ISIS appears to have inspired
its first terrorist attack in the United States: in Garland, Texas. This item
may have slipped the attention of many people because as is so often the case
today, much of the reporting and commentary has got caught up on other, supplementary
issues.
The
supplementary issues are first, that the attack targeted a competition set up
to show images of what people thought Muhammad may have looked like. Then,
there is the identity of the people who organized the exhibition and spoke at
it.
There
will be a feeling, post-Garland, that if ISIS can strike in Texas, it can
strike anyplace. The entire developed world is therefore a potential site for
an attack from ISIS. Although no one will put his hands up and surrender,
neither will anyone be likely to draw attention to himself by saying or doing
anything that might displease such homicidal censors.
The
presence of strong security forces clearly helps to prevent attacks, but it is
worth remembering that ISIS will use the opportunity of such "failed"
attacks to come up with other ways of operating, which they will judge more
likely to succeed.
What
is most striking, however, is how silent many of the usual defenders of free
speech have been.
Undoubtedly this is partly to do with the idea, becoming ingrained, that if you draw Mohammed or publish such images, you have, in some way, got it coming to you. This is an appalling pass to have come to, but it is in just such way that censorship and self-censorship are allowed to embed themselves.
Very
few people say that they will not draw a historical figure because they are
scared. But attack by attack, the feeling is growing among the majority of the
media and others who have declined to publish such images, that they have
failed. So to hide that shame, they tell themselves there is something
provocative and even irresponsible in challenging people who would challenge
the freedom speech.
One
might still get the support of those who cherish free speech if one were
accidentally to publish a cartoon of Mohammed, but not if you did so
deliberately, and in full knowledge of the consequences. But of course, it is
precisely after facing the consequences of challenging these would-be censors
that it is most important to keep on challenging them, so that people with
Kalashnikov rifles do not make our customs and laws.
As
people come up with ever more elaborate ways to justify what they probably know
in their hearts to be contemptible, it becomes harder and harder for them to
change course.
Then
there is the other only-occasionally-spoken-about supplementary issue, which
may well be at the root of the difference between the assaults in Europe and
the response to the attempted Texas assault. The January massacre at the
satirical French magazine Charlie
Hebdo undoubtedly woke up a portion of the general public in the West
because the victims were cartoonists and editors at a "left-wing"
magazine. That is, Charlie
Hebdo stood for a type of
robust secular, anti-establishment type of French politics, which a portion of
the left worldwide could recognize as its own.
This
stands in contrast to the comparative lack of solidarity after threats to the
Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten,
in the wake of the 2005 Mohammed cartoons affair. To varying degrees, Jyllands-Posten was described as a
"conservative" paper. In this context, unsure whether
"conservative" meant anything from "establishment" all the
way to "racist," there was often suspected to be some dark, ulterior
motive for publishing cartoons of the founder of Islam
.
There
is, however, no escaping such smears. Plenty of people proved willing, in the
wake of the Paris attack, to smear the murdered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo as far-right-wing or racist.
The
organizers at the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), Pamela Geller and
Robert Spencer, are not left-wing journalists but conservative activists; and
because the Dutch politician Geert Wilders spoke at the opening of the
exhibition, that added a layer of complexity for people who like labeling
actions with political valences, rather than just seeing actions as apart from
them. It seems clear, however, from the pattern of condemnations on one side
and silence on the other, that a cartoonist may be worthy of defense if he is
associated with a left-wing organization, but not if he is associated with a
right-wing one.
Of
course, this idea goes to one of the false presumptions of our time: that
people on the political left are motivated by good intentions even when they do
bad things, while people on the political right are motivated by bad intentions
even when they do good things. So a cartoon promoted byCharlie Hebdo may be thought to be provocative in a
constructive way, whereas one promoted by AFDI can only be thought if as being
provocative in an unconstructive way. Whether people are willing to admit it or
not, this is one of the main problems that underlies the reaction to the Texas
attack.
Such
a distinction is, needless to say, a colossal mistake. When people prefer to
focus on the motives of the victims rather than on the motives of the
attackers, they will ignore the single most important matter: that an art
exhibition, or free speech, has been targeted. The rest is narcissism and
slow-learning.
It
does not matter if you are right wing or left wing. It does not matter if you
are American, Danish, Dutch, Belgian or French, or whether you are from Texas
or Copenhagen. These particularities may matter greatly and be endlessly
interesting to people in the countries in question. But they matter not a jot
to ISIS or their fellow-travellers. What these people are trying to do is to
enforce Islamic blasphemy laws across the entire world.
That
is all that matters. If we forget this or lose sight of it, not only will we
lose free speech, we will lose, period.
