Why terrorists will never win
"Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself."
--Salman Rushdie, Indian-born British novelist and essayist, Interview in The Guardian, November 8, 1990
Nuf said.
--Salman Rushdie, Indian-born British novelist and essayist, Interview in The Guardian, November 8, 1990
Nuf said.
Labels: Journal
5 Comments:
what about the ever encroaching limits on our freedoms due to terrorism? and the fear that they instill which limits our freedoms on a personal level - on a daily basis? if their goal was to terrorize and limit our ability to do what we want when we want to - they succeeded. ~stanzi
From The Intellectual Activist.
The central issue of the "cartoon jihad"—the Muslim riots and death threats against a Danish newspaper that printed 12 cartoons depicting Mohammed—is obvious. The issue is freedom of speech: whether our freedom to think, write, and draw is to be subjugated to the "religious sensitivities" of anyone who threatens us with force.
That is why it is necessary for every newspaper and magazine to re-publish those cartoons, as I will do in the next print issue of The Intellectual Activist.
Cheers Mark Hubbard
Stanzi? The only Stanzi I know is a cat that lives in my house…
Either our cat has developed intellectual and internet skills well beyond walking across the keyboard at feeding time, or her mommy is helping do her homework!
In any case, if we feel limited in our freedoms, it is mostly our own fault because we allow our government (of "We, the people") to do so. Free speech should be everyone's duty, a pro-active right. Right?
Mark,
I can understand why some newspapers didn't want to casually or overtly offend religious sensibilities in the beginning, when this first came up--but now that people have been killed by extremists, the cartoons are historical fair game for every freedom-loving newspaper in the world.
In the long run, liberty always trumps religio-fascism in the free marketplace of ideas.
I think the terrorists could very well win. So many people are so damned afraid of offending anyone that they go along with censorship. Even the Dutch paper that printed the Muhammad cartoons is refraining from printing the Iranian holocaust cartoons.
I found four of the Iranian holocaust cartoons on The Israeli News Service, but the focus of their article was to call for a SEO (search engine optimizer) scheme to keep people from finding the Iranian cartoons.
I recently posted on my blog an opinion piece by Edward Wasserman. He refers to a 1985 case in which an Austrian film was banned because of its anti-Christian message. The European court of human rights upheld the banning.
There is plenty of censorship in America as well, usually in the guise of political correctness. When I was in college, the black student union was successful in stopping the film society from showing Barbet Schroeder's documentary on Idi Amin, because it was critical of a black person.
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