A society that rejects
the notion of a heckler’s veto cannot accept the idea of a murderer’s veto
By BRET STEPHENS
By BRET STEPHENS
Since when did the phrase “she was asking for it” gain
respectability in the encyclopedia of American political correctness?
In 2011
Lara Logan was sexually assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, after which several
bloggers chimed in that the CBS correspondent somehow had it coming
to her because she’s blonde and pretty and the demonstrators were frenzied and
male. Respectable opinion, conservative and liberal alike, rose up as one to
denounce the appalling suggestion.
Fast
forward to the May 3 terrorist attack on the Curtis Culwell Center in Garland,
Texas, in which two jihadists attempted to shoot their way into a Muhammad cartoon
contest organized by Pamela
Geller and
her organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative. Since the attack,
Ms. Geller has been denounced from Fox News to Comedy Central as a provocation
artist who needlessly and knowingly put people’s lives in danger.
“This is
problematic to me, because I wonder whether this group that held this event
down there to basically disparage and make fun of the prophet Muhammad doesn’t
in some way cause these events,” commented Chris Matthews. “Well,
not the word ‘causing’—how about provoking, how about taunting, how about
daring?”
Taunting.
Daring. In other words, asking for it.
Ms. Geller’s outrage is that she disapproves of political
Islam in about the same way Bill Maher does,
except that her politics skew right while his go left. Therefore she’s a
vicious hatemonger whereas he’s an amusing freethinker, if sometimes a bit
outré. Ms. Geller also seems to think that the appropriate response to violent
Islamist histrionics is abrasive public derision, a view shared by the late
editors of Charlie Hebdo. But so far not many people are je suis-ing Pam
Geller,apparently because mocking Muhammad is acceptable only if you’re also
mocking Jesus, Moses and Buddha.
The
higher criticism of Ms. Geller is that, while her constitutional rights are not
in question, her judgment and wisdom are. I happen to think that Ms. Geller’s
substantive contribution to the great foreign-policy debates of our time is
roughly equivalent to Pat Benatar’s contribution to the Western musical canon,
but that’s beside the point. Every healthy society needs gadflies, who
contribute more with their sting than with their buzz. Ms. Geller is one of
those gadflies.
In
particular, Ms. Geller is hammering home the point, whether wittingly or not,
that the free speech most worth defending is the speech we agree with least.
That’s especially important when the enemies of free speech—in this case,
Muslim fanatics—are invoking the pretext of moral injury to inflict bodily harm.
A society that rejects the notion of a heckler’s veto cannot accept the idea of
a murderer’s veto simply because the murderer is prepared to go to greater
extremes to silence his opponents.
All the
more so since the Islamist objection to depictions of the prophet—I say
Islamist because there is a rich history of
Muslim depictions of Muhammad—is far from the only Islamist objection to
Western ways. Sayyid Qutb, spiritual godfather of the jihadists who attacked
Ms. Geller’s event, spent the better part of 1949 in Greeley, Colo., and was
scandalized by football, jazz and American womanhood, among other perversities.
Should the polite consensus of American opinion concede the legitimacy of the
complaint about cartoons, another complaint will follow.
What will
it be? Daytime eating by non-Muslims in certain neighborhoods during Ramadan?
Criticism of Islam in the form of writing rather than images? Bullies know that
the key to dominion always lies in the first conciliating act of submission.
Ms.
Geller knows this too, which was the very point of her conference. As for the
argument that she put lives at risk by holding her conference, the same point
might be made against the management of Condé Nast, now that they’ve moved
their publishing empire to the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
I’ve also
heard it argued that respectable publications would never print the kinds of
cartoons showcased at Ms. Geller’s conference. Maybe so, but hers is a crusade
for freedom, not respectability. And as far as I know, she never asked to be
published. She paid for her own microphone.
We live
in an era where people like the idea of rights, so long as there is no price to
their practice. We want to speak truth to power—so long as “truth” is some
shopworn cliché and “power” comes in the form of an institution that will never
harm you. Perhaps it was always so. But from time to time we need people to
remind us that free speech is not some shibboleth to be piously invoked, but a
right that needs to be exercised if it is to survive as a right.
Pam
Geller may not be the most erudite scholar of the Middle East, or the most
couth defender of the First Amendment. Then again, she’s defending it, at considerable
personal risk. Can Chris Matthews make the same claim?