Free speech and the “clash of civilizations”

Three hurtful words, scrawled in black circles under the eyes of a ballplayer named Yunel Escobar:Tu ere[s] maricn. The message, conveyed in the eyeblack of the Toronto Blue Jays shortstop during a recent game, means, Youre a faggot. Thats hate language, and reaction was swift and stern. Major league baseball launched an investigation, the Blue Jays suspended Escobar for three games and enrolled him in sensitivity training, and he gave the obligatory apology in front of the microphones. Few if anyone publicly complained that, hurtful or not, homophobic or not, Escobars free speech rights trumped the concerns of others wounded by his words. No one said Escobar should be able to continue displaying the slur.

Given the reaction of the offended community, Escobars punishment was absolutely justifiable and necessary to maintain order in society,wrote Stacie Brownon PolicyMic. In other words, the community came together and shut Escobar up, due to a collective sense of mutual respect for the rights of others not to be hurt by hateful speech. Society has forged standards of respect and unacceptability about racial, ethnic, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs. Rightly or wrongly, the message is: Use certain hateful words in public, and youll pay the price. So why is there a different set of values at work when it comes to the hurt caused Muslims by hateful, Islamophobic characterizations of the Prophet Mohammed, or denigrations of Islam?

The Innocence of Muslims is only the latest attack on the prophet designed to provoke and therefore reinforce the image of Muslims as the Other, unworthy of the support and empathy of civilized peoples. The obvious, outward motive of such attempts is to show Muslims as irrational, violent, intolerant and barbaric, all of which are attributes profoundly inscribed into the racist anti-Muslim discourse in the West,writes the Egyptian journalist Hani Shukrallah, editor of Al Ahram Online.

But whether the provocation is the Innocence trailer, which depicts Mohammed as a pedophile and murderous thug; Danish cartoons, including one depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban; a Florida Quran-burning; or images of naked women with verses of the Quran scrawled across their bodies, in a film whose director liked to call Muslims goat-fuckers, the defense centers on free speech.

Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views, even views that we profoundly disagree with, President Obama pointed out at the United Nations last week, in the continuing wake of the Innocence furor. We do not do so because we support hateful speech, but because our founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views and practice their own faith may be threatened.

Instinctively, as a journalist, Ive always been close to a free-speech absolutist. After all, if we start banning things, where do we draw the line?

But there are two problems with blanket free-speech protections in these cases: One, such universal protections dont exist in the first place. Laws on the books already prohibit certain hateful and provocative speech. In Germany, its against the law to deny the Holocaust. Here in the States, try advocating assassination, running an explosives seminar, defending the 9/11 attacks, or even making a charitable donation to the wrong group in the wrong conflict zone, and see how far you get. Some of these restrictions emanate from the USA Patriot Act, but others have been in place for decades. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court in 1919, argued that the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. As Sarah Chayes points out in an L.A. Times Op-Edtitled Free Speech or Incitement?, The Innocence of Muslims was provocative by design, and therefore may fit U.S. case law that prohibits specifically advocating violence. She quotes Anthony Lewis, former New York Times columnist and eloquent free speech champion: If the result was violence, and violence was intended, then it meets the standard for a criminal act.

The second problem in the blanket free speech defense is its unequal application to Muslims and Arabs. I come from a land, from a faraway place, where the caravan camels roam, went the Disney film Alladins opening song, where they cut off your ear if they dont like your face. Its barbaric, but hey, its home. Is there any other group in America for whom this kind of slur would not be roundly condemned, its offenders forced to apologize before being sent into the corner like Yunel Escobar?

There is little in the public conversation that seeks to understand and explain the hurt caused to Muslims by these slurs. Tomock, todenigrate, tomake funof, somebody whos deep [in] the hearts of the Muslims? Really? asked Sheikh Hamza Yusuf at a packedforumatZaytuna College, a new Muslim college in Berkeley, Calif., in the aftermath of the Innocence furor. (I was the forums moderator.) Yusuf argued that religious denigration should be seen in the same light as racial slurs, where there are consequences. You will lose your job! We dont accept racial denigration anymore. I think religious denigration has to be seen as identity.

Islamophobia, and the accompanying hating on Arabs, helps provide cover for exceptional denigration. At the Zaytuna forum, Hatem Bazian, a co-founder of the college, described an Islamophobic production industry that is dedicated to demeaning, to speaking ill of Muslims and attempting to silence Muslims from civil discourse. This othering simply does not spur the same kind of outrage as slurs on blacks, gays, Jews, Asians or Latinos. In Hollywood especially, from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Dont Mess With the Zohan, Arabs and Muslims are the last fair game for attacks with impunity. Jack Shaheen, director of Reel Bad Arabs, cites a dangerously consistent pattern of hateful Arab stereotypes. All aspects of our culture project the Arab as villain. That is a given. The attacks on Arabs and Muslims come with free speech arguments that often dont apply for other groups.

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Free speech and the “clash of civilizations”