Anxieties about the erosion of freedom of expression, that touchstone of democracy, have surfaced across the political spectrum – from the no-platforming of certain speakers by students’ unions in UK universities to the deadly serious consequences of standing up against religious forces internationally. But all of it is animated by underlying concerns about: power and privilege; the inflated notion of offence; the limits to freedom of speech; state imposed versus peer imposed limits; what constitutes acceptable protest; and, less discussed but equally important, the role of the marketplace.
At the deadly end, we saw cartoonists being killed for their ‘Islamaphobic’ representations of Mohammad in the satirical French magazine, Charlie Hebdo. We would have expected the condemnation of the killings to have been unconditional, yet many on the left preferred to focus on the racist content of the cartoons as if anything could explain the murders. Like many of the writers who boycotted the PEN awards ceremony where Charlie Hebdo received the Freedom of Expression Courage Award, they felt that, under the guise of free speech, this was one more assault on an already disempowered community.
Garry Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame, says critically of Charlie Hebdo that "Traditionally, satire has comforted the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable … . By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died." This is wrong on several counts. First of all, religious beliefs – like any other beliefs – are fair game. Secondly, we should not conflate religion with race, doing so is itself racist because it leaves no room for secular or devout Muslims who were not offended by those cartoons. And it is safe to conclude that the vast majority of Muslims who were offended by the cartoons would want no truck with the killers, AQAP, an off-shoot of Al Qaeda. It has created a situation where the threat of violent religious extremism has the power to quash all free speech through self-censorship. Thirdly, Trudeau turns the notion of hate speech on its head. It is a legal concept designed to protect vulnerable minorities from violence from, say, racists or homophobes stoked up by hate speech, not to cover violent retaliation by the armed wing of a minority community. At the heart of this debate, are contested understandings of where power resides.
