DISPATCHES by Hank Kalet: Our columnist reflects on the history of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, which is celebrating its 40th year of existence.
Don’t renounce freedom of speech when offended, but rather speak out to overshadow the offensive speech.
By: Hank Kalet
"Hypocrisy abounds: Everyone supports the free speech they agree with." Ted Rall
Free speech is offensive.
That’s something that far too many of us refuse to understand, that our freedom to speak also comes with a freedom to offend and by extension a freedom to take offense.
At its core, this is the argument being played out in the controversy over the publication in a Danish daily last September of a dozen caricatures of the Muslim prophet Muhammad.
The story began on Sept. 30 when Jyllands-Posten ran the 12 cartoons, which depicted Muhammad as, among other things, the precursor to today’s terrorists (including one showing Muhammad in a black, bomb-shaped turban with its fuse lit).
Local outrage followed. Clerics denounced the paper from the pulpit and demonstrations clogged Danish streets. In response, the Danish government defended the paper, while refusing to meet with Muslim leaders, further inflaming the controversy.
From there, the protests spread to the Middle East, where they turned violent and deadly.
The violence, of course, is not just unwarranted but should be condemned. But it also does not diminish the very real sense of Arab victimization that triggered the protests.
"The Danish cartoons," as James Carroll wrote in his Boston Globe column last week, "were a flame applied to a primed fuse, and the extraordinary reactions to the images from across the whole House of Islam point beyond the immediate provocation to a far broader sense of insult that Muslims have been made to feel."
Most Arabs live in conditions of poverty under authoritarian governments supported by the United States. U.S. troops occupy Iraq and Afghanistan, while the Palestinians live under Israeli occupation. Iran has become an international pariah for seeking weapons that many believe Israel already has. And Muslims are essentially second-class citizens in Europe.
All of this leads to a sense of alienation and anger of which the protests were a natural outgrowth. Again, this does not excuse the violence, but it is important not to conflate the violence with the protests, just as it is important not to allow an individual ethnic or religious group to determine the bounds of what is acceptable and what is not.
Imam Hamad Chebli of the Islamic Society of Central Jersey, speaking to our reporter Joseph Harvie last week for a story on reaction to the cartoons, raised the issue of boundaries.
"The freedom of speech allows a person to give a speech," he said, "but not if the intent is to insult the audience."
The imam is one of the most thoughtful and gracious religious leaders I have ever met, but on this he is wrong. Drawing such a line, whether it is to protect one’s religious sensibilities, one’s political affinities or one’s sense of propriety, contradicts the basic tenet that a free society can only be free if its citizens are free to say what is on their minds no matter how vile their words might be.
And if we have the right to offend, as columnist Gary Younge pointed wrote recently in The Nation, we certainly have the right to be offended.
Imam Chebli and the rest of the Muslim world are within their rights to be offended by the cartoons and to view them as a provocation, an intentional effort on the part of the editors of Jyllans-Posten to challenge Muslim sensibilities.
The proper response, however, is not to silence the paper, but to speak out against the cartoons, to drown out as free-speech advocate Nat Hentoff has said repeatedly over the years the offensive speech with more speech.
"Taste is subjective," cartoonist Ted Rall wrote recently, making the drawing of any line an arbitrary matter.
Muslims are offended by the Danish cartoons, and yet Arab newspapers regularly run what I and many others would consider anti-Semitic cartoons. Christian groups denounce films like "The Last Temptation of Christ," but refuse to acknowledge Jewish concerns about anti-Semitic stereotypes in Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of the Christ." And Arabs are portrayed as dogs by Leon Uris in a novel "Exodus" that portrays the founders of the modern state of Israel as heroic and godlike.
Rabbi David Eligberg of Congregation B’nai Tikvah put it best in our story last week.
"I think it is very difficult to draw a line, a hard and fast line that says this is where freedom of speech ends," he said. "The premise of freedom of speech is that it allows people to articulate things that will make people’s blood boil."
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post and The Cranbury Press. His e-mail is [email protected].