In a perceptive piece today in The New York Times, David D. Kirkpatrick describes the violent protests in the Middle East as something very different than the cliched language we have been getting from many on the right (and some on the left). The issue, he says, comes down to the way we describe freedom:
When the protests against an American-made online video mocking the Prophet Muhammad exploded in about 20 countries, the source of the rage was more than just religious sensitivity, political demagogy or resentment of Washington, protesters and their sympathizers here said. It was also a demand that many of them described with the word “freedom,” although in a context very different from the term’s use in the individualistic West: the right of a community, whether Muslim, Christian or Jewish, to be free from grave insult to its identity and values.
The argument is not a novel one. It is the central tension in a free society — how to define freedom and whether the right of free speech and expression trumps a person or community’s right to be free from insult or injury.
The protests engulfing the Middle East are less about the silly little film produced by a small band of bigots than they are about a larger sense of victimization. They come after a multi-decade assault by the American government on the Muslim world, one that started before 2001. Without being an apologist — violence, especially at the level perpetrated by the terrorists on 9/11, cannot be justified — we have to acknowledge that we have been at war with the Muslim world for decades and that this has not exactly won us a lot of friends in the Middle East.
The anti-Muslim attitude only got worse after 9/11 and is not just the province of crazy extremists like the Rev. Terry Jones. It has become a regular part of our discourse, mouthed by even the most respectable members of the political and chattering classes.
Consider Joe Scarborough, MSNBC morning host and a former member of Congress. His rant this morning is a classic of the culture-clash argument, one that conflates a host of grievances, real and imagined in the Muslim world, into an all-encompassing ideology of hate for the west:
“You know why they hate us?” he said. “They hate us because of their religion, they hate us because of their culture, and they hate us because of peer pressure. And you talk to any intelligence person, they will tell you that’s the same thing, and all those people who think we’re going to go over there and change them are just naive.”
Scarborough said that there had been “unrestrained savagery” throughout the Middle East. “One intelligence person told me, if you scratch the surface, and if you gave every street vendor, from street vendor to prime minister in that region a chance to throw a rock at the U.S. embassy, they would,” he continued.
Scarborough then went through many policies that are deeply unpopular throughout the Muslim world, saying that none of them could have played a part in the protests.
“They hate us because of waterboarding? No they don’t,” he said. “They hate us because they hate us. They hate us because of Obama’s drone attacks? No they don’t. They hate us because they hate us.”
This kind of argument gets us nowhere. It ignores the real issues — our consistent and continued embrace of some of the worst dictators, when it’s convenient; our focus on oil and stability to the exclusion of other issues — and fails to address the actual cultural differences that Kirkpatrick’s quotation underscores.
Just as significantly, it does nothing to make these newly freed people understand the value of the American First Amendment. If the right to speak both verbally and symbolically is going to gain a toehold elsewhere in the world, we need to make it clear why it stands as our most cherished political value — and we need to stop with the hypocritical defenses we tend to make. Democrats have a bad habit of defending speech only when it is convenient to their electoral prospects (Glenn Greenwald offers an excellent summary of Obama’s failures regarding the current crisis here). That has allowed conservatives stand in as defenders. But the people now defending the right of the pastor in Florida to put Muhammad on trial or to allow for the production of a film like the one that ignited these latest protests, are also the first people to push for bans at home on speech that they abhor and to cheer when people they dislike are arrested and charged purely for what they say.
As Greenwald says, those of us who “ignore or even cheer for the suppression or punishment of views they dislike, while loudly decrying it when it comes to the views they share, are not believers in free speech.”
They are just rank manipulators who exploit free speech values in an attempt to ensure that only their views can be heard while the views they despise are suppressed. This, unfortunately, is the clear history of the American right, now marching so flamboyantly behind the free speech banner in order to protect hateful anti-Islam speech.
It is also the history of many on the left (I am talking about so-called liberal mayors who have wear their crackdowns on the Occupy protests as a badge of honor).
We need to remember that protest is a legitimate response to an affront — protected by the First Amendment here and the most effective tool historically to make change. The protests in the Middle East come from that tradition. Advocates of free speech need to stand up for the makers of this absurd film and for the protesters, while condemning the violence.
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