewish community after being invited to speak to the 'Black Youth Taking Action' group.
- In February, Muslims at the University of California, Davis, protested the invitation to speak extended by campus Republicans to a 'former Islamic terrorist' turned 'Zionist-Islamofacism-warrior'.
- Last week, Muslims at that same university welcomed Norman Finklestein - son of Holocaust-vicitms, anti-Zionist, and alleged Holocaust-denier - which was duly opposed by Jewish students.
- Also in the past week, an Italian university prevented a French Holocaust-denier from speaking on campus.

Now, each case does have its intricacies which complicates the cases slightly. For example, while in the UC Davis cases students invited the contentious speaker, in the last case Robert Faurisson (the denier) had been invited to speak at the University of Teramo by the very director of the master's programme in Middle Eastern studies (for the sake of 'balance', here's a link to the Italian story from an Iranian site, the previous link above being to the Jerusalem Post - though both stories say much the same thing). In addition, the university cited 'security concerns', rather than 'objectionable content' as the reason for denying the denier. In the David Irving case, the festival's planners had legal concerns as Holocaust-denial is illegal in Poland. At UC Davis, the Jewish students complained that while the anti-Islamofascist speaker had been funded privately, the university had paid some $400 to the Muslims group to fund Finkelstein's lecture expenses.

But actually these details are hardly relevant - in fact they're a total distraction (and in most cases they were merely spurious excuses for what was really censorship). The real story of note here is the total absence of political content to these cases. Rather than a proper argument about the Israel-Palestine question or even about the historical understanding of the Holocaust (though really there should be little need to discuss the latter), partisans of both sides engage in lectern-wars over who can and cannot speak. The censorious nature of no-platform policies has been widely discussed (in fact, the columnist for the Sacramento Bee is quite good on this question), but equally worrying is the promiscuous use of inflammatory terms to describe 'the enemy' - something I just indulged in, above. For these political questions - one of the few to still genuinely inflame passions - it is almost as if we need a new language to discuss the issues. The old terms have become tainted through association with the dog-whistle-politics being practiced on university campuses thousands of kilometres (or indeed decades) away from the site of actual political conflict. The bans and counter-bans, the Zionist/Islamofascist name-calling, the promiscuous use of bad historical analogies - these do not constitute politics, they are the enemy of politics.

Alex Hochuli

R-A-C-I-S-T, find out what it means to me

A local Standards Committee last week cleared Councillor Gail Kenney of Cambridgeshire of the ‘racial offence’ of ‘offending a group of Muslim girls’. Kenney met with the Soni Kuriz Young Asian Women’s Group last June. She demanded to know why someone would want to wear a headscarf, saying she found burkhas ‘frightening and intimidating’ and that they could be used by terrorists as a disguise (which is true, and has already happened). Kenney also said in response to a request for another mosque that, ‘we’ve got one already – do you want one on every street?’, and suggested that a college drop-out present at the meeting would ‘end up getting married to someone illiterate from back home’. Not the most diplomatic of performances, certainly – but did Kenney’s remarks really deserve a 9-month long investigation?

Article 2 of the Local Authorities Model Code of Conduct (2001) states that councillors should ‘promote equality by not discriminating unlawfully against any person’ and should ‘treat others with respect’, while Article 4 cautions against bringing one’s ‘office or authority into disrepute’. The young Muslim women claimed Kenney had broken these rules.

The danger in submitting elected representatives, or indeed anyone else, to codes of conduct that prescribe ‘respect’ is of course that in today’s censorious climate, almost anything can be (and is) interpreted as disrespectful. Indeed, the Cambridge Campaign Against the Arms Trade has accused another Cambridgeshire councillor of violating the Code of Conduct by calling them ‘pathetic’. Rather than focusing on the issues at stake – say, the right to dress as one pleases, rallying community support to demand the council build a mosque, or take action against the arms trade – groups instead cry foul about the way they are treated and spoken to. The claim is not that Kenney is corrupt, incompetent, or even wrong to hold the views she does, but that her replies conveyed inadequate ‘respect’ for someone else’s point of view.

But whether someone’s view is worthy of respect is contestable, not something to be pre-determined by a Code of Conduct, or indeed by someone's identity. Ideas should be judged on their merits and be debated openly and robustly – that is the only way we can test their validity. The Soni Kuriz group could have responded to Kenney by explaining their desire to wear headscarves, or making the case for additional mosques. If they felt strongly enough, they could have campaigned against her publicly and let the electorate decide her fate. Instead, they threw their hands up and cried foul, attempting to have her removed by a Standards Board comprised of mostly unelected representatives, on the grounds that she was rude to them.

Events like this are increasingly common and show up three troubling trends. The first is the use of unelected authorities to try to get rid of or silence elected representatives – highlighted most memorably by the campaign to have London’s Mayor, Ken Livingstone, removed from office for a supposedly anti-Semitic comment. This degrades public life by allowing a handful of ‘offended’ individuals to pursue a politically-motivated campaign that is not subjected to public involvement.

This is facilitated by the second trend, the rise of speech codes in public life. This gives ammunition to those who want to bring down elected officials without going to the trouble of using democratic means.

This produces a third, and possibly the most dangerous trend: the tendency to suppress all speech on ‘controversial’ racial or religious issues. This simply reinforces the public image of Muslim groups as particularly sensitive to criticism and as unable or unwilling to engage in robust discussion. Indeed, the Soni Kuriz group has now vowed to never invite a councillor to speak again. Speech codes that seem to pander to such groups simply tend to infuriate everyone else. More importantly, they do absolutely nothing to challenge racist or other discriminatory attitudes in society. Councillor Kenney’s views were never countered with better arguments and shown to be wrong. In this case they are not even ruled to be disrespectful. No one has changed their minds after this episode about the nature of burkhas, the socio-economic conditions of young Muslim women, or the need for another mosque in Arbury. Its only outcome is the further retreat of the Soni Kuriz group from public engagement, and a chilling effect on free speech.

Lee Jones

Doorstopping Free Speech

Leeds University has been accused of censorship following its cancellation of a talk entitled 'Hitler's Legacy: Islamic anti-Semitism in the Middle East'. When the speaker, German academic Matthias Köntzel, arrived in Leeds only to be told that his lectures were off, he was shocked. “It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here,” he said.

The case is a telling example of the banal nature of censorship today. It was not that the university authorities thought that Köntzel's work lacked merit, nor even that they thought his work was wrong. Rather, they cancelled on 'security grounds'. They insisted that they were not expressing an opinion about his views. It was, they said, merely a bureaucratic matter of not having enough doormen to ensure his safety. So does health and safety become the dull final arbiter of which views get a hearing?

The case also shows that people no longer even listen to viewpoints with which they disagree, let alone engaging with and fighting them. The head of the university Islamic society issued a 'complaint' about the speaker, saying that the title was “provocative” and that his views were “not very pleasant”. Why not just say you disagree, or openly criticise his views as wrong, immoral, or blasphemous? Why not turn up to voice such criticism in person, or lobby the lecture with banners and whistles? Anything but the dull and neutered ‘complaint’ that the title of the lecture was 'provocative'.

There is a risk that we may lose the ability to tell what is and is not an insult. There are criticisms of Islam that are merely provocative and insulting, and that are best ignored. But Köntzel has gone to the bother of writing books and articles, and formulating arguments in the light of historical evidence. The Muslim brotherhood did, in fact, have a relationship with the Nazi Party in the 1930s - though what you make of that is another thing. There are insults, and there are formed opinions, and the latter deserve an opportunity to be heard.

Josie Appleton

Gagged down under

Fear and loathing are not the only things which can unite people in Australia. It seems there is nothing like banning free speech to get us all singing from the same hymn sheet, as Australia’s top Muslims are gagged by the Lebanese Muslim Association in Sydney.

Not so long ago, there was media uproar over a sermon given by Australia’s top Mufti, Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali, in which he (reportedly) claimed that women wearing revealing clothing and no headscarf were like meat left out for the cats to attack. Granted, it’s pretty awful stuff, but I thought we had gotten used to judges, clerics and other unelected members of the establishment making idiots of themselves by ranting on about women ‘asking for it’ because of how they dress, dance, smoke, drink or wear their hair. In 2001 we had a possibly worse example, courtesy of the Anglican Church. While he was Archbishop of Brisbane, Governor General Peter Hollingworth seemed to excuse the actions of an Anglican priest accused of sexually abusing a 14 year old girl.

Like al-Hilali, Hollingworth was another unelected figure with ‘weird and dangerous’ views. The difference between the two cases is that no one associated Hollingworth’s opinions with that of the entire Australian Anglican population. Hollingworth only spoke for himself and possibly for Elizabeth II. The Governor General eventually moved on, as did the controversy.

For al-Hilali, his case has proved different. Seeing the Mufti’s words as incitement to rape, Pru Goward, Australia’s Federal Sex Discrimination Officer, sought to have him not only gagged but also deported (to where of course, I don’t know). After John Howard also stepped-in to condemn him, the Mufti hit back saying that if his comments were indeed an incitement to rape he would stand down and quite literally gag himself, for 6 months.

The Mufti then commented on Egyptian TV that ‘Muslims [are] more entitled to be in Australia than those with convict heritage’. For the Lebanese Muslim Association (LMA), this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and the LMA officially gagged al-Hilali and four other top Muslim clerics for the ‘immeasurable damage’ they had caused. According to Tom Zreika, the LMA President, the organisation was trying to put an end to ‘perceived un-Australian viewpoints by some clerics’.

The knee-jerk censoriousness and hypocrisy on all sides is remarkable here. While comparatively few complained over Hollingworth, many more believe al-Hilali’s views too offensive to be heard. Meanwhile, the LMA seem to have bought into al-Hilali and his unelected cohorts’ pretences to speak for the entire Muslim community – and so tried to stop them making public statements altogether.

Despite the late summer warmth here in Australia it is quite chilling to think the one thing that may unite Australians from many different backgrounds is an ever increasing desire to limit freedom of speech.

Dom McCarthy