Cameron panics

I may be alone in this, and I do agree that given the Tory reputation for racism a dismissal may have been appropriate for bad judgement...

However, what Patrick Mercer actually said was that calling someone a "black bastard" happened in the army. Along with calling people "fat bastards" or "ginger bastards". Which is probably true. So he wasn't being racist. The worst you could say of him was that he was condoning a culture of verbal abuse, but that depends on whether you believe that a group of guys who are expected to go out and... erm... kill people are likely to cry into their mattress every night over being called "a slow-moving ginger bastard".

What scares me is that it is now far safer as an MP to waffle and hedge evasively (in the grand tradition of Tony Blair) than it is to actually speak from the heart or discuss controversial issues honestly. This bolsters a culture of spin, PR and stage management. The worst person coming out of this is probably David Cameron who has demonstrated he is too scared to stand up for a public culture of open debate.

David Irving

David Irving, holocaust denier and general idiot, gets three years in the slammer under Austria's holocaust denial law. While I find it hard to feel sympathy for a man who travelled to Austria knowing that he was a wanted criminal there, he doesn't deserve this.

This isn't a legal point. There is no doubt that he violated the Austrian law. And there is essentially no doubt that this Austrian law complies with article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights governing freedom of speech - the European Court of Human Rights has consistently held that laws against holocaust denial fall within the permitted exceptions to free speech under article 10.2. Even in the U.S. a holocaust denial law would probably be constitutional - the first amendment does not protect false statements of fact made with "actual malice".

Even if human rights law allows laws against holocaust denial, they aren't necessarily a good idea. The purpose of the false statements of fact exemption isn't to allow the government censor to serve as a Platonic guardian of the truth: it's to punish things like libel, fraud, and perjury - falsehoods which cause identifiable damage to specific people.

Liberals then to believe in a maximalist conception of free speech. Deborah Lipstadt, the victorious defendant in the notorious Irving libel trial explains more eloquently that I could why this is.

Moreover, I don’t believe censorship is efficacious. It renders the censored item into forbidden fruit, making it more appealing, not less so.

Quite.

While it is legitimate to argue that there is a difference between cartoons and the murder of millions of people, it is hard to argue for laws against Holocaust denial but demand that the Danish cartoonists’ freedom of speech be protected. It suggests a double standard.

This is vitally important. Censorship envy is a legitimate grievance which we are handing Muslim troublemakers on a plate. All demands for censorship are reasonable to the people making them - the only answer that we can expect other people to accept is "Nothing we can do, it's a free country."

When David Irving forced me to go to court to defend my freedom of expression, my most important weapon was the historical truth. We have truth and history on our side.

Quite. The libel trial involved a team of expert historians showing David Irving's to be false with meticulously detailed evidence, all of which is now on the record. This criminal trial involves the Austrian State declaring them to be false as an act of raw power. Show, don't tell.

John Stuart Mill devotes the first half of On Liberty to analysing the case for free speech. He explicity points out that free speech should extend to false statements of fact. Firstly, this is because our understanding of truth gains depth through conflict with falsehood. If Irving had been silenced by force on "day 1" then the evidence that Lipstadt and her team of lawyers and historians produced would not have been produced. Secondly, there is always the outside chance that we might be wrong. At the time On Liberty was written, both Mill and his political opponents were as certain that God existed as we are that the holocaust happened. Mill argued that atheists should nevertheless not be punished for advocating false beliefs.

Mike S at Harry's place commented

The fact that the bastard has now been forced into making a mealy-mouthed recantation of many of his lies has made the whole affair a success in my opinion.

I imagine the Catholic authorities thought the same thing about the mealy-mouthed recantation of his "lies" that they extracted from Galileo.

Prosecuting Irving is not a victory against far-right holocaust deniers, who are a joke anyway. It is not a victory against Arab holocaust deniers, who operate from countries where the State actively promotes their sick lies and suppresses the truth. I don't know if Irving was set to give a major speech at Iranian president and dangerous lunatic Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's proposed holocaust denier's conference. I do know that the keynote speech will include something like this:

The Jewish-controlled government of Austria acknowledged that it was unable to refute David Irving's ideas when it chose to jail him rather than arguing with him

It is interesting to look at the US reaction. This excellent blog post suggests that for most Americans there is a visceral tendency to defend free speech, even for idiots. While we can wonder if this is universally true given that a majority of Americans support flag-burning laws, it is certainly true of the American political elite.

If this had happened in America, then the American Civil Liberties Union would have taken up Irving's case. Over here, the general reaction even among friends of free speech is "I know he shouldn't be in jail, but he is so odious that I won't spend my time or money trying to get him out." The ACLU are to be commended for this attitude.

Why were the cartoons offensive?

A fairly widespread view on the whole cartoon row is that while Jyllands-Posten has the right to publish offensive cartoons, it shouldn't exercise that right. My view on this question depends on precisely why the cartoons are offensive. There are three possibilities:

1. The cartoons could be offensive because they are defamatory. In particular, they portray Mohammed as endorsing suicide bombing. To the extent that the cartoons are defamatory, of course they should not have been published. Free speech does not extend to the right to spread lies. On the other hand, both the author of the offending cartoons (only two of the twleve cartoons deal with suicide bombing) and the nutters calling for his execution believe that Islam does in fact endorse suicide bombing. So this is unlikely to be the real problem.
2. The cartoons could be offensive because they are sacriligious. The cartoonists are trying (largely unsuccessfully) to be funny, whereas religion is not a joking matter, at least to those who believe in it. I can't accept this argument. All humour is offensive to somebody - precisely because it involves A using something B takes seriously to give C a laugh at B's expense. Caricatures of Mohammed are acceptable for the same reason that Father Ted is. Danish Muslims should get a sense of humour. The fact that the cartoons are not, in fact, funny does not change this - bad jokes are grounds for groans, not (even peaceful) outrage.
3. The cartoons could be offensive because they are idolatrous. Islamic law bans any pictures of Mohammed, even entirely respectful ones. In the words of Shaikh Faiz Saddiqi, a spokesman for the Muslim Action Committee, "It is as if the media around the world just don't get it, the publication of an image of the prophet Muhammad in itself is a deep insult." The origin of the row also suggests that this is the case - a Danish publisher couldn't find an illustrator for a book about Mohhamed that was not otherwise anti-Islamic. If this is the real problem, then of course it is acceptable for non-Muslims to publish the cartoons, since Muslim religious law isn't binding on them.

From the behaviour of both moderate and nutty Muslims over the issue, it looks like the real problem is idolatry. That is why it is particularly important that we stand up for free speech rather than taking the soft option of denouncing the cartoonists as insensitive bigots.

Let's suppose that Pastafarians believe that Spaghetti should always be spelt with a capital "S" in homage to the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Further, let's suppose that some Pastafarians parade through the streets carrying placards saying "Death to Heinz" after Heinz advertise spaghetti with a small "s", because they find this kind of irreligious behaviour deeply offensive. Does that mean that the rest of the world is suddenly under some kind of moral obligation to use a capital "S"? Of course not.

Giving in to the critics of Jyllands-Posten would set a precedent that we should use a capital "S". Unless you believe that respect for other people's religion only applies to large religions with lots of political clout.

Those cartoons - redux

I have so far avoided blogging on the notorious Mohammed cartoons, largely because I haven't been blogging at all for the last week or so. To create some pretence of topicality, I thought I would respond to this uncommonly stupid Guardian column by Jonathan Steele.

It is not often that the left agrees with Tony Blair, let alone George Bush. But the good sense the two leaders have shown in the Danish cartoons affair by siding with leftwing and liberal critics of the offensive drawings' publication is one of the more remarkable aspects of the drama.

Hm. The left agrees with Tony Blair most of the time, actually. He is a Prime Minister leading a centre-left government, whose MP's (who are presumably on the left) regularly vote through his legislation. But the more serious error in Steele's opening sentence is the use of the term "liberal". Liberals believe that free speech is absolute. Being a Liberal Democrat activist, I know quite a lot of liberals. None of them share Blair's view that publishing the cartoons was wrong, in either a legal or a moral sense. (Most of us think that it was stupid or rude, neither of which is grounds for outrage.)

Flemming Rose, the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten, which first printed the unfunny cartoons, says he wanted to break away from Denmark's "self-censorship" in the face of Islam.

No scare quotes needed. The comissioning of the cartoons was provoked by a specific incident of self-censorship - namely that nobody in Denmark was prepared to be named as illustrator of a book about Mohammed because of the risk of violence.

Other European papers that followed suit boasted of courage.

Accurately - we are dealing with people who have burned down embassies in response to these cartoons.

The fact is that on the cartoon issue the great neocon and his ideological advisers were pragmatic and smart enough to see that the drawings were in poor taste, deliberately provocative and grotesquely inaccurate in suggesting that every Muslim is a murderous would-be martyr and, worse still, that the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing.

Neither taste nor theology are appropriate topics for government officials to comment on in their official capacity. Whether or not the Qur'an advocates suicide bombing is a question that is hotly contested both by Muslims and non-Muslims. Steele is entitled to his opinion (although if, as I suspect, he has not read the Qur'an, I don't see why anyone should care what it is) and is free to discuss it in a Guardian column. The British government should not take a position on what is or is not correct Islamic doctrine, and British politicians should not pontificate about the issue (unless they are imams in their spare time).

Bush's reaction shows that Americans have a better understanding of multiculturalism than most Europeans

Yes, quite. And there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. America is a country whose first response to the September 11th attacks was to declare a "crusade".

E pluribus unum - "unity from many" - as their motto puts it.

Actually, the official motto of the United States is "In God We Trust". "Unity in Diversity" is the motto of the European Union. "E Pluribus Unum" referred to the Union of several States, all of which were run by property-owning white Christian males. When the possibility arose that it might be interpreted to include blacks and women, the Americans carefully changed it.

In Britain we are further back. If there is a tolerance spectrum, with resistance to diversity at one end, acceptance of it in the middle and celebration of it at the other end, Britain lies somewhere near the middle.

Which is as it should be. There are good reasons for not celebrating the fact that some people in the UK believe that women and gays are second-class citizens.

(Some evil right-wing Danish official said) "We have gone to war against the multicultural ideology that says that everything is equally valid."

While this blog disapproves of wars against drugs, terror, multicultural ideology, or anything else that is not an army, the Danes have a point. Water is still wet no matter how strongly the Fuq-Whit tribe of Bongo Bongo Land believe that it is dry. Mass murder is bad, and democracy, free markets and the rule of law are good. We should be prepared to say that these views are more valid than the opposite, whatever culture people belong to.

When the demonstrations started and other papers in Europe printed the cartoons in "solidarity" with Jyllands-Posten, they compounded the initial anti-Muslim error by trying to stir up a continental clash of civilisations

Just to think, I thought that being gratuitously controversial was about selling more papers. Apparently it is part of some grand neocon conspiracy to provoke World War III.

But why should a progressive paper in Britain feel "solidarity" with anti-immigrant Danish editors who made a major error of judgment rather than with British Muslims who universally deplored the cartoons?

Because they are both newspaper editors who feel harried by people taking offense at what they publish? I certainly find it hard to believe that a newspaper editor, progressive or not, could feel solidarity with people who support new laws restricting newspaper editors.

(Snip the obligatory couple of paragraphs condemning embassy-burning)

Even the Saudis only reacted after Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime Minister, refused to receive a protest delegation of Danish Islamic leaders and ambassadors from Muslim countries. The Danish government's insensitivity and rudeness were almost as offensive as the cartoons.

Why and earth should the Danish prime minister get into discussions about what a privately-owned newspaper publishes. There is absolutely nothing the Danish prime minister can or should do about rudeness in the papers - that is what having a free press means. If he had met the ambassadors and said "Sorry - it's a free country. Nothing I can do. Please go away" then they would have been just as offended, but the Prime Minister's valuable time would have been wasted.

Several days after the dispute erupted, Bush rang Rasmussen to express support. But he was careful to say he was acting "in light of the violence against Danish and other diplomatic missions", not in solidarity with the phoney free-speech issue.

The free speech issue isn't phoney. If you don't have the right to offend anyone, you don't have free speech. Although given Bush's attitude to speech he finds offensive, I'm not surprised that he got this one wrong.

Muslims are not only an important part of Europe's new diversity. They are diverse among themselves. To suggest that, because almost all of Europe's Muslims felt offended by the cartoons, they all support slogans calling for revenge and beheadings is as inaccurate as it is for people in Muslim countries to claim that every European approved the cartoons' publication. There are liberals, conservatives, modernisers and traditionalists in all communities, just as there are those who know the bounds of good taste and bigots who do not.

Steele is able to state the obvious. Nevertheless, he still manages to mislead. While very few European Muslims support supressing free speech by burning embassies, an awful lot of them do support supressing free speech by passing laws. There is a real and important divide between those who support free speech and those who don't. I stand with Jyllands-Posten on one side of it. Steele, Blair, and the Muslim Council of Britain stand on the other side. With the embassy-burners