At Atlas Shrugs I discuss the media's strange eagerness to endorse restrictions on the freedom of speech:
As the Muhammad movie riots continue to roil the world, prominent Muslim leaders in the U.S. and elsewhere are calling for restrictions on the freedom of speech, including the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, and the Muslim Brotherhood – and in the U.S., Sheikh Husham al-Husainy of the Karbalaa Islamic Education Center in Dearborn, Michigan and Imam Mohammad Qatanani of the Islamic Center of Passaic County, New Jersey. Given Sharia prohibitions on free speech, that is to be expected. What is more surprising – or should be more surprising, if the free press were doing its job -- is the alacrity with which the mainstream media has echoed these calls for self-censorship and submission to Islamic blasphemy laws.
In the wake of the worldwide Muhammad movie riots, the Los Angeles Times, for example, published its second op-ed in four weeks calling for restrictions on the freedom of speech. To be sure, the second piece, by Sarah Chayes of the Carnegie Endowment, was far more sophisticated and well reasoned than the crude call for censorship of the first, which was written by the thuggish Nathan Lean. Where Lean had ham-fistedly smeared and demonized those whose speech he hates and then called for them to be silenced, First Amendment be damned, Chayes argued on the basis of a fine distinction that already exists within American free speech law: “U.S. law makes a distinction between speech that is simply offensive and speech that is deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk.”
Indeed, but as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, the legal distinction to which Chayes was referring was formulated in response to the Ku Klux Klan’s advocacy of violence, and thus did not apply to the Muhammad movie filmmakers, who called for no violence from anyone. The Klan, said the WSJ, “advocated (but did not incite) violence on the part of their own supporters in order to promote their cause of racial supremacy. By contrast, the filmmakers provoked a violent reaction from the other side. To prosecute them would be analogous to punishing civil rights activists for inciting white supremacists to commit violent or lawless acts.”
A point well taken. But the larger question is, why is the Los Angeles Times coming down on the side of restrictions on the freedom of speech in the first place? Are they not aware that such restrictions, if implemented, can and probably will be used against them? While the Los Angeles Times editors are no doubt serene in their certainty that they will never print anything that will insult Islam or Muslims, there could all too easily come a time when a governing authority deems something they have published to be “hateful” or even “deliberately tailored to put lives and property at immediate risk,” and – if free speech by then has been restricted – that will be the end of the Times as an outpost of the free press.
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