Daily Archives: October 1, 2012

Pakistanis protest this week in Karachi against an anti-Islam video made in the United States.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A former CNN producer/correspondent, she is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television." Follow her on Twitter: @FridaGColumns.

(CNN) -- A new battle has erupted on the global stage over the future of free speech. Its epicenter moved to the U.N. General Assembly, where world leaders expounded on the great issues of the day.

The annual U.N. gathering came just days after a chain reaction of ferocious protests in Muslim countries against a video on YouTube insulting Islam. Reaction to the video led to the deaths, at last count, of more than 50 people, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

So, the hateful video and the mass violence became an inescapable topic at the United Nations. And yet there was intense disagreement about what exactly was troubling about the events of the last few weeks and what action they demand.

In the view of some Arab and Muslim leaders, the time has come to draft new international rules limiting free expression for the sake of preventing insults to religions. The head of the Arab League, Nabil Elaraby, called for "criminaliz(ing) acts that insult or cause offense to religions."

Frida Ghitis

This move to impose anti-blasphemy laws should come as a call to action for democracy advocates everywhere: Freedom of speech, a most fundamental of human rights, a cornerstone of democracy, has come under international attack.

Certainly, non-Muslims living in some of those countries have had nightmarish experiences with them as the bans are used to target minorities and government critics. Among political leaders, however, the idea appears popular.

Follow this link:
War against free speech?

Maybe we should understand what people in other countries think before we tell them they are wrong.

A Muslim man holds a sign in front of police during a protest against The Innocence of Muslims in Athens on Sept. 23. (AP)

"Our Constitution protects the right to practice free speech," President Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. "Like me, the majority of Americans are Christian, and yet we do not ban blasphemy against our most sacred beliefs."

This defense was too measured for some. My Atlantic colleague Jeffrey Goldberg argues that "[b]lasphemy is an indispensable human right . . . the essence of free speech." Obama could have explained that to the world, "but he didn't."

I'm sure others found it too robust. Stanley Fish (a beloved former prof) recently explained that Arab rioters -- indeed, one could read his essay as saying, all Arabs -- reject liberal values and regard any criticism of Islam "as a blow that is properly met by blows in return."

Americans seem curiously unaware that, in many countries, thoughtful, modern, secular-minded people don't reject free speech -- they reject the claim that it protects The Innocence of Muslims. Under the most advanced legal norms in their countries, free speech doesn't include the right to incite hatred against racial or religious groups.

American society has made choices about which kinds of speech to permit and which to forbid. Since the mid-1960s, we have protected most racial and religious hate speech, even while we reject threats against individuals, incitement to immediate violence, and "fighting words." Most of those choices, I think, are good ones. Attempts to silence hate speech may begin with good motives; but, over time, they tend to silence discussion, not to foster dialogue.

But that American view isn't the "essence" of free speech. Much of the advanced, democratic world questions it, not from ignorance but from painful experience.

Human rights as international law came into existence after World War II. The field was born in a determination that fascism and Nazism would never recur. Regimes like Hitler's maintained power through censorship, but they came to power because as political movements they observed no boundaries on decent discourse. They used mass communications to dehumanize their enemies -- Jews, socialists, non-"Aryans." By mainstreaming hate speech, they undermined and destroyed democratic governments, then justified official discrimination and finally genocide.

A mature regime of international human rights, many observers believed, would take both these dangers into account. Unchecked incitement to war and hatred might be every bit as dangerous as official censorship and repression. The international human-rights norms they forged reflect both cautions.

View post:
'Free Speech' and the 1st Amendment Aren't Always the Same Thing

In defending freedom of speech at the UN, President Obama addressed a variety of audiences, especially the worlds Muslims angry over an offensive video, but he also didnt want to rile up his political opponents at home. That kept some of the key defenses of free speech off the table, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

By Paul R. Pillar

It was inevitable that President Barack Obama would devote a significant part of his address to the United Nations General Assembly to the subject of freedom of expression. The repercussions of the anti-Islam video that sparked violence in several Muslim-majority countries are too recent and too substantial not to have done so.

The President began and ended his speech referring to Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador who died in some of that violence. Mr. Obama had to explain why the United States could not have somehow just banned the offensive video. And of course he would have been criticized by his domestic political opponents if he had not delivered a vigorous defense of free speech.

President Barack Obama addresses the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

What the President said on the topic in his U.N. speech was appropriate for the forum, the time and the circumstances. The address deserves the good reviews it received.

The President noted that modern mass communications make obsolete many notions of controlling the flow of information. He argued that free speech is necessary for a democracy to function well. And he observed that efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.

All quite valid, although this defense of free speech was still rather narrow. The President discussed the subject in large part in terms of religion. He said it is not repression but rather more speech that is needed to rally against bigotry and blasphemy. Use of that last term was unfortunate.

Although bigotry and blasphemy are both negative concepts that imply contempt for someone elses community, and although sometimes both are exhibited by the same warped minds, they really are different things.

Some of the most pronounced bigotry is exhibited by those who profess to be most outraged by blasphemy. The term blasphemy recalls the intolerance codified in blasphemy laws and the genuine outrage of how some of those laws are implemented.

Read more:
Obama Carefully Defends Free Speech

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) In U.S.-funded ads running on Pakistani TV, subtitled clips show President Barack Obama extolling America's traditions of religious freedom. For many watching, though, the message misses the mark in efforts to calm the Islamic outrage over a film denigrating the Prophet Muhammad.

America's free speech laws and values of openness are not in question, but rather there is confusion and anger over how they are applied.

A powerful theme binding the protests from Indonesia to Africa is the perception that the U.S. codes of free speech are somehow weighted against Islam permitting the Internet video that insults the faith but placing clear limits on hot button issues such as hate speech, workplace discrimination and even what is acceptable on prime-time network TV.

Beyond the rage, bloodshed and death threats churning now for two weeks is a quandary for American policymakers that will linger long after the latest mayhem fades: How to explain the U.S. embrace of free expression to an Islamic world that increasingly sees only double standards?

Although there are many nuances including strict U.S. laws when hate speech crossed the line into threats or intimidation they are mostly lost in the current outrage that included a peaceful march in Nigeria on Monday and Iran threatening to boycott the 2013 Academy Awards after the country's first Oscar-winning film this year.

With each protest, many clerics and Islamic hard-liners hammer home the narrow view that America is more concerned with political correctness or safeguarding children from sexual content than the religious sensibilities of Muslims.

In Gaza, preacher Sheik Hisham Akram said tolerance is the goal, but the "red line" is crossed with "anyone who insults our religion." Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now in New York for the U.N.'s annual General Assembly denounced last week the "deception" of U.S. laws protecting rights while allowing the clip from the film "Innocence of Muslims," which portrays Muhammad as a womanizer, religious fraud and child molester.

"In some extent, it's not an issue of condemning America's freedom of speech. It's become an issue, in the eyes of many Muslims, over where the lines are and why they are not protecting the feelings of Muslims," said John Voll, associate director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University in Washington.

It also turns the $70,000 U.S. ad initiative in Pakistan one of the hotbeds of the protests into a major challenge to gain any ground. Besides Obama, the spots include Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton repeating that U.S. authorities had no connection to the video.

It's part of wider U.S. strategies to use social media and other forums to reach out to moderates in the Islamic world including what the State Department has described as a "virtual embassy" for Iranian web surfers. But the fallout from the film has so far drowned out appeals for calmer dialogue in places such as Pakistan, where at least 23 people have died in unrest linked to the film.

Continue reading here:
Free speech 'red lines' feed Muslim film rage

Pakistanis protest this week in Karachi against an anti-Islam video made in the United States.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist for The Miami Herald and World Politics Review. A former CNN producer/correspondent, she is the author of "The End of Revolution: A Changing World in the Age of Live Television." Follow her on Twitter: @FridaGColumns.

(CNN) -- A new battle has erupted on the global stage over the future of free speech. Its epicenter moved to the U.N. General Assembly, where world leaders expounded on the great issues of the day.

The annual U.N. gathering came just days after a chain reaction of ferocious protests in Muslim countries against a video on YouTube insulting Islam. Reaction to the video led to the deaths, at last count, of more than 50 people, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens.

So, the hateful video and the mass violence became an inescapable topic at the United Nations. And yet there was intense disagreement about what exactly was troubling about the events of the last few weeks and what action they demand.

In the view of some Arab and Muslim leaders, the time has come to draft new international rules limiting free expression for the sake of preventing insults to religions. The head of the Arab League, Nabil Elaraby, called for "criminaliz(ing) acts that insult or cause offense to religions."

Frida Ghitis

This move to impose anti-blasphemy laws should come as a call to action for democracy advocates everywhere: Freedom of speech, a most fundamental of human rights, a cornerstone of democracy, has come under international attack.

Certainly, non-Muslims living in some of those countries have had nightmarish experiences with them as the bans are used to target minorities and government critics. Among political leaders, however, the idea appears popular.

Continued here:
A war is raging against free speech