21st May 2010, 11:32 PM
Fittisize Wrote:This particular case seems more about directly insulting Islam and being as vulgar and disrespectful as possible than upholding any ideal of freedom of speech, which here has only been used as an excuse to justify Islamophobia. People loooove to conflate their ass-backwards idea of "freedom of speech" with hatemongering as evidenced by any racist claiming the First Ammendment when they start talking about sand niggers and the like. The "Everybody Draw Muhammad Day" Facebook page no longer exists, by the way, and for good reason. You should have seen the horrible, hateful, ignorant things that people were posting on it. Why on Earth would somebody want to participate in such an event for any reason aside from deliberately antagonizing a large group of people who will, no doubt, be offended by it? Are you really that spot-on in your worldview? Do you really care about protecting your right to freedom of speech that much, or are you just looking for another way to denigrate Muslims? The Western approach to censorship and freedom of speech is by no means the standard that the rest of the world should follow. It is not appropiate to all peoples of all cultures, and represents only a relatively small proportion of how the world goes about its business in this regard anyways.
Ya know, Pakistan isn't representative of all of Islam. Actually, the totalitarian measures taken by its government may not even be representative of its people. It's a big country, sure, but there's plenty more of the Islamic world, spread out across virutally every single country in the entire world, from Indonesia to Morocco to the mosque on 71st street in my city. There's a billion Muslims out there, and they don't all share the same experiences and opinions.
I cannot possibly disagree more with most of what you say. First, one thing I definitely do agree with -- racist and hate-filled statements are wrong, troubling, and usually unhelpful (even if there is a good point behind it, as here there is, the racism just makes things worse and reflects badly on the people making the statements...). People saying that they hate all Muslims and such are wrong. Even in this thread and others here some of the images and such have bothered me.
But, freedom of speech means exactly that. America was founded with an extremely broad concept of freedom of speech, where words are not considered to be actions and only actions, or words directly causing actions ("shouting fire in a crowded theater"), are banned. Many other Western countries do not go as far as the US, often do not protect hate groups and such as long as they don't act violently, but on the matter I think that the US is in the right. Thoughts are not actions. People have the right to say what they think. It doesn't make them right or wrong, but they have the right to say it. This is a vitally important principle which is incredibly important, and if we give up on that we are surrendering one of our core values to forces of hatred, fear, and backwardsness.
Let me repeat that -- yes, the First Amendment DOES protect the speech of hate groups, including neo-Nazis. As long as they keep their actions to just words, the government cannot do anything about them, and must defend their right to hold public rallies, etc. This is absolutely right. Of course, it is also the right of people who oppose them to hold counter-rallies, which they often do, drawing far, far more people than the small groups hate group meetings do. Freedom of speech for all.
But if we give up on that, allow people who don't like what we say to have control over our speech, we give up not just on a key part of the Constitution, but on a central element of the Enlightenment that it came from. Because, if you look at Islam today, it has many similarities to Medieval Christianity. It goes even farther than the Medieval Christians did on many issues, to be sure, but it is far more like that than the Western world today. But, the West changed. The Reformation changed the world forever, and led over time to the Enlightenment. The old concept that thoughts and actions are the same (yes, there is a line of that thought in Catholic and some Protestant thought) was opposed by Enlightenment thinkers. Why should we allow people who in important ways oppose the philosophical bases of the modern Western world to dictate how we should act? That leads us down a very, very dangerous path, towards greater and greater conciliation towards things diametrically opposed to what we believe and what is right, that we should never do. It's perfectly okay to make pieces of art that insult Christianity, and it is done regularly. Christian leaders protest, but usually in ways that accept to some degree the freedom of speech rights of the person who made the artwork or what have you.
Because I'm sorry, but I am never going to support restricting women's rights for some, or revoking the First Amendment and banning all negative depictions of religious symbols for certain religions, or what have you, simply because some group of people disagrees with it. I do not entirely agree with Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory which says that the world civilizations can never agree or work together, as you definitely appear to be saying here. THey are different, and in some ways never get along, but that doesn't mean that they should stay hermetically sealed from eachother or something, and it doesn't mean that we should accept things like Iran hanging teenagers or the abysmal treatment of women in the Middle East. I know that that's their culture, but that doesn't mean that we should just ignore it and allow a horrible situation to continue unabated... because as you say, the Islamic world is huge and broad, and it is not uniform. Some parts are much better than others on many subjects. Pakistan itself is a very interesting study of contrasts, with both more Westernized elements and very traditional ones coexisting in the country. Remember that a woman, Beanzir Bhutto, did get elected President there (after her husband, who had been President, was assassinated). I'm sure these bans came out of the more conservative elements in the country.
On that note, I'm not saying that Western culture is the best in everything. It's not. Cultures are different, and should be. But working towards things like greater roles for women in society, or freedoms of the press, assembly, speech, religion, etc... those are things I think we can and should work for. (On the freedom of religion note, they don't have that either. Remember that in many Islamic nations, trying to convert a Muslim person to any other religion is a death penalty offense...)
People like Huntington or you would say "Just leave them alone and let them be as they want to"... but when there are so many people being oppressed within their own societies, that's very hard to do. Of course, the good news is that things ARE changing in most of the Islamic world. Traditionalists do not want to admit or support it, but things are changing -- what I am saying is not some pipe dream or thing that requires drastic measures. It's something which I really do believe is slowly happening, in some ways at least. Not in every field of course, but in some, and that is fantastic, when the starting point, in the Arab world in specific, really was so medieval...
How about I mention one more, final example. Should we simply say, "Iran, go ahead and keep executing gay teenagers simply because they are gay. It's your culture, that's fine with us, cultures are different." Or should we protest when they do such things, saying how wrong their actions are. Or should we protest, saying how horrible their actions are and how they will need to change if they ever want to join the modern world. I know which of those options I prefer.