Category Archives: Censorship

Discussing identity politics : How lived experiences disrupt debate

By Freddy Bin Yusuf

In Hippias Major, one of the dialogues of Plato, Socrates and Hippias set out to find out what is the definition of beauty. Hippias offers definitions, and Socrates counters with four arguments, concluding beauty is difficult to define, something no doubt he knew before posing the question to Hippias. This is one of the great dialogues of Plato about Socrates, and these dialogues shape much of how the West define concepts, and form arguments.

Socrates was an ugly man, his statues affirming this, and with that in mind I’ll attempt to link it to this. The adherents of identity politics have laid a new card on the table, one which they use to silence debate and twist questions into attacks. This is the concept of “lived experience”

The term lived experience is used to describe the first-hand accounts and impressions of living as a member of a minority or oppressed group. 

Essentially this original definition was that you cannot discount an experience and you should listen, as in the example in the link, a male in tech cannot comment on what is is like for a female tech, only listen to her lived experience. This, on face value, is simply common sense, get as many different viewpoints as you can.

However, it has been twisted further. I spotted this in a tweet on Twitter and have seen similar across social media:

“white people can’t decide what’s racist, straight people can’t decide what’s homophobic, cis people can’t decide what’s transphobic”

This is essentially used to close down debate as its used as a counterpoint to questions and criticism. It is often demanded that you cannot engage in an argument on certain issues unless you are part of the minority that is being oppressed.  This concept is used to reinforce claims and statements that are not derived not from data, or from evidence, but from feelings of the individual who is able to provide evidence of lived experience.

Lived experiences derive from postmodern critical theory, which politicises social problems by situating them in historical and cultural contexts, but takes it one step further in ignoring historical reality in favour of a self-affirmative reality.

This defies belief, and ignores history. The banning of slavery could not be debated by non-slaves? The argument for the vote for women could not be debated by men? What happens if the viewpoint is from an intersection of identities that form a sum of one person? No one can debate at all? This has even been applied to jokes and comments on various identities, with attempts to control the speech of everyone, not just those party to the conversation.

The ground rules for debate cannot be set by one side alone, they cannot decide what can be debated, what can be questioned or what can be disproved. It is fair to reject the basic foundations of debate within a closed community, but this is not the case as they are insisting that their concepts are now the universal societal rules which must not be broken, and they seek to enforce their domination of all culture by any means necessary.

Socrates: because they do not seem so to people; but that is not what I asked, what seems to most people to be beautiful, but what is so.” We shall, then, I fancy, say, as we suggested, “We say that that part of the pleasant which comes by sight and hearing is beautiful.” Do you think the statement is of any use, Hippias, or shall we say something else?

Socjus: As an ugly man you are not allowed to comment on beauty. Blocked. 

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Take the time to insult Erdogan

By Jake Wilde

Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, does not like to be insulted. In that sense he is no different from the rest of us. Where he differs from most of us is that he arrests people who do so.

He doesn’t care if you’re at home, whether your insult was intentional or if you had no idea it was even an insult.

He certainly doesn’t care if you are a journalist, an academic, or a Tolkien-loving family doctor 

But matters have taken a more worrying turn. He now doesn’t care whether you’re Turkish or not.

Twitter is the bane of Erdogan’s life. He banned it in Turkey in March 2014 and again in July 2015. He is responsible for 60% of all of Twitter’s removal requests.

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Take the time to insult Erdogan. While you’re still allowed to.

Brown Men Can’t Wear Tweed

By David Paxton

‘Hit piece’ is a pejorative. Something trashy, something demeaning to the writer. It attempts to diminish its target under the guise of objective reporting and will use low tactics to get there. What makes a piece of journalism a ‘hit piece’?

Nathan Lean’s New Republic latest, What Does Maajid Nawaz Really Believe?, provides an object lesson.

Maajid Nawaz is a former Islamist who now heads the counter-extremist think tank Quilliam. Lean’s title suggests an emphasis on the ‘really’. There is the Nawaz that we see, hear, and think we know, and then there is the truth which Lean seeks to expose.

Glenn Greenwald shared Lean’s article, calling it a ‘great investigation’. What were the methods of investigation and what truth has it revealed? Why is Nawaz so worthy a target?

The opening paragraph hints at where we are headed.

…It’s January 2013 and the British activist, sporting a slick black tuxedo and a gelled coiffure…

He was wearing a dinner suit, the standard formal attire for a debate at the Oxford Union. On its own this is just some mediocre scene-setting but it ties in with a later passage.

Before long, the scrappy son of Essex had a book deal, and traded in his prison garb for Harris tweed waistcoats and red corduroy pants—a get up he described as “versatile and smart” in his 2014 Sunday Times “Masters of Fashion” profile. “My day can include being in the Newsnight studio or with friends or at Downing Street, so dressing is tricky,” he said.

It’s practically impossible to talk about your appearance during an interview for a fashion feature and not sound a dick when you’re subsequently edited and quoted. It’s easy ribbing, and I dare say, fair game.

Nawaz likes his clothes. I disapprove of his winged collar and dislike the way he keeps his blazer done-up when he sits but… is this meaningful? Why include it? The last time a hit piece came his way, disappointingly via the Guardian, meeting him was described thus:

…a buzzy private members’ club in Covent Garden. I find him in the second-floor bar, crisply turned out, ready with an engaging smile, sipping a skinny flat white.

His coffee, his clothes, his up-town location. These expressed irrelevancies, noticeable by their level of detail, form a pattern. It’s part of a wider narrative, Nawaz the “turncoat”. The “scrappy son” who abandoned his authentic roots for the temptations of The Man. Tweed, red trousers, dinner jackets, the uniform of the overlords, part of the establishment. He has sold out.

Lean continues:

Nawaz jet-sets from Ivy League lecture halls to annual gabfests in the Colorado mountains; from the stages of TED talks to awards galas; and from the backrooms of British officialdom to Senate hearings in Washington

‘Jet-sets’ is to ‘travels’ what ‘quaffs’ is to ‘drinks’. Have you got the picture yet? You must have, because it isn’t aimed at the reader who appreciates subtlety. We fight The Man, he draws from his teat.

he says, gazing out at a farrago of ambassadors, journalists, and luminaries.

David Cameron tapped him as an adviser on combatting extremism, Tony Blair gushed admiration in a front-cover book blurb, and George W. Bush picked his brain about torture at a backyard barbeque in Dallas.

Success in Nawaz’s stated mission means meeting politicians and raising awareness wherever possible. So the more successful he becomes the easier it is for the ‘sell-out’ narrative to be supported by such snark.

indications, they say, of a turncoat who cares more about being a well-compensated hero than he does about the cause he champions.

…shown Maajid a way of attaining the sort of fame and status he desired

[Maajid and Ed] were in a unique position [and] one that would equate to fame and riches, but rationalized it to themselves that they were fighting a good fight against Islamists

Such is Nawaz’s playbook for achieving fame…

He had an “insatiable lust to be recognized,”

Accepting the tale of Nawaz the turncoat and that he saw riches, wanted them, and acted accordingly is made easier by the idea that he never really believed in the fundamentalist ideology in the first place. He has always been about the fame/money/prestige.

“He is neither an Islamist nor a liberal,” he said. “Maajid is whatever he thinks he needs to be.”

Nisbet remembers Nawaz as a guy who wasn’t particularly religious, but labored to appear committed to Islamism in an effort to win popularity and promotion.

This is all psychological conjecture. To support it, Lean supplies us with quotes and opinions obtained from “interviews with his friends and relatives”. One must ask how many of these friends are still friends. Lean doesn’t always let us know which are ideological enemies with motivation to attack, which remain Islamists, or which are still Hizb ut-Tahrir. In one case, that of Ian Nisbet, he does state that his interviewee is currently a member of that Islamist group, a fact that would lead most journalists to discount his comments entirely: of course an extremist doesn’t have a favourable view of a counter-extremist. So which of the others isn’t an extremist? A credible piece of journalism would furnish the reader with relevant context such as this. But this is a hit piece. Information isn’t the aim.

Barely a paragraph of Lean’s passes without an obvious internal contradiction, cheap shot or half-truth. He claims that because Nawaz wasn’t vocally disavowing his Islamism while locked up with a plethora of Islamist hard nuts this amounts to something of a contradiction. He claims Nawaz became more radical and not less.

Even assuming Lean is correct about this, it would be proper to have considered that an intensified radicalism is among the things you could expect from someone losing the faith. Upping the ante and trying to drown out the doubts would be a reasonable expectation.

Lean draws inferences from Quilliam’s funding. If I were more of a ‘follow the money’ sort I would make a big deal of the fact that Lean is director-of-research for the Pluralism, Diversity and Islamophobia project at Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. This centre being funded to the tune of $20m by the aforementioned Saudi prince.

His timing was curious. Nawaz broke ranks with Hizb ut-Tahrir the same week that his Newham College classmate and ex-party member, Ed Husain, rose to quasi-stardom with the publication of his kiss-and-tell memoir

‘Kiss-and-tell’ is an interesting choice of description. It smacks of betrayal. Did Husain really rise to ‘quasi-stardom’ in a week? From a book? Was this when Nawaz insta-flipped from one thing to another?

Nawaz’s version, explained at length in his book Radical, seems far more plausible than the idea he saw somebody get some attention and immediately decided he wanted a piece of the action. Does his new-found fame, his income, his status please him? Probably. Does he have an ego of note? Perhaps. Has Lean come even close to demonstrating that this is all he is about and that we should doubt his ideas accordingly? No.

There’s value in ad hominem arguments to explain that which cannot be explained logically. Once you have exhausted attempts to understand somebody’s views by the validity and consistency of the arguments then there is room for analyzing other motivations. But as so often with discussions of Nawaz, this isn’t even attempted. This is about Nawaz serving ‘The Man’. This is the crux of the entire piece.

One might choose to call The Man, ‘liberal democracy’, or ‘the rule of secular law’, but in this story it is the rich oppressor. Nawaz extols and evangelises the former but it’s the latter Lean insists he’s part of. This is the ‘Uncle Tom‘ line of attack.

Lean has previously called Nawaz a ‘native informant’ and Sam Harris’ ‘Muslim validator‘ and ‘lapdog‘. Follow the thread below Greenwald’s tweet or run a search for “Nawaz+Uncle+Tom” to see how rife this abuse is. Nawaz is unable to be a man with agency, or with beliefs he has developed over time; he has simply crossed to the other team, the enemy, and has done so for corrupt reasons. A brown man in a suit speaking with non-brown men of importance. How dare he.

A search of who was keen to promote this article hints at why the ‘Uncle Tom’ narrative gains traction: Glenn Greenwald, CJ Werleman, Murtaza Hussain, and Nafeez Ahmed; are all fine examples.

The story of Uncle Tom is from a time of slavery. It is expressly racial. As a modern insult, he is on the side of the oppressors when he should be with his own side, the oppressed. The Regressive Left and their Islamist fellow travelers are well placed to see a parallel.

The former see the world as a relativist mush of identity politics and power dynamics. Secular democracy is not superior and there are no universal values. Under pure relativism, moral status is inversely proportional to power and the West is powerful.

The latter endorse all the Islamic grievance tropes they can find. There are reasons why those blessed with the final revelation aren’t running the world and these include the nefarious tactics of the Infidel. It is manichean.

Those who believe in ideas, those who believe secularism superior to theocracy, have little difficulty accepting a brown person, or even a Muslim brown person, supporting universal liberal values. Those who believe in identity politics do. They see a race traitor. They see an ‘Uncle Tom’

When this comes purely from Islamists it is explicable and expected. When it comes from those who claim to be of the Left it is as depressing as it is commonplace. The racism of the anti-racists. The know-your-placeism which drives the useful idiots of jihad to protect the extremists by attacking the moderates.

…many of his former close acquaintances …see him as an Islamic Judas Iscariot, a Muslim who turned his back on his fellow believers when state coffers flung open—and their testimony reflects that sense of betrayal.

Correct. They do. But these ‘former close acquaintances’ are Islamists. As the writer Jamie Palmer put it, “I’m pretty shocked to discover from Nathan Lean that Maajid Nawaz’s former Islamist colleagues think he is a traitor. Who’d have thought?” The real shame is when they are supported by those who should know better.

Stripped to its essentials, all we have in this piece is a description of some Islamists unhappy with Nawaz fighting Islamism. Oh, and that he’s an easy mark for tailors. That’s it.

In response to a complaint that the ‘lapdog’ comment was personally insulting rather than substantive, Lean said the following.

Yet somehow, the satisfaction I get at seeing how much it irritates your tribe, is, indeed, worth it.

Lean is in a tribal fight and will take satisfaction from saying what hurts rather than what informs. And I don’t need a juicy quote from an ideological enemy to demonstrate it. Lean is of course free to do this but The New Republic continues its destruction of its own reputation by enabling him.

Nawaz doesn’t obfuscate. He “jet-sets” to “Ivy League halls” and to stand on “stages” “crisply turned out”, sometimes “sporting” “tweed”, sometimes in front of a “farrago of ambassadors, journalists, and luminaries” and he clearly explains his views. Those views are not hard to find, he works hard to make sure you hear them. The New Republic could easily pay for a writer to engage with those ideas. What business has it giving space to a pitifully ineffective hit piece?

I would condemn a great hit piece as ethically poor while respecting its quality, but Lean has managed to do nothing bar produce a lesson in poor journalism and throw away any residual credibility he might have had. He is the sappy suicide bomber who forgets to find a crowd before detonating and only manages to kill himself.

For a writer, character assassination where the only character assassinated belongs to the assassin is a short-term gig. But others will come along to have a go. The more frequently such pieces appear, and the more the likes of Greenwald promote it, the more you know Nawaz is damaging the narrative and credibility of those who should be damaged. If there’s truth to the adage that you should know a man by his enemies, then Maajid Nawaz appears to be well worth the knowing. In spite of his taste in clothes.

Charlie Hebdo and the Turds That Won’t Flush

By David Paxton

‘Ding’ ‘Ding’ Round 57…

‘He’s obsessed’ you remark. Well yes actually, I am a bit. But even when I think enough should have been said on this matter yet more turds float to the surface and I think it important to try and flush them. By now however, it’s beginning to feel like nothing so much as playing whac-a-mole. But with turds.

Much has already been written about the PEN debacle. This by Tom Owolade is typically good. I have also attacked Glenn Greenwald’s laughable contribution here. But the same tropes keep coming up again and again. 10 days after the massacre I posted this long and, I had forlornly hoped, exhaustive piece breaking down the various forms of apologia. I think it holds up. However, the superbug like inability for some of this bullshit to die is quite something to behold and is itself worthy of examination.

As I said at the time, the filthy fifth-columnist detritus require little examination. They are Islamists and wish to exculpate Islamists. The Useless Idiots like Nabilla Ramadi suffer from a form of Muslim nationalism that makes her bend any truth or logic to ensure that all Muslims are not tarred with the same brush. Even though no serious person seeks to do so.

But there are the others. The sort of smart, talented and lauded person who when not writing novels sends letters to PEN explaining why the unbelievably brave shouldn’t be granted a bravery award. These are the ones deserving a second glance. Yes, because they really should be allies but also because their problems are seemingly a touch more complicated.

As Owolade wrote:

Charlie Hebdo is a satirical magazine whose staff were murdered for the crime of blasphemy. This fact alone should entail support and sympathy from everyone who believes the right to mock ideas and cause offence trumps acquiescence to blasphemy law.

This is obvious. He goes further:

But Charlie Hebdo are not racist and their staff were not murdered for racism and hate speech. They were murdered for depicting a religious figure.

And yet those writing to PEN, months after the event, keep insisting black is white.

Good people, not horrible Tories like me, but proper lefty types, people who know, people who work for Charlie Hebdo, people who are French, folks that have actually sodding read it, tell them in many different ways, repeatedly, what Charlie Hebdo were/are about. It is crystal clear what they are about and there is no possible excuse for ignorance. Yet ignorance is what flows from the fingers and mouths of these weapons. This is no longer a lack of information, or even a difference of opinion. This is a mental condition. It is the practice of denying clear reality no matter how much evidence is smashed across their heads.

As tempted as I am to call this mendacious, I truly believe most of it is not. They just don’t have the faculties to face up to objective reality and accept what that would mean for their comfort blanket of a world view.

I previously described such people’s world view as following the 3 Stages of Stupidity. In it short it goes thus:

1: Always holding unequivocal support of the underdog

2: Divide the world into oppressor/oppressed

3: Assume the superior virtue of the oppressed.

When David Frum obliterated Gary Trudeau he expressed a similar variation, which he knocks down into two stages:

1. Identify the bearer of privilege.

2. Hold the privilege-bearer responsible.

I won’t quibble.

There is really something in this. Please read my full and fleshed out explanation as I still think it is the clearest answer to the mystery of their pathology. Add to this explanation the tendency in many educated ‘liberals’ to be singularly unable to empathise with a thought process involving any aspects that mean nothing to them. A fervent devotion to religion and the feeling that blasphemy is enough gets no dice. It must be identity politics or economics. Those are the only tools in their box.

But I really didn’t expect things to have sunk quite this low:

Francine Prose on Comment is Free:

The narrative of the Charlie Hebdo murders – white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists

The fucking narrative? It was a massacre. It was events. Strange it should take a novelist to attempt remove all flesh and life from such a discussion. Though I suppose when it serves her purpose so clearly…

As for her summation of the narrative, white folks killed by ‘dem brown folk, if this were true it would be a fact and not a narrative. But it isn’t even true. Check the list of the dead. And who is spreading this ‘narrative’? Something this wrong needs a reason. She is actually willing to change the facts in order to not have to adjust her own pitiful ‘narrative’.

Comment is free but she comes close to making one wish it wasn’t.

She goes on:

The bitterness and rage of the criticism that we have received point out how difficult people find it to think with any clarity on these issues and how easy it has been for the media – and our culture – to fan the flames of prejudice against Islam. As a result, many innocent Muslims have been tarred with the brush of Islamic extremism.

The bitterness and rage is because people such as herself are denying reality and propagating 24 carat bullshit to obscure the obvious clarity about the murder of innocents.

If it is easy to fan the flames, perhaps it has less to do with our difficulties and more to do with the postjudice that follows yet more users of the right to free speech being slaughtered by religious maniacs. The very rights she nominally campaigns in support of. Her final sentence takes the biscuit though. If she wishes for the Muslims that have nothing to do with these crimes to be free from association with them, is it not best that her and others stop representing these crimes as springing from the collective anger of the same mass of people? By pretending it isn’t blasphemy but some reaction to socio-economic factors the suspicion is cast on those they have lumped together by a demographic distinction. If one seeks to deny the real motivation and replace it with their ‘narrative’ about reactions stemming from Muslim anger are they not doing the heavy lifting in this job of tarring?

She has plenty more:

But I also don’t feel that it is the mission of PEN to fight the war on terrorism; that is the role of our government.

When one realises the opponents in this war are the greatest threat to free speech going, it most certainly should be. It is all of ours. But nobody is asking her to pick up a rifle and stag on. There is some part of this fight that calls for removing the taboo of religious offence, which aids in demystifying the beliefs of these loons. That as it happens is dangerous work. Charlie Hebdo was doing that work. It is what they were to be recognised for. At worst she is seeking to undo that work and at best pretending it wasn’t being done.

I have nothing but sympathy for the victims and survivors.

This is untrue. She also has contempt for their output. She makes this clear.

As a friend wrote me: the First Amendment guarantees the right of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, but we don’t give them an award.

If only we could all have friends so insightful and quotable. This thought from her chum works to show it is possible to stick up for the worst speech imaginable without approving of it. Fine. The problem is though, Charlie Hebdo weren’t Nazis, or even close. In fact, they were anti-Nazis and everyone is sick to death with having to point this out. There is no way she doesn’t know this. Yet still she pretends and willingly smears the dead as purveyors of detestable speech. It really is becoming ever more clear that reality is not unknown but merely unwanted.

And the idea that one is either “for us or against us” in such matters not only precludes rational and careful thinking

No. A thousand times no. Some people are for us. Some people are against us. That is rational and it is careful. If you have a masturbatory sense of your own intelligence that requires a masochistic search for nuance where there is none to be found, you have a problem. Not only were the attackers against us, they couldn’t be more clear and loud about this fact. Yet again they choose to listen to themselves rather than the facts.

One of the more disappointing aspects of this is that they are helping least the people their pitifully solipsistic sense of guilt is meant to be considering. The peoples most in need of the liberating view points of Charlie Hebdo are the Muslims, atheists and others stuck in places far less amenable to a free existence than France. Try Raif Badawi, Avjit Roy or Sabeen Mahmud if you wish to get specific.

This brings us on to Teju Cole. This ball of self-regard and pretension specifically draws a line between Charlie Hebdo and Roy and Badawi. In his letter to PEN he wrote:

I would rather honor Raif Badawi, Avijit Roy, Edward Snowden, or Chelsea Manning, who have also paid steeply for their courage, but whose ideals are much more progressive than Charlie’s.

Much more progressive? This really does confirm either startling ignorance or a willful denial of reality. I would like very much to hear his response to this question: What are Charlie Hebdo’s ideals? As I wrote in my Letter to Laurie Penny:

Charlie Hebdo consistently and unfalteringly engaged in opposition to the following:

  • Corruption in government
  • Unwarranted power of big business
  • Europe’s disastrous austerity policies
  • Israeli actions in Gaza
  • Restrictions on immigration
  • Anti-immigrant policies
  • Any form of racism
  • Organised Religion
  • The Le Pen family, the National Front and their populist politics

This list hints at some pretty progressive ideals no? I will go further, I cannot conceive of an organisation with more progressive ideals than Charlie Hebdo. On what grounds does Cole feel qualified to draw this line? He needs to back this up. Avijit Roy was described by many as Bangladesh’s Charlie Hebdo and Raif Badawi is in prison for the same reasons so many at Charlie Hebdo are dead. Could it be that there isn’t a real difference in their ideals but that the other two happen to be a bit brown? It’s the only answer that fits the facts. And it is pathetic.

To read the letters justifying the grandstanding of these people is depressing. I am both saddened and maddened that such self-serving discharge is openly expressed by people considered to be thinkers and that in our time this is what passes for an intelligentsia.

We are bound by duty and decency to show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. But more than that we are bound by self-preservation. A case I have made previously. (Shit, hasn’t all this been said previously?)

Their bravery is beyond question, that giving them an award for it should be questioned on taste grounds is wrong. That the objections to the taste are fabricated from falsehoods and smears is odious. Salman Rushdie said “I hope nobody ever comes after them”. It’s a noble sentiment. My nobility is really beginning to show cracks.

The limits of Cultural Appropriation

By Robbie Travers (@RobbieTravers)

Cultural appropriation is a concept that should be viewed with deep suspicion.

 My objections to it are simple: Firstly, it is deeply authoritarian to police the behaviour of people because they are deemed to be appropriating the property of other cultures, often ones that are deemed to be marginalised. We should never seek to police behaviour that does not call for violence, or behaviour that are not violent. For example: teens wearing Bindis and Indian headdresses at festivals.

 The argument that many of these teens don’t understand the culture behind these items of clothing is levelled. The argument that they are participating in oppression by wearing them, either in a state of blissful ignorance or actively, is actually redundant. Cultures often take items from other cultures and integrate them as part of their culture, and whilst it may offend some, not allowing cultures to share and adopt traditions of oppressed cultures becomes authoritarian. How so? It creates privileged groups of people with culture that cannot be mocked, discussed and that their culture is there property and theirs alone.

 But also, what is an oppressed group? as different groups have different ideas of oppression. Are our values universal? as many of those who dress as Arab’s are criticised, but yet not all Arabs are oppressed, look at the Saudi Royal family for example. The argument falls to scrutiny.

 Secondly, the often hypocritical proponents of cultural appropriation define culture as a commodity that is in the possession of marginalised groups. That this is something they alone should have the ability to control and they alone possess. Culture should never be anyone’s property, nor should it exclusively belong to one group: this is how culture stagnates as it goes without discussion or adaptation.

 However, these same proponents are incoherent when it comes to the culture of groups in perceived positions of power, with some individuals claiming that cultures only occur due to marginalisation, hence groups in power have no culture and others claiming that only marginalised groups have ownership of their own culture. This is ridiculous, promoting the thinking that only certain groups should be privileged to have ownership and control over their culture. I don’t think any group should have said powers, but it is inconsistent to suggest that certain groups should and shouldn’t have this ability.

 Yet somehow, it remains their belief that culture should remain in the property of those who own it, rather than anyone outside said groups to try and adopt or adapt aspects of it.

 Cultural appropriation also tries to appeal to the idea of collective and ancestral guilt, that white people are somehow responsible for the actions of their ancestors and hence should respect other cultures due to their “sins.”

 However, consider this closely, are all white people the same? No. Those who often claim that white people appropriate other cultures and hence create mindless stereotypes appeal to mindless stereotypes to prove their arguments are solid. But also we should bear in mind that we don’t judge groups not perceived to be in positions of power for the sins of their ancestors, why should we do so to groups in power.

 Or why at all. If someone hasn’t committed a crime, don’t punish them for it.

 Hence, Cultural appropriation should fail to be convincing to any logical and rational thinker, as it is illogical and hypocritical thinking.

A rebuttal to the censorious student Left

By Tom Owolade (@owolade14)

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The recent attitude displayed by the NUS Women’s campaign received scorn on twitter and elsewhere but they revealed a mindset undimmed by shame or contrition. Whether it was suggesting clapping be replaced by jazz hands, or insisting gay men stop culturally appropriating black women, the absurdity of these suggestions were plain to see. Yet, despite this, the values that informed these suggestions – emphasising narratives over facts, and identity over principles – is espoused unabashedly by many, and therefore merits examination.

 

The influence of these values is clear and growing. In universities, Individual liberty and moral universalism continues to dwindle whilst identity politics and a culture of moral relativism flourishes. Freedom of speech, a pre-condition for free and open societies, is being curbed by censorship and self-censorship, from debates to classrooms to online forums. This censorious climate is caused by a widespread belief that the freedom to express oneself must be balanced against securing the comfort of those without ‘privilege’. The assumption of individual liberty – and its possibility of offending anyone – is replaced by an assumption of collective responsibility to tiptoe around our thoughts, trying desperately not to offend those most vulnerable in society- namely people of colour, LGBT people and women. Freedom is speech is transformed from a right into a privilege, to be exercised responsibly in accordance with particular issues.

 

Firstly, self-censorship is nourished by this attitude: individual viewpoints are burdened with the responsibility of not being offensive when talking about issues that affect victimised groups. An offence to them, it is argued, constitutes an act of oppression, disabling their dignity and therefore requiring a response even – especially!  – at the expense of certain principles; principles are married with privilege and thus are meaningful only in consequential terms. Because of this, censorship in some instances can be excused under the invocation of victimhood – and the consequent challenge to privilege – however spurious: from no-platforming feminists with the ‘wrong’ and ‘oppressive’ opinions to banning music videos with the ‘wrong’ and ‘oppressive’ messages. And because of this, the central tenets of liberalism are unravelling in a relativistic swamp. The fundamental logic justifying this new censorship is indistinguishable from the logic that justified old censorship: the sheer arbitrariness of ‘offence’ legislating against individual liberty and conscience. Who is defined as oppressors and oppressed is done spuriously, one persons oppressors is another persons oppressed – to some, because of her identity, Julie Bindel qualifies as a victim. However, because of her views on Trans issue and Islam, her censorious critics paint her as a perpetrator of oppression. The fact that her censors don’t subscribe to objectivity means that there isn’t a meaningful criterion for distinguishing whether she is privileged or unprivileged – they rely on a binary that doesn’t account for the fluidity of identity and beliefs. Liberal minded people rely on an insistence on objective principles. Julie Bindel should be afforded the right to express her beliefs unencumbered by attempts to silence or intimidate her, as should anyone expressing their beliefs irrespective of whether their identity qualifies as victimiser or not.

 

We live in a world where the lucid expositions of Locke and Paine have lost their allure and potency and given way to postmodernism: an ideology so convulsed by a cult of victimhood it censors without compunction under the pretext of protecting the ‘victims’ and arraigning the ‘privileged’. It is through this context that we can observe the flourishing of safe spaces, trigger warnings and cultural appropriation. These practices contain within them principles one can reasonably be sympathetic with: empowerment of previously persecuted groups and an attack on structural inequality. The incontestable progress made by society partially depended on advocacy of these principles, it would be wrong to entirely dismiss them.

 

However, when these beliefs – admittedly noble – are shot through with the fanaticism induced by identity politics, then censorship and the policing of behaviour is normalised: a vital component of free societies –  individual rights – is made secondary to special rights accorded to groups, people are thereby viewed through regimented and differentiated moral prisms rather than through a universalism that views each person as an individual. Following from this, people are infantilised; People who, by accident of birth, happen to be ‘privileged’ have their behaviour and individual conscience policed; It also infantilises the victimised groups who, by accident of birth, are assumed to be allergic to controversial views, and are thus mollycoddled from dangerous and contestable beliefs. It is therefore counter-productive to its stated aims of empowering victimised groups.

 

It is also wrong in principle. It is carried out with noble intentions, confidently posturing as ameliorative. It intends to inoculate downtrodden groups from dangerous ideas and the hostile terrain of those with privilege. In reality, it limits civil discourse and stifles the engine of free societies: the capacity to discuss ideas and express one’s moral convictions with the inviolable liberty conferred to all citizens. This is why, most of all, this new manifestation of censorship necessitates a rebuttal.

James Snell has written a piece arguing the concept of trigger warnings is both wrong in principle and counter-productive in practice.

Robbie Travers has written a critique of the concept of cultural appropriation. Arguing it is myopic, dysfunctional and fundamentally reactionary.

Depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and Freedom of Religion

This is a cross post from Dead White Male by Allan Gilmour (@allanglmr) The original article is here.

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Following the attacks in Paris made on the Charlie Hebdo staff, there has been a clear need to restate and reaffirm the need and importance of freedom of speech: the freedom to question, parody, and puncture any ideology is an essential part of democracy and a healthy society. However, some questioned the wisdom of publishing (or even re-publishing) the images of Muhammad on the Charlie Hebdo covers (for example, Jonathan Freedland and Joseph Harker of the Guardian) because they thought it would cause needless offence to a very large number of Muslims – maybe even the “vast majority of Muslims around the world”. But to argue that the cartoons shouldn’t be re-published because they might offend a large number of people is to simply reinforce a religious taboo; it’s an argument to make blasphemy an acceptable restriction on free speech. This makes it more difficult for those who are not offended to express themselves as Maajid Nawaz found when he went onto Twitter to say that he didn’t find one of the Jesus and Mo cartoons offensive. He was expressing an opinion about his own faith and for this he received death threats. If it becomes normal in the media, and in public life in general to take blasphemy seriously, then this will in fact restrict the freedom of Muslims to express their faith as happened with Nawaz. For anyone who might think there is a need to be sensitive to the feelings of Muslims that are against depictions of Muhammad because of the general prohibition of it in Islam, and who do not want to offend a large number of these Muslims by reproducing the pictures in question, they should remember another principle; one that is inextricably linked to free speech – freedom of religion. Respecting this prohibition is insensitive to the diversity of opinion and practice in Islam. Not only that, it fosters the conditions in which an idea is immune from being challenged by anyone – especially other Muslims. A tradition of depicting the prophet in some Islamic art does exist. For some Muslims it is part of their worship. They should be allowed to create and admire these images without fear of censorship or fear of violence. A prohibition which silences critics, or anyone who wants to break any of these taboos for whatever reason, is only helping one group of Muslims force their interpretation on the rest of the Muslim population and everybody else. By taking the demands and actions of one group of Muslims seriously (and taking it as the general opinion of all Muslims) narrows the definition of Islam and makes it harder for others to express their thoughts on it and to practice it how they wish. It smothers diversity within the religion and any dissenting voices. The prohibition of the depiction of Muhammad is open to interpretation for those that want to follow it. Whether this interpretation is correct or not (and that goes for any rule that a religion sets out), it does not need to be followed by everybody. Even if it were undeniable that scripture prohibited depiction, that would not mean that people have to follow it. And even if the majority of Muslims find it offensive as is claimed, it still does not mean all Muslims or anyone else must observe it. With freedom of religion comes the right to interpret your religion as you want to and to practice it in the way you want to. This means you don’t have to follow all the rules that you don’t think are important, and nobody should be able to make you. Whether it is extremists, conservative Muslims, or anyone else who thinks that nobody should be depicting Muhammad, they are all damaging the diversity of practice in Islam and making it harder for other Muslims to express their faith in different ways. For Muslims who want to be able to discuss, develop, and express their faith without limits to doing so, there needs to be a commitment to freedom of religion and ultimately freedom of speech.

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Charlie Hebdo Reaction: Part 2, Know Your Enemy

By David Paxton

Part 1 is here.

If you’re on Facebook you might know the feeling. Somebody you know socially, somebody you like, generally intelligent and sound, has freshly planted on their Facebook page the latest effusion of Greenwald or Hasan, Francois-Cerrah or Self. This can be tough to take. As it floats there like a turd in a swimming pool the ethics of whether or not to clean it up in public can weigh heavy. You might well restrain yourself until you see the depressing number of ‘shares’ and ‘likes’ and you read the ghastly comments underneath. This is something up with which you will not put.

If the person actually knew how stupid or dishonest it was they surely wouldn’t have posted it, but can you put your finger on exactly why it is stupid beneath the facade of nuance and balance?

There are experts we can turn to for help. From left and right and centre:

The late, great Norman Geras, whom this blog exists in honour of, was a master at skewering such pseudo-intellectual fraudulence (see his wonderful 2005 piece about apologists. I shall refer to it below). Hitchens, obviously (his savage demolition of the ghastly Chris Hedges is always good for morale. Here’s a free speech lecture). Mark Steyn has turned such exposure of humbug into an absurdist comedy act (on relativism, on free speech). David Aaronovitch is one of the few in Britain’s media mainstream who refuses to pull any punches against his colleagues. (This week he has taken to strangling weasels). Finally, Maajid Nawaz needs to be mentioned because of the specific topic at hand. Brave, pious and self critical, his patient dealing with slipperiness in this clip shows why he has much to offer you.

The respect achieved by those listed above is well deserved but my single advantage over them today, I suspect, is the sheer weight of bullshit I’ve waded through over this last week (due to their death in some cases).  The cretins kept writing them and I kept reading them. Perfect sadomasochism. But I have done it so you don’t have to, and in doing so I have noted a few recurring themes and tactics and began to pick up a few tips on how to address them. I share them below.

What follows includes a fair amount of ad hominem argument. But by that I don’t mean insults, there’s some of those too, but I mean actual ad hominem. Because when sometimes brilliantly clever and well educated people stoop to such low arguments, ones they don’t universally apply, you must surely look for a personal but commonly shared fault as part of the cause. And in identifying this fault it aids our understanding.

Finally, a reminder and for perspective: this discussion surrounds the slaughter of satirists with assault rifles. Fucking cartoonists. In Western Europe. In 2015. It’s worth sitting back and mulling that over for a bit before trying to ingest the attempted arguments for the explicable ‘root causes’ of this.

Of course we also mustn’t forget that Jews were attacked for being Jews that day, it’s simply the bulk of subsequent discourse on this has been heavily weighted towards the former incident.

So then… swimming pools, floaters, nets.

Root causism: ‘I’m only trying to explain, why are you so against nuance?’ 

The ‘root causes’ types are the most common form of floater. We see plenty of examples from them. Jon Snow popped up with a great one.

Who is suggesting tanks? Although it is perhaps preferable to this. But Snow aside, there are countless different examples of root causism. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 etc.

They are usually kicked off with a preamble saying ‘I am not condoning merely explaining’, too often another form of ‘I am not racist but‘.

Example:

And of course, we must all repeat the rubric: nothing – nothing ever – could justify these cruel acts of mass murder. And no, the killers cannot call on history to justify their crimes.

But there’s an important context that somehow got left out of the story this week….

or:

My position is this: the murderers are fully responsible for what they did and should be treated with the full force of the law. Nothing justifies the killing of these people. But this is not the whole of this issue.

or:

Killing in response to insult, no matter how gross, must be unequivocally condemned. That is why what happened in Paris cannot be tolerated. But neither should we tolerate the kind of intolerance that provoked this violent reaction.

This time reformulated to avoid the ‘but’:

We urgently need to understand why this violence is happening and keeps recurring and to do so is neither a justification for any crime nor an apology of violence.

It is tricky to condemn because of course none of us are actually against nuance and are all for the greatest explanation possible.

Chomsky in this piece:

The reaction of horror and revulsion about the crime is justified, as is the search for deeper roots, as long as we keep some principles firmly in mind. The reaction should be completely independent of what thinks [sic] about this journal and what it produces.

This is true. There are important variables and competing factors we need to know more about. The marginalisation and alienation that makes the ideology attractive etc. It is important for counter-jihad organisations to understand this and to put the knowledge into practice. However, sometimes this is merely used to shift the blame.

None of these same writers followed up the Breivik slaughter in 2011 with articles explaining exactly why mass Muslim immigration to Europe might actually have driven him to it. They merely went about condemning anyone they didn’t like who Breivik happened to mention in his manifesto. This cartoon brilliantly exposes such inconsistency showing why the instant attempt at nuance is so out of place in any other circumstance. Thus demonstrating why the tactic is, in fact, rarely a search for nuance but is symptomatic of something else.

Try this example: When reporting on attacks and atrocities during the rise of the Nazis, each and every piece from an author is prefaced something like, “Obviously I condemn the incident, but we must understand that the greed of speculators before the 1929 Wall Street Crash led to despair in Germany.” Few doubt the importance of the Great Depression in the rise of the Nazis but surely at some point it’s fair to see such a preface as more than a search for nuance and explanation. Rather it would seem a source of exculpation.

There is something in the sense of it being reflexive, instant, automatic that should make you pause and question the actual motivation here. Assuming you have read thousands of articles on thousands of events, does this formulation not stand out?

Now the comparison with the Great Depression grants that there is some relationship to the event and is therefore suggesting merely the frequency and prominence is misplaced. But apart from my appeal to your reader’s spidey sense that something is up, there are other issues surrounding the concepts of proximate and ultimate causation which condemn these pieces. Namely, often the stuff following the ‘but’ is also broadly irrelevant to the actual incident in terms of moral blame. The Geras piece I mentioned in the introduction deals with this perfectly and I recommend reading all of it.

Trigger Warning: Nah, just kidding. Grow up.

Geras:

In circumstances he judges not too risky, Bob, an occasional but serial rapist, is drawn to women dressed in some particular way. One morning Elaine dresses in that particular way and she crosses Bob’s path in circumstances he judges not too risky. He rapes her. Elaine’s mode of dress is part of the causal chain which leads to her rape. But she is not at all to blame for being raped.

The fact that something someone else does contributes causally to a crime or atrocity, doesn’t show that they, as well as the direct agent(s), are morally responsible for that crime or atrocity, if what they have contributed causally is not itself wrong and doesn’t serve to justify it. Furthermore, even when what someone else has contributed causally to the occurrence of the criminal or atrocious act is wrong, this won’t necessarily show they bear any of the blame for it. If Mabel borrows Zack’s bicycle without permission and Zack, being embittered about this, burns down Mabel’s house, Mabel doesn’t share the blame for her house being burned down. Though she may have behaved wrongly and her doing so is part of the causal chain leading to the conflagration, neither her act nor the wrongness of it justifies Zack in burning down her house. So simply by invoking prior causes, or putative prior causes, you do not make the case go through – the case, I mean, that someone else than the actual perpetrator of the wrongdoing is to blame.

So why so heavy on instantly searching for ‘root causes’, especially in the case of Charlie Hebdo where the attackers clearly said they were avenging their Prophet and logically this seems so much more immediate than the wider issues such as poverty, police stop and searches or Abu Ghraib? Let alone taking it back to the Algerian War which ended in 1962! Why this reflexive need to equivocate in Muslim attacks but not all others?

From Western writers, part of it comes from the sense that their self-criticism can make them appear and feel sophisticated. Unfortunately for them it doesn’t when based on abject nonsense, then it looks like nothing so much as public displays of masochism. For extremists and fifth columnists like Asghar Bukhari I presume the reasoning is obvious. For the likes of Jon Snow I suspect it involves an inability to empathise with the killers. I don’t mean sympathise, Snow will do that with the best of them. I mean his old-school liberal mind simply cannot accept that religious extremism actually motivates such people. It must have a root cause elsewhere more explicable from his own experiences. The likes of Milne operate from a vicious strand of anti-Americanism due to his being an unreconstructed communist, if not Stalinist. But I think there is another source of reasoning in the minds of those on what I call the ‘New Left’. You know, the ‘Multi-Culti Left’, the ‘Laurie Penny Left’, what Caroline Fourest calls the ‘Stupid Left’. The crazies who simply won’t allow Muslim terrorists to be responsible for their own actions. They tend to be a ‘Type 1’ in my last piece. My explanation for their mindset goes something thus:

The three stages of stupidity

I suggest there is a three stage mental process undertaken by thinkers of the New Left. I think this process is prevalent in a large number of those being criticised here. I also think it will be found in those writing every second article on Comment is Free these days. Jones, Orr, Penny, Younge would all be candidates.

The three stages are:

1: Holding the urge to protect and support the underdog above all other motivating forces to the point of myopia. Support for the underdog is felt by most humans, thankfully, and should be. But it is so strong in some that it is followed unequivocally and other motivations are ignored.

2: With that as a motivating principle each problem is approached, subconsciously and consciously, by dividing all actors in a situation into the ‘oppressor’ and the ‘oppressed’. This is done along demographic lines, be them race or gender or sexuality or whatever. If you are part of that group you’re treated as the group. The view struggles with seeing individuals at all.

3: The thinker then falls for Bertrand Russell’s fallacy of ‘The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed‘. The weaker group in the binary situation is of superior virtue. No. Matter. What.

So: Unequivocal support of the underdog, dividing into oppressor/oppressed, assuming the superior virtue of the oppressed.

Muslims in the West are (normally) a racial minority and a religious one. In the world, Muslim nations are weaker than America and the West. So both times they are ‘the oppressed’ regardless of what incident is under discussion. This means for people following those initial three stages, terror attacks cause a problem because they don’t like terror but like the ‘oppressed’.  Firstly the individuals are ignored and are reduced to part of a demographic grouping. So rather than just blame three Muslims with Ak47s who made decisions, it becomes a situation of Muslim oppressed vs the Western oppressor and the actions are relativised and excused away with a shift of blame and responsibility. They have to be. Reflexively. Or else the cognitive dissonance is too much to bear.

Of course most don’t think it was ok to gundown cartoonists. But the actual gunmen cannot be to blame as individuals. The oppressor has to be. So you then get to see the articles that begin “Obviously I condemn this action but let me explain why it wasn’t their fault…”.

This is utterly standard and I’ve already supplied examples galore. And many people do it without knowing why. Therefore seeing these pieces, written instantly and with dubious proximate causal-reasoning, we see more at play than an intelligent search for nuance and the greatest understanding.

We are not fighting nuance here but fighting reflexive attempts to relativise away cognitive dissonance and maintain that three stage process.

Take this line from Gary Younge’s piece immediately following the attacks:

They are personally responsible for what they did. But we, as a society, are collectively responsible for the conditions that produced them.

By this logic we can say the same about anything. Everything is all everyone’s fault and therefore it is nobody’s fault. The fact is though the personal responsibility of the individuals is far more important than societal factors. Evidence this is true is that such similar actions are being carried out under very different societal conditions and that people under identical societal conditions choose not to carry them out.

So yes, there are other factors, but they don’t seem contingent. He writes as if they are balanced and equal, but they simply are not. Younge’s line is not an appeal for more nuance, despite his piece being titled ‘The Danger of Polarised Debate’. It is an attempt to ensure we cannot make a member of the ‘oppressed’ the guilty party here and the most that can be gotten away with is that it is our fault just as much as the gunman’s. So that is what is implied. The three stage mental process won’t allow anything different. The blame must be shifted and shared or their heads will explode. But alas, he doesn’t know this.

This helps explain why in their writing, if an ‘oppressed’ nation or peoples does something objectively awful, as a reflex to hold off the cognitive dissonance it is instantly explained away as an inevitable and inescapable reaction to one or other action of the oppressor. Of course fairly soon this becomes de facto racist in that various ethnicities are robbed of agency, choice and responsibility based solely on their ethnicity and its relative power ranking. Remember, individuals don’t count. Any of their work on Israel/Palestine demonstrates this instantly.

These stages require all sorts of mental wrangling to maintain. With some perverse outcomes.

When a person is in more than one group at the same time, a female Muslim for example, cognitive dissonance is pretty high. To solve it a readjustment occurs and the individual in question is assigned to one or other group. Usually the largest or whichever allocation allows the assumptions of the three stages to remain most strongly in place for the duration of that argument.

So let’s say there is an article in the Guardian about the oppression of women in the Muslim world. The Muslim woman becomes part of the oppressed minority of Muslims against the oppressor, which is the West, and her individual struggle as a woman is then subsumed. Despite solicitous studies in the field of intersectionality, you really are only part of one group at a time with this process.

Because the people speaking of feminist ideals become part of the West they have to be bad. For although feminists are on the oppressed side in a UK based topic, these ones are up against Muslim men, who are lumped in simply as Muslims, and therefore the feminists must conform to their larger identity, Westerners. Hence why we see committed feminist writers, plagued by this process, willingly abandon their sisters in a Muslim country under talk of cultural relativism and of different standards applying.

Shifting the blame via reducing the actors to expressions of group dynamics is just one method of apologia though.

Reflexive Smearing

“They didn’t deserve to die but they were racist…”. That’s the second most common formulation in evidence this last week. Again the examples are myriad and can be found in several of the pieces I have already linked to. The fact is, it simply isn’t true. They were a far-Left magazine who mocked anti-immigration and racist campaigners. This next point isn’t a slam dunk, but the fact that Stephane Charbonnier’s life partner was Jeannette Bougrab, of Algerian descent and a diversity overseer at the CSA, should at least give pause. And yet so many writers have been willing to reflexively smear the dead as racists. Possibly it could be understood, but not condoned, in the immediate aftermath where people unfamiliar with the magazine were quick to comment and had merely seen unexplained images. But fairly soon such sites as this or this were up and running to unpack the satire and so the excuse of total ignorance became even less valid. I speak worse French than Joey Barton and yet upon reading explanations and speaking to French friends I can clearly see the difference. That standard is not placing a great expectation on a commentator.

Myriam Francois-Cerrah is a writer and pundit on French political issues. She knows the difference and still was happy to smear the dead on T.V. (Nesrine Malik also calls their efforts “so racist” in that clip).

Hasan tries it on by suggesting:

crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?

If true this might be a concern. But it isn’t true. I think the characters tend to look the same depending on the cartoonist. Orthodox Jews get curly side burns, Mohammed gets a dish dash and Jesus gets a halo. But unless you do a real compare and contrast study I’m calling bullshit on this. A claim without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Still though, better safe than sorry:

Hebdo 1 Hebdo 2

Here is Mohammed with normal features.
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I don’t see a theme of racial caricatures here. Show me I’m wrong. More likely this line of attack is the sound of a barrel being scraped. It seeks to blame the victims, weaken movements of solidarity and enhance the never ending narrative of Muslim victimhood so cherished and promulgated by the likes of Ramadan, Hasan and Bukhari.

Yes some are fifth columnists and their interest in the smear is clear but some are simply unable to allow the blame to reside on the side of any identified victim group (the three Stages again).

Laurie Penny’s first contribution to this debate was, as far as I can tell, the following tweet:

I find this an extraordinary statement. Let us for the sake of argument agree that Charlie Hebdo’s efforts could be fairly reduced to racist trolling. Penny tweeted that the murders were bad but so is racist trolling. In one tweet and as a first comment. That is pure false relativism.

It is just about all she said on the matter. She could basically only bring herself to speak in order to show balance where none was required. She just crowbarred it in. Inappropriately and inelegantly.

But, Charlie Hebdo were not racist, they were deeply anti-racist. It is a smear.

Smearing the dead as racists is so far off the scale of bad, and done so reflexively and casually by people not considered stupid, that it has to be an indicator of underlying problems with the author and their approach. Cartoonists lie dead and Penny wastes no time declaring them racist in the same tweet as she condemns the violence. That’s fucking low. But with the three stages the ‘oppressed group’ cannot be the party in error and people will seemingly abandon all sense and all decency while relativising away their cognitive dissonance.

Imagine, you know you are on the hit lists of serious terrorist groups, for doing your job at a magazine working in the name of secularism, and you continue to do that job until you are murdered in cold blood. If that is not heroic I truly wonder what is. Penny’s notion of heroism might well be different from mine.

I also wonder, will Penny ever get to be face to face with Charb’s life partner and be able to explain to her exactly why her murdered loved one was an un-heroic racist troll? I hope not.

Damn right you’re not Charlie. Disgusting. Is there enough chlorine to clear up this one?

False comparisons and whataboutary

‘What if the cartoons were about X,Y,Z?’. This performance by Bukari on Sky News covers half the fallacious nonsense in this entire post. But this line stands out  (Murray’s face from 01:32 is just wonderful, as is his subsequent performance):

We wouldn’t publish black people… as zoo animals

That is not an equivalent of what Charlie Hebdo was doing. It is a false comparison. There is such a thing as anti-Muslim racism. But, Islam is not, per se, a race and mocking Mohammed is not the same as drawing a racial cartoon. Islam is an idea no matter how much it means to you, your physical ethnicity is not.

The second form of this same argument is comparing printing Mohammed to antisemitism. Glenn Greenwald, predictably, went to town with this idea. His lengthy contribution is a prime example of disingenuous output. Try also, this Joe Sacco cartoon in the Guardian.

Many have tried it. Here is Nabila Ramdani on This Week:

try and draw an antisemitic cartoon tomorrow

Another entirely false comparison. Mocking Islam is not the same as antisemitism. Why? Because anti-Judaism is not the same as antisemitism. They were not abusing all Muslims but the main character in their story, therefore the comparison is false. Charlie Hebdo mocked the god of the Old Testament, this should be enough to qualify as a fair comparison. They weren’t murdered for it.

Hasan in his piece:

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so…

There are plenty of jokes playing on 9-11 in the media, even people falling from the towers. Try this, it’s brilliantly funny. Or see the following picture:

9-11

Do I really need to explain the difference between mocking a religious figure and mocking the murder of 6 million people? Or 3000? When the close relatives of victims and survivors are still alive? Is he seriously making that comparison? Well clearly he’s making it but no way can he be considered serious.

A similar attempt to show double standards is made when referring to Muslim protests at soldier’s funeral processions. Do such people now need to have the difference explained between the taboo of upsetting grieving relatives and the taboo of depicting an historically significant person who died a millennium and a half ago? Again, a false comparison. And surely embarrassing by its making.

Mehdi’s argument, and those of others, is that it is just as offensive to the receiver. Mehdi is a man who loves his prophet more than his children so this may well be the case. But the level of offense claimed by an individual is entirely subjective. He might claim drawing a cartoon of an historical figure is as offensive as mocking the death of your family member, just like I may claim Mehdi’s perfectly trimmed facial hair offends me more than mocking every genocide that was ever undertaken.

A funeral isn’t a 1400 year dead man and a religion isn’t your mother.

To ignore the fundamental differences is stupid at best, slimy, opportunist and dishonest at worst. I’m not granting the benefit of the doubt here.

‘No absolute right to free speech’ and the Motte and Bailey

The ‘no absolute right’ line is a strawman. Only the craziest of libertarians come close to denying this. But it is also used as a Motte and Bailey argument.

Are you aware of a Motte and Bailey argument? If you are I am sorry for the egg sucking lesson, but I am new to the concept myself, have found it extremely useful and have started seeing them everywhere. This awareness has made me kick myself at not seeing earlier how so many people I disagreed with were getting away with cheating for so very long. A brief explanation is worthwhile as the tactic is used in more than one instance here:

A Motte and Bailey castle is a medieval system of defence in which a stone tower on a mound (the Motte) is surrounded by an area of pleasantly habitable land (the Bailey), which in turn is encompassed by some sort of a barrier, such as a ditch. Being dark and dank, the Motte is not a habitation of choice. The only reason for its existence is the desirability of the Bailey, which the combination of the Motte and ditch makes relatively easy to retain despite attack by marauders. When only lightly pressed, the ditch makes small numbers of attackers easy to defeat as they struggle across it: when heavily pressed the ditch is not defensible, and so neither is the Bailey. Rather, one retreats to the insalubrious but defensible, perhaps impregnable, Motte. Eventually the marauders give up, when one is well placed to reoccupy desirable land.

For my original purposes the desirable but only lightly defensible territory of the Motte and Bailey castle, that is to say, the Bailey, represents philosophical propositions with similar properties: desirable to their proponents but only lightly defensible. The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed.

Diagnosis of a philosophical doctrine as being a Motte and Bailey Doctrine is invariably fatal. Once made it is relatively obvious to those familiar with the doctrine that the doctrine’s survival required a systematic vacillation between exploiting the desired territory and retreating to the Motte when pressed. Clearly, the diagnosis is not confined to philosophical doctrines: others may suffer the same malady.

This describes perfectly the use of ‘no such thing as an absolute right to free speech’. In Mehdi Hasan’s HuffPo piece he says:

None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

‘There are limits to free speech’ is a rewording of the same point. It was used during Thursday night’s Question Time, yet again by Hasan.

Both are pretty hard to disagree with. Of course there are limits. This is therefore the Motte in this instance. Many have used that claim in their preambles and discussions this week. They then either directly say these cartoons should not have been published or try and trade off the assumption which they leave hanging after making the initial statement. Namely that you shouldn’t publish x or y. This latter area is their Bailey. That is the space they wish to inhabit in their piece. Don’t let them leave that assumption hanging. They are using this because they are trying to suggest Charlie Hebdo has brought this on themselves. It is apologia.
If you question them with things like ‘so you are saying they had no right to publish?’, they may say ‘no’, then try ‘are you suggesting satirists should self censor when it comes to religion?’ or ‘is a picture of Mohammed something outside of our rights of expression or beyond the ‘limits’?’ then they tend to retreat back to their Motte. The same goes for asking ‘what are the limits?’. If they don’t retreat and tell you their line is drawn before Charlie Hebdo, then fine, they are, despite their protestations elsewhere, calling for censorship or self-censorship. There is a social penalty to saying such things are beyond satire, but that is what they hint at without being willing to say. Make them say it. Let them endure the penalty.
Once the retreat has been made you may ask ‘then what is the relevance of your statement that there is no such thing as an absolute right to free speech?’. Again they don’t usually have an answer. Feel free to put the boot in and ask ‘so why did you choose to include it so prominently?’. If doing so on Twitter, be aware that this is the exact moment you get blocked.

‘With free speech comes responsibility’

Another classic and usually another Motte and Bailey. Will Self and many others have used this claim. From Self’s interview on Channel 4, ‘Should Satire only attack people in power‘:

My value is free speech, unquestionably, but I think we need to be aware that with free speech comes with responsibilities, any right comes with responsibilities

‘Unquestionably?’. That’s a nice ‘but‘ he has there. Now I agree rights come with responsibilities. They have to. But what are these responsibilities? I assumed it was ensuring you don’t try and repress the right of others to express themselves and that our responsibility is to ensure there is a free space in the public sphere for expressing ourselves without fear of violence. Perhaps it is to keep things fair and honest, to not employ demagogic language and engage in sophistry. Responsibilities the people examined here singularly fail to live up to.

Perhaps a responsibility of free speech is to ensure you don’t vacuum up all the intelligence documents you can and then fly them to Chinese and Russian controlled places. Something I have not heard Self or any of those mentioned here condemn.

You know what to do now: ‘What is that responsibility?’ is the question which must be asked. Followed by: ‘Why didn’t you put it in the article’? Make them spell it out.

From Hasan’s piece:

I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility

It is telling that he doesn’t chose to explain what that responsibility is. Few do. Once however, when forced, he did have a stab at it. This was when he was previously discussing Charlie Hebdo. He said:

…with rights come responsibilities and I’m saying in a society where we all have to rub along together, where we all come from different backgrounds you have a responsibility not to go out of your way to piss people off, to try and kick off a riot etc. etc. put the law to one side…

Remember, Mehdi loves Mohammed more than his own family, I understand this is emotive for him and that he might feel as far as he is concerned that offense = riot. But who thinks Charlie Hebdo was indeed trying to kick off a riot? I know they’re French but was that really the purpose of their satire? Was it merely to piss people off rather than target power or hypocrisy? Mehdi should be asked.

Either Mehdi is saying that Muslims are so basic they will inevitably riot (he isn’t), or he uses this tactic to condemn the offending of religious sensibility with a strawman. We know he would rather Mohammed wasn’t depicted in satire, in this example he got as far as saying he shouldn’t be, but he refuses to say he shouldn’t be because such subjects should be socially protected from satire. He is merely implying a protection. It’s clear this is what he is doing yet he has stated he isn’t doing it. This is shifty. Motte and Bailey. And in doing so he reduces Muslims to an ‘other’ who just cannot hold their temper. Shameful.

But he is adept and it is difficult to nail him down. Further on in that exchange Aaronovitch comes close in a lovely moment where Hasan is cornered and he attempts to sidestep a straight forward question by effectively saying he is unable to comment on British society because it is Christian and he isn’t. Desperate, laughable stuff. Though I wish he’d remember his inability to comment before he next chooses to accept a Question Time invitation.

Get them to fully defend the Bailey or beat them back into the Motte and proceed to burn it down

‘Shouting fire in a crowed theatre’

Speaking of burning things down, this cliche pops up often in free speech debates. Hasan brought it up some time ago, again in his debate at the L.S.E. vs Aaronovitch. There he attributed it to John Stuart Mill rather than Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It was used by Diane Abbott on This Week following the attacks. To be fair though, Abbott is not a floater, she has been generally solid on this issue.

The main comeback to this is also becoming a cliche and is dependent on it being misquoted (Holmes included the word ‘falsely’). I first heard it from Steyn and then from Hitchens, namely that you are obligated to shout fire in a crowded theatre if you happen to believe there to be a fire there worth shouting about. Charlie Hebdo saw fires up and down French society, from National Front racists, to clerical bullies and Islamofacists. And they shouted ‘fire’ loudly and humorously.

Even then, I don’t see how the grammar of this metaphor translates to general free speech situations. What exactly are the doorways where people will be crushed and trampled in this situation unless we are saying that Muslims seeing a cartoon are the same as people stampeding from the fear of death from fire.

Mill is often cited as the source of reasoning for the Holmes quote. Mill actually said:

An opinion that corn dealers are starvers of the poor, or that private property is robbery, ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn dealer, or when handed about among the same mob in the form of a placard

That’s the closest Mill gets to supporting such a view. And it is surely an incitement argument. But a French newsstand is not a mob outside the house. They are simply ‘circulating through the press’. So when you hear Holmes’ poor metaphor uttered in a free speech argument, especially this one, feel free to point out its facile uselessness.

‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’

This is an HL Mencken quote that has been doing the rounds. It seems Will Self pulled it into the debate in his Vice article. He wrote:

Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from HL Mencken’s definition of good journalism: it should “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted”. The trouble with a lot of so-called “satire” directed against religiously-motivated extremists is that it’s not clear who it’s afflicting, or who it’s comforting.

This was used again to me in a very telling Twitter exchange with his wife Deborah Orr. As often with Twitter the full flow of the exchange is difficult to follow due to multiple answers to single tweets but it begins here. Her argument in the exchange is all over the place. Anyway, the offending tweet:

Note that in Self’s quote Mencken is talking of ‘good journalism’ and Self is asking what is ‘truly satire’. So let us say it is bad satire, that is a taste judgement, or a value judgement. Either this is totally irrelevant to the free speech or solidarity argument and therefore shouldn’t be there, or it is yet again part of the refusal to lay the blame on those with the weapons and as such another surreptitious attempt at victim blaming. Like if their satire had been ‘good’ or ‘proper’ they would still be breathing.

This is all part of the ‘punching downward’ line. Which is not being used in a relevant way. But even if it were, I disagree with the premise:

Was Charlie Hebdo attacking all ‘Muslims’ or the religion itself? It is not the same thing. And attacking jihadists is not attacking ‘Muslims’ either, but merely Jihadist Muslims.
How often have you heard this week that they were offending 1.6 billion people? Well, if that is true then I think a religious figure important to 1.6 billion people is pretty powerful. It is punching upwards. How many people would come to violently avenge an insult to Stephane Charbonnier? None I am assuming. Is that not a measure of power? Be careful claiming a billion offended victims while trying ‘powerlessness’ in the same argument.

Islam is a system of power, like Christianity. To mock its tenets and its characters is punching upwards and it is satire. And mocking the tenets is not to mock Muslims en masse. Many racists are poor and alienated, was Charlie Hebdo punching downwards when it mocked Marine LePen or racist attitudes in general? No. So stop being silly.

We must not let the ‘punching downwards’ stand on factual grounds, they weren’t, or on taste grounds, it is irrelevant. The continued use of it is yet another form of victim blaming.

Side note: Telling us 1.6 billion Muslims are offended does no favours to those Muslims that aren’t. It will make those that believe it look upon all Muslims as irrational when they are not and will renforce the Us vs Them narrative. It doesn’t take a genius to work this out so surely those that advance that line for their own arguments are unserious about their stated desires of progress and cohesion?

Secular Religion/Fundamentalists

This is like ‘fundamentalist atheist’. The cheap attempt to make you just the same as those you oppose. So adherence to secularism is the equal of adherence to religious dogma.
Once again we turn to Will Self:

The whole notion seems to be that free speech is some kind of absolute right and that’s exactly the same as a religious point of view interestingly, it places human ethics outside of human society…

Self teaches ‘Modern Thought’ and unfortunately for our future that seems appropriate.

It’s another strawman because I know of no ‘absolutists’ beyond a barely heard bunch of crazies. But ok, if an absolutist exists, my claims in Part 1 of this piece mean I must be one of the closest to one. Is it like a religious point of view to me? No. I think the right of a human to freely express themselves, although a beautiful and luminescent idea, is founded on a utilitarian basis rather than a supernatural or dogmatic one. My support is not from ‘faith’.

I am however tempted to allow this to stand. Because then when people start saying ‘we should respect each other’s religions’, I’ll be able to reply ‘well my religion is unfettered free expression, so you must respect it you horrid blasphemer’. Of course my religion has no vengeful warriors, so you’ll be safe in your place of business if you happen to insult Paine or Voltaire.

For the sake of argument though let us grant Self and others the premise and call this belief in free speech or secularism a religion. My erztaz religion, in power, allows for maximum freedom of thought and expression, actual religions require the opposite. And Self’s implied middle way requires the state or/and supposed enlightened complex-thinkers such as he to adjudicate between groups and measure and judge offence. When compared thus his line of attack makes little headway. It’s not true and if true it loses. It does however obscure clear thinking behind clever sounding bollocks. Which Self does very well. I presume this is why this view is popular with many modern intellectuals. When faced with a simple moral standpoint that is difficult to live by and a complicated one that is easy, they will choose the latter all too often.

Violence and Orwellian word games

As a final note, be aware of the attempts to couch offensive language in terms of violence. This may be to compare an insult to a punch or to claim that an insult affects health.

But more slippery is the use of terms like ‘violently offensive’ or ‘safe space’.

This example comes from a ludicrous article by Abdal Hakim Murad:

To laugh at the Prophet, the repository of all that Muslims revere and find precious, to reduce him to the level of the scabrous and comedic, is something very different from “free speech” as usually understood. It is a violent act surely conscious of its capacity to cause distress, ratchet up prejudice and damage social cohesion.

When I hear ‘violent’ I think something along the lines of this:

using or involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something

And so does anyone else with a care for language and its meaning. The attempt to piggy back onto our rational fears of physical harm his wish to see beliefs protected is both dishonest and an insult to sentient beings everywhere.

Tariq Ramadan refuses to condemn stoning women yet is welcome to teach women at Oxford who seemingly require safe mental spaces from harmful ideas. ‘Safe space’ is cheating language as it pretends the desire to have an unchallenged mind is a ‘safety issue’. It isn’t. Sticks and Stones. Words will hurt you, but stones will fucking kill you. And all the safe spaces in the world won’t protect you from the words that really hurt you in life.

Violence means violence and the sly appropriation of well understood words to advance an agenda is Orwellian.

—————————

There are a lot of words above and I feel vulnerable to the ubiquitous ‘somebody is wrong on the internet’ cartoon (no fear, I won’t kill you over it). But my introductory reference to the Facebook scenario has a grain of seriousness to it. Unguarded but good people fall for these shysters and bullshitters. They are seduced by deceivers who peddle knowingly false arguments and fools who do so unknowingly, then they take their shaky conclusions with them to ballot boxes. This subject is much too serious to allow such underhand or stupid practice to go unexposed, let alone respected for reasons of being ‘an alternative voice’ or being on the side of an imagined oppressed. It should be countered wherever it is found. The stakes are high.

If you are one of those that smells a floater but isn’t entirely sure why, I hope some of the examples and counter arguments on here help you articulate why the turd is indeed a turd. I’d be thrilled to hear they did. Good luck fishing them out.

The latest edition of Charlie Hebdo included an editorial. The translation I took from Slate and have included excerpts here. They sum it up better than I ever could.

 Still, a question keeps gnawing at us: Are people finally going to banish the dirty words “secular fundamentalists” from their political and intellectual vocabulary? Are they going to stop inventing clever semantic convolutions to qualify assassins and their victims as somehow equivalent?

These last few years we’ve felt a little lonely in our attempt to push back, with the stroke of a pen, against the pure crap and pseudointellectual criticisms that have been thrown in our faces and in the faces of those who firmly defend secularism: Islamophobes, Christianophobes, provocateurs, irresponsible, throwing fuel on the fire, racists, had it coming. Yes, we condemn terrorism, but. Yes, sending cartoonists death threats isn’t good, but. Yes, burning a newspaper is bad, but. We heard it all, and our friends did too. We often tried to laugh about it, since that’s what we do best. But now we’d really like to laugh about something else.

We are going to hope that starting January 7, 2015, a firm defense of secularism will go without saying for everyone, that people will finally stop—whether because of posturing or electoral calculus or cowardice—legitimizing or even tolerating communalism and cultural relativism, which only open the door to one thing: religious totalitarianism. Yes, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a reality, yes, international geopolitics is a series of dirty tricks and maneuvers, yes, the social situation of “populations of Muslim origin” in France is profoundly unjust, yes, racism and discrimination must be fought relentlessly. Fortunately, there are several tools that can be used to try to resolve these serious problem, but they’re all useless without secularism. Not positive secularism, not inclusive secularism, not whatever-secularism, secularism period.

TL/DR:

There are apologists among us.

For Norm.

Charlie Hebdo Reaction: Part 1, Moral Weakness and the Case For Solidarity

by David Paxton

“Any action which is seen to abuse this spirit causes injury to the game itself.”

Preamble to the Laws of Cricket.

By the time I had got onto the internet following the Charlie Hebdo attack people had already begun to discuss how to react to those who murder for blasphemy, I quickly wrote a piece on it explaining why I thought it appropriate to reprint the offensive material and why it was unfortunately incumbent on all of us to call those in the media to account for not doing so. I think it has held up quite well. However, the weight of terrorist apologia, victim blaming, misplaced equivalence, intellectual laziness and moral weakness that has been ejaculated onto the web in the subsequent days suggests many people still cannot fathom the real message from this atrocity.

That message is this:

The maintenance of the full spectrum of free speech, except for those common law protections against harm, is an essential aspect of our society which all citizens have a duty to protect. This duty includes sharing the risks endured by those who may use their speech in ways you disapprove of and who express opinions you cannot countenance. The sharing of those risks includes media outlets reprinting offending material, both due to them being newsworthy by definition and because of the effect it will have in rendering attacks less effective. We need to arrive at the point where this position is the norm and any efforts that bring that to pass are required of us all.

How far from this we still are is seen by this Guardian piece addressing the latest cover.  In it Joseph Harker, Assistant Comment Editor at the paper says of Charlie Hebdo:

In depicting the prophet Muhammad it is deliberately offending the vast majority of Muslims around the world. And in caricaturing him holding a “Je suis Charlie” placard, they are adding insult to injury by claiming the prophet would support the values of the magazine, which for years has been widely criticised for targeting Muslims, in particular, under the cover of free speech.

Yes. That is right. He said they have ‘added insult to injury’. Those vile and cruel, mostly-dead bastards. How tasteless of them. How insensitive.

As it happens I think the latest cover is a masterpiece. It is perfectly judged. It shows they will not be cowed by theocratic nutcases, and as Padraig Reidy states in that same Guardian piece:

It is a challenge to those who in the past week, after throat-clearing on the horrendous murder of Charlie’s staff and their protectors, have attempted to switch the focus to the magazine’s supposed Islamophobia.

The very fact that the latest edition exists is remarkable and the fact that many media outlets have actually done the right thing and reprinted its cover is cause for optimism.

But because so many are still not grasping what’s at stake and that, unbelievably, in 2015 the arguments for supporting unfettered free expression still have to be made, this piece sets out from first principles the argument being advanced. This isn’t just an individual taste thing, it’s a wide and universal principle that we must show solidarity with the threatened.

Free speech and its importance:

A Starting Point

I don’t believe in this ‘absolute right of Free Speech’ learned apologists and appeasers keep informing us we do not have. Who does? It is a strawman.

America has it about right. We should have a negative right to freedom from restriction of expression and that traditional common law restrictions such as libel, forgery and incitement are accepted. I think Official Secrets protection is sensible and can accept some restrictions based on obscenity (e.g. child pornography).

The restrictions described above show clear cases of harm prevention and are based around the balancing of opposing rights. There is no right to not be offended and nor should there be. I therefore see no balance required between free speech and preventing offence.

I would add that I’m skeptical about some of the additional restrictions in modern Britain including our hate speech laws. Although supporting the motivation for having them I think the tendency for ‘mission creep’ in their application is real and liable to have detrimental effects. Especially those extending to religion. However it is perhaps not of immediate priority here.

With the above established the rest is a free for all as far as I am concerned. Yes people have a responsibility to be polite in their lives, manners are oil to the gears of life. But this is not a legal responsibility, if you want to be gratuitously offensive, you can. More than that, some people, French satirists for example, will see the generation of material that would be likely to cause offense vital for their cause and their attempts to progress society in their chosen direction. Nobody likes to be mocked or ridiculed and the ability to do so is a powerful weapon of speech. And must be protected. You may well prefer it when it ‘punches upwards’ or ‘afflicts the comfortable’, but that is a taste judgement and irrelevant here.

All this should be uncontroversial and fairly basic. However it is clear others do not agree. People talk of a ‘balance’ required, of ‘responsibility’ and even of ‘consequences’. All fine words on their own but if they contradict the state of affairs I have expressed above then I think them wrong. However, this is not an ‘agree to disagree’ moment. I refuse to ever reach that point on the broad strokes of this issue. Here is why:

Collective Responsibility

In contradiction to the rhetoric from activists of all stripes I think 21st Century Britain provides a relatively easy life compared to most of the world and all of our history.  It can therefore be understood why a person may think that the full spectrum of free speech available to them is a luxury they might do without. You’d be forgiven for thinking you have little need for the right to transgress, provoke or offend and that the loss of that freedom is a price worth paying for the mental comfort of those who may be offended. However, there are three clear problems with this view.

1: It is ahistoric

One of the key reasons our lives are better than most of those who have gone before us is that we have been able to use unpopular speech. Be it gay liberation movements fighting for equality, be it women fighting for suffrage, be it the struggle of rational thinkers against clerical supremacy, causes which have been of benefit to us have progressed through the ability and desire to transgress, provoke and offend.

2: You don’t know what the future holds

You may suggest you are cognisant of its previous worth but think those days of necessity are gone. We haven’t reached an end to history and so nobody knows when they will next have to use such speech which may shock or offend others. Comfort now does not mean comfort later.

3: It isn’t just your right

If you think you have little need for the full range of speech and collude in the trading of it for greater comfort, you aren’t just trading away your rights. You are trading away mine. You may be giving up the rights of somebody being oppressed in ways you are unaware of. This is not acceptable.

The third problem is what I want to concentrate on here and also is perhaps where this argument gets tricky.

When making the case for mass reprinting of offensive material I suggested that all people and not just journalists need to bear their share of the risk. I described us all as non-fighting combatants in the war against those who would murder for speech. This would include office cleaners, IT engineers and other staff. In a subsequent discussion I was asked ‘well what if the cleaning staff don’t believe in free speech’? My short answer was ‘well they don’t have any bloody choice’. I stand by it. They have a collective responsibility to protect free speech and I will endeavour to explain why.

Existential Threat. 

To suggest that free choice and free expression is so important that you have no choice about it seems self-contradictory. It is a paradox. I would compare it to the dilemma of when an anti-democratic party that would install a dictatorship is doing well in an election. In this instance there is a clear argument for the suspension of that party’s right to seek election as they would rob from future generations the right and ability to decide their own government.

The imposition of conscription, the suspension of habeas corpus, the curtailment of free speech and the appropriation of property are all things that were seen in the US or/and Britain during World War II. Such actions are extreme and we have to ensure such measures are always temporary and that the threat is real and warranting such action. This is mentioned to establish the principle that some form of compulsion to fulfill societally ascribed duties is an accepted norm when it is deemed necessary for the survival of the state or its peoples.

When not engaged in a general and all out war I believe the maintenance of the full rights to free speech earlier expressed are worthy of something comparable to this compulsion. Not from the state, with penalties, but socially, it should be a basic part of press ethics. To achieve and maintain this we have a duty to call people on not fulfilling their duties. There must be a societal norm and expectation to do so.  Because the prolonged absence of free speech rights is a recipe for such calamity as to be able to be deemed an existential threat to our way of life and eventually our lives. It may not be as an immediate threat, or as clear a threat. But it is a threat,

By way of example of such a threat, imagine a fascist and growing force that is seeking to have some of its ideological basis deemed beyond the bounds of normal expression and able to remain untouched by satire and ridicule. Surely there we can see something constituting an existential threat?

So where it may be a duty both morally and legally during a war to hand over property or provide your labour or fighting ability to the effort, I believe the same applies in peacetime to maintaining free speech and protecting all people’s rights to exercise it free from threat. I think this a primary and universal responsibility.

Injuring the Game

The best analogy I can muster to explain this primary and universal principle is from the game of cricket. The laws of cricket are biblical in length but there in paragraph one, page one, of the Preamble to the Laws of Cricket is the following:

Cricket is a game that owes much of its unique appeal to the fact that it should be played not only within its Laws but also within the Spirit of the Game.

Any action which is seen to abuse this spirit causes injury to the game itself.

This opening expresses the realisation that all players who wish to play the game first accept that the game itself is more important than their own ambitions within it. And that without that commitment to the condition of the game itself, the value of the results of their own ambitions is thus diminished. The good condition of the game therefore is the first responsibility and it is shared by all players on opposing sides.

In The Tolerant Society Professor Lee Bollinger states”

…the free speech principle involves a special act of carving out one area of social interaction for extraordinary self-restraint, the purpose of which is to develop and demonstrate a social capacity to control feelings evoked by a host of social encounters.

So as a society, we must first open the space for a free and rigorous exchange of ideas, we can then move on to bowling bouncers at opponents heads all day in pursuit of the win. But all share that primary responsibility first. A key part of that responsibility is to protect ALL speech. The game itself. Not just the parts that help your team win.

In Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky states:

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Stalin and Hitler, for example, were dictators in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

The use of this cricket analogy is dependent on free speech being vital. I have explained above why I consider it so. I will also add that it is the most important right. I have been looking for some time for a quote I remember hearing and have failed to find it. So the following sentence is a paraphrasing of a thinker whose name escapes me.

Take away all my rights but leave me with free speech and I will use it to regain the others.

The right to free speech is the first and foremost right. It is the very basis for freedom of religious practice, it is the weapon for gaining new rights and is essential for the protection of rights already won. And all people share an equal burden in maintaining it.

The case for solidarity (reprinting the offending material):

Here is a statement of principle:

Once art/writing/satire is threatened with violence and murder it becomes important beyond its content.

To threaten the production or dissemination of artifacts of free expression with violence and murder is an attack on all free speech. And therefore the approval of the content is not relevant. It is an attack on your most fundamental right even if you despise the speech in question.

I repeat: It doesn’t matter if you agree with the content or not. You are duty bound to protect it.

It seems that the only way so far suggested to counter such attacks is what I describe as ‘option 2’ in my last piece which reiterated what I said in an earlier one on Sony and The Interview. Namely the widespread dissemination of offensive material by all and sundry when threatened. I quote:

the moment people threatened and indeed proceeded to kill over them, any news organisation worth its name had an obligation to publish. Firstly because it is news, but secondly and I suggest more importantly, as an act of defiance to the threat, of solidarity with the threatened and to ensure that the most ugly of precedents is not set.

This proposed action, I suggest will have the following positive effects:

1: When in response to a threat, rather than an attack, it acts to dissipate the risk onto as many shoulders as possible and thus diminishing the benefits of an attack. In short, you can’t kill us all.

2: The Streisand Effect will render threats and attacks counter-productive.

3: When an established norm it will provide the comfort for voices to speak as they wish without fear. This is good for all society.

4: It makes it clear they don’t stand a chance in changing our society in the way they’d hope. It will reiterate that our fundamental rights will be protected no matter what and as a society we are intent on maintaining them. So the required change in behaviour is incumbent on those wishing to silence speech.

5: It works against the trend of infantilising those lumped in with the ‘offended’ group who are instantly presumed to have been victims of controversial thought.

I know of no other suggestion. ‘Option 2’ is all there is. However when we speak of solidarity it must include the reprinting. Not the farcical and fraudulent expression of solidarity like the New Statesmen attempted to get away with. They managed to print an editorial titled Solidarity With Charlie Hebdo, where they proceeded to reprint several of Charlie Hebdo’s more racy covers including the Bishop of Rome in drag dancing at Mardi Gras. They did however manage to miss out printing any of the cartoons that actually got them killed. They are not standing with Charlie as much as affecting a desirable stance that looks like standing with Charlie.

Most other organisations have also failed to stand with Charlie. They have avoided printing newsworthy items because of fear and/or a desire not to offend. This too is unacceptable.

‘Getting to option 2’

There are three types of people in media not printing in solidarity or for news purposes.

Type 1: The first is honest, they won’t print because of fear of offense. These may well be people who revel in offending in other circumstances but they have identified a victim group here so it is a line they cannot cross.

Type 2: The second is dishonest and says they won’t print due to fear of offence but actually it is fear of violence.

Type 3: The third is those that accept they should reprint but do not because of fear of violence.

The first is probably lost to the cause and should be constantly called out on their failure. In my next piece I will try and analyse who these people are and what should be done about them. The latter two are worth trying to get on board and in the right circumstances will do so.

The reaction to the Danish Cartoons Controversy in 2006 was poor. Very few organisations disseminated the cartoons and some that did were pursued in court. It was a moment lost and had an incredible chilling effect on speech on this subject. As evidenced by Mohammed’s depiction being censored in South Park episode ‘201’ in 2010 whereas it hadn’t been in the earlier episode ‘Super Best Friends’ in 2001.

Things almost seemed to get better after the 2010 South Park controversy when Molly Norris proposed ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’. Unfortunately when the going got tough, Molly got going and it appears she is still gone 4 years later. Things were bleak.

The sheer ridiculousness of the Maajid Nawaz retweeting controversy in the UK, culminating in this laughable segment on Newsnight, seemed to help shift opinions. It had tipped into farce. The surrounding debate eventually included Newsnight showing the depiction in question. This was progress.

As depressing as much of the reaction to the attacks has been I think there are signs we have got further towards the goal from where we were in 2006 or 2010. The BBC seems to have amended editorial guidelines, the discussion of the requirement to publish is louder and larger than before and Charlie Hebdo’s post-attack edition increased its print run from 60,000 to 3m. It sold out in minutes and an additional 2 million are being printed. The Streisand effect if you will. This is good. Better still is that the depth of the atrocity combined with the brilliance of the cover means that organisations really looked stupid not publishing it. So many now have.

I’m sure Britain’s major editors have each other’s phone numbers. I am sure they will have used them to discuss such things as Leveson. Has it really been beyond their wits to get together, do the right and proper thing and decide to publish as one? I suggest no. And it is time they did.

I think that the next time this issue arises we will hit the tipping point where the refusal to do this appears so egregious that people will be forced, by others and by their own conscience, to publish. And for the reasons outlined above, I hope this is the case. The chill will begin to thaw.

It seems strange to need another terror attack or threat to achieve one’s goal. But then if there is no further incident, there will be no further problem anyway, rendering this discussion irrelevant. Unfortunately, I know which option my money is on.

Note:

I have largely avoided including all the counter arguments and examples of egregious thinking that have been out there. This is entirely due to length and I will deal with them in Part 2. There I will address the nature and tactics of those arguing the various positions that differ from the one expressed here.

The very deep thoughts of Deborah Orr

Twitter is an astounding thing. Remembering back to when I first used it, we’d describe it in terms of a great leveller, able to break down barriers between the public and the previously unseen conversations of certain elites. It allowed students like me to gain insight and access to the worlds that really fascinated and alluded them: politics and the press.

Whilst this peak behind the curtain should have been an exciting insight in to the workings of the British media, it was in fact a monumentally depressing view into a culturally vapid, morally relative, boring community of slack-jawed fuckwittery with little or nothing to recommend it except for the extreme hard work of their editors and my own schadenfreude. This took some time to get used to, but I think it probably does society the world of good to see the all too human failings of those who would like to pronounce on how we should think, feel and act.

Anyway… back to the point. Deborah Orr is pronouncing on the good (or bad) taste of publishing the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. I’m not going to delve in to how ironically tasteless I find her pronouncements – given the people who drew them were murdered in cold blood for doing so a matter of mere days ago, I am sure you can all judge for yourselves. I do, however, find the idea that she is not in the least embarrassed by assuming this role (of deciding what is or isn’t suitable for public consumption based on her own distaste of the topic/image/idea), and she is therefore doing it in view of the public, utterly astounding.

Good God, we’re adults for crying out loud, are you going to come round my house and go through the bookshelves to remove the books that make you blush, or feel uncomfortable, or challenge you?

The truth is often unpleasant, life is nasty, brutish and short. Worthy journalism, worthy writing, is there to report on that truth, to help us to comprehend the world in which we live and to bring in to sharp focus the narrative and connection between events. We really are in a sorry state of affairs if distaste becomes the basis by which we embargo news stories. The images are context without them the story is anchorless. They are part of a long and complicated narrative that talks of the ageing and maturing of European revolutionary politics, globalisation, inter-cultural relationships, secularism, Islamophobia, Islamo-facism, intolerance and tolerance and more besides. This is the history and the context in which we live.

There are many reasons editors might not want to publish the images (the safety of their staff not being a small matter), but taste should never, ever be one of them. Deborah, avert your damned eyes if you don’t like it, but how dare you condescend to tell us, in the name of good taste, what truth should be kept from us.

Anon.