Daily Archives: October 3, 2012

01-10-2012 09:59 Last year, college censorship took a turn for the ridiculous when a professor at Sam Houston State University vandalized a student-sponsored "free speech wall" with a box-cutting knife to remove anti-President Obama speech he didn't like. When the students complained about the vandalism to the campus police, the police took the professor's side and demanded still more censorship, leading students to dismantle the wall. Morgan Freeman, the student who organized the protest, recounts this amazing and disturbing story in FIRE's latest video. Warning: the story involves a four-letter word! -- Subscribe to FIRE's YouTube channel to receive automatic updates! Produced by Ted Balaker. Interview by Greg Lukianoff. Music "Alice in Wonderland" by Emma Wallace (Magnatune Records)

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College Professor Censors Anti-Obama Comment on Free Speech Wall - Video

As rioting over the anti-Islam film "Innocence of Muslims" spread across the Muslim world, President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton both deplored the film's message but defended the free speech rights of its creators. In Clinton's words: "We do not stop individual citizens from expressing their views, no matter how distasteful they may be."

But now one of the film's creators, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, is sitting in jail in downtown Los Angeles. He may face two years in prison for allegedly violating the terms of his probation through his actions surrounding the film's production. News of his arrest and detention has been widely covered around the world, causing some to worry about the perception that the United States was punishing Nakoula because of the content of his movie.

Government officials maintained that Nakoula was back in custody not because of the impact of the movie, which portrays the prophet Muhammad as a womanizer and a child molester, but because he had used aliases in producing the film and lied to probation officers.

TIMELINE: 'Innocence of Muslims' unrest

Nakoula, who was on a type of probation known in the federal system as supervised release, served time in prison for a 2010 conviction for taking out bank and credit cards under myriad fake identities. He now faces eight charges of probation violation. The allegations include making false statements to authorities about the film claiming his role was limited to writing the script and denying he used the alias "Sam Bacile."

Authorities say they have proof Nakoula's role in the movie was "much more expansive" than that of a writer and that Nakoula could face new criminal charges for lying to federal officials.

Probation officials are recommending a two-year prison term for Nakoula, despite a guideline range of four to 10 months.

PHOTOS: Protests over anti-Islam film

A federal judge ordered him held in protective custody without bail, saying he is a flight risk and poses "some danger to the community."

Some legal experts said the government was on firm legal footing and had little choice but to enforce the terms of Nakoula's probation once he came onto their radar.

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Jailing of 'Innocence of Muslims' creator raises free speech worries

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”

Facebook it's protesting online child privacy protection laws that would make it harder for kids to "like" things with the social network. They say they want to encourage kids' freedom of expression, but we bet it also has a lot to do with advertising.Following that for the first time would allow children under 13 on the site with certain parental moderation including getting mom and dad's permission to "like," Facebook wrote the following in a : "A government regulation that restricts teens ability to engage in protected speech as the proposed COPPA would do raises issues under the First Amendment."Facebook has in a compelling enough way to get the ACLU's approval. But, considering the motives behind the updates to the Child Online Privacy Protect Act, it sounds like this is less about free speech and more motivated by ad-dollars.

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The newupdates to COPPA are not only , but aim to specifically limit how much the Internet can track children, . "If the F.T.C. carries out its proposed changes, childrens Web sites would be required to obtain parents permission before tracking children around the Web for advertising purposes, even with anonymous customer codes," she wrote. That would apply to the Facebook "like," which beyond a metric for what people like, acts as a way to track user behavior for advertising purposes, . He wrote:

Third parties like advertising networks or Facebook that know or have reason to know they are attaching software to children's websites won't be allowed to collect any personal information without first obtaining parental consent. Currently, many websites secure consent by sending an email to an address provided by the child.

Before Facebook went for a different tactic to keep its like away from regulation, saying it "would create more legal certainty for operators and facilitate the development of innovative, engaging online content for teens," in an . As that was less convincing, it is now going for the FirstAmendment, hoping that will resonate.

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Though Facebook has indicated a move away from " " as the go-to metric for advertising, they still serve as a lucrative way for the social network to make money. , for example, are based on a user liking a brand, which it then turns into a personal endorsement for the product. These have turned into a . And, they are doing especially well in the , which is the future after-all. We imagine Facebook wouldn't want to miss out on getting all those new young users as the faces of their favorite brand pages.

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Free Speech Isn't the Only Reason Facebook Wants Kids 'Liking'