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Category Archives: Free Speech
College Professor Censors Anti-Obama Comment on Free Speech Wall – Video
Posted: October 3, 2012 at 8:12 pm
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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Jailing of 'Innocence of Muslims' creator raises free speech worries
Posted: at 8:12 pm
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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Free speech and the “clash of civilizations”
Posted: at 1:18 am
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 Isn't the Only Reason Facebook Wants Kids 'Liking'
Posted: at 1:18 am
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'
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Speech that silences
Posted: at 1:18 am
The SAC at U of L is no stranger to religious extremists, such as the one pictured fuming above from last year.
By Rae Hodge
FACT: If I catch you on my campus using a roped-off Free Speech Zone to yell pro-slavery and anti-gay sentiments to a group of black students within earshot of the Office for LGBT Services, I will repeat WILL publicly humiliate you in front of your intended audience by demolishing your arguments until you are speechless, befuddled and blushing deeply. My rhetoric will be swift, uncompromising and executed with extreme prejudice.
And, yes, thats exactly what happened Tuesday when Drake Shelton, the white supremacist would-be leader of the as yet unformed Protestant Christian Church of Louisville, jumped on his racist soapbox at U of L to beat his separatist drum to the tune of Leviticus 25:44, with a sign propped at his feet reading: This colony never kidnapped slaves from Africa.
While I would love to detail how this interaction unfolded, whats more important here is recognizing how this incident reflects two major problems with the debate regarding hate speech on public college campuses. The first problem is that debate has so far been framed as one where First Amendment rights are at odds with eliminating racism. The second is that the proponents for the protection of hate speech rarely, if ever, think to build an argument that can withstand the christening edge of my bloody axe. U of Ls patron is Minerva, goddess of both logic and war; bigots should therefore be prepared for both from this campus.
Charles R. Lawrence III, a remarkable author and law professor at Georgetown, published an article back in 1990 in the Duke Law Journal called On Racist Speech. In it, he forms a profound interpretation of Brown v. Board as a free speech case when he argues that segregations inherit problems include the message of inferiority to black students. The cases success, then, is in part its elimination of that system of messages in schools.
Students often gather outside a roped off free speech area near the SAC to confront.
Lawrence makes a crucial distinction in the essay: that hate speech in public is not regulated because it is assumed that the listener can escape without being stripped of rights; a black student on a campus is an unwilling listener who cannot escape hate speech without de facto segregation. Safe passage in common areas, then, is part of a universitys obligation to provide equal educational opportunities.
Lawrence also speaks to the silencing nature of hate speech, which is counter to the aims of free speech and seeks to exclude and minimize the voices of its victims. He posits that If the purpose of the First Amendment is to foster the greatest amount of speech, racial insults disserve that purpose.
In a climate of racial harassment, the speech and political participation of students within a racial minority becomes subdued. If a university is asking black students to bear the burden of insult in the name of free speech and for the greater good, then those students must be fairly represented in the universitys deliberations on the matter.
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On the Line "Freedom of Speech" – Video
Posted: October 2, 2012 at 9:17 am
28-09-2012 06:10 "FREEDOM OF SPEECH" At the United Nations, President Barack Obama spoke about deadly riots sparked by an anti-Islam video. He said, "there are no words that excuse the killing of innocents." Many of the rioters have demanded that the US government impose restrictions on speech that they find offensive. But the US Constitution gives broad protection for free speech.
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On the Line "Freedom of Speech" - Video
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Algeria at UN: Limit Free Speech, Protect Islam – Video
Posted: at 9:17 am
29-09-2012 14:49 Algeria demanded new efforts to limit freedom of expression to prevent denigrating attacks on Islam, appealing to the United Nations to take a lead as nations engaged in new debate on the tensions between free speech and religious tolerance. (Sept. 29)
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War against free speech?
Posted: October 1, 2012 at 1:10 pm
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.
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'Free Speech' and the 1st Amendment Aren't Always the Same Thing
Posted: at 1:10 pm
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.
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Obama Carefully Defends Free Speech
Posted: at 1:10 pm
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.
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