Culture Clash Over Free Speech
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2012-09-18/culture-clash-over-free-speech
Protests against an American-made online video mocking the Prophet Muhammad have sparked discussions about free speech. Guest host Steve Roberts and his guests discuss clashing cultural norms and efforts to define and regulate hate speech across the globe.
Guests
Zeynep Tufekci
assistant professor of the School of Information at the University of North Carolina and visiting scholar at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School.
Salman Rushdie
Booker Prize-winning author of 11 novels, including "Midnight's Children" and "The Satanic Verses." His memoir is titled, "Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie."
Hisham Melhem
Washington bureau chief for Al-Arabiya News Channel.
Rebecca MacKinnon
senior fellow at New America Foundation. Her work focuses on the intersection of the Internet, human rights and foreign policy.
Comments
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I was unable to access the AJE site via Firefox, Safari, & my cell phone from Corpus Christi soon after the violence in Libya, via my own wi-fi at home in Waco, and now via Firefox at Love Field's wi-fi in Dallas. (But, I am accessing it via Safari at Love Field.) All this time (a week since the violence?) I've had no trouble accessing any other sites.
Islamic radicals use incidents such as this video to incite violence. Since the goal of the radicals is to keep the general populace of their respective countries in submission (not to mention ignorance), they simply love it when some moron here in the USA gives them the ammunition they need.
If we had common sense, we wouldn't give them the ammunition. Let them make up their own lies. Those whom they need to keep in submission fall for it every time.
And this should be a lesson to those everywhere who advocate a union of religion and government. Remember the words of Christ: "My Kingdom is not of this world".
But man-made government is of this world.
Let's keep the two separate.
What the video producer did was illegal. Here’s why:
Freedom of speech does not allow the speaker to incite a riot. The supreme court found in Feiner v New York that the need to block an immediate threat to public safety takes precedence over free speech. A previous case -- Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) -- was cited to support the Court’s decision: “When clear and present danger of riot, disorder … or other immediate threat to public safety, peace, or order, appears, the power of the State to prevent or punish is obvious.”
So what constitutes an “immediate threat”? The current standard is “imminent lawless action.” Under the ILA test, speech is not protected by the First Amendment if the speaker” intends to incite a violation of the law that is both imminent and likely.”
Notice the importance given here to the speaker’s intent. When his hadn’t produced the tsunami of rage that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula expected, he reasoned that problem was language: the Muslims he was trying to incite didn’t understand English. Only after he had the video dubbed in Arabic did it ignite the immediate conflagration he wanted and expected, based on previous Muslim reactions to the Danish cartoons and the burning of the Koran.
To put a fine point on it for those of you who need one, Nakoula knew that his video would incite an immediate, violent and unlawful reaction in his target audience IF they understood it, so he had it dubbed to make sure they did. He got what he wanted.
Hey Bo -- You flatter your co-religionists and, by extension, yourself. Ever hear of the Crusades? The Inquisition? The Wars of Religion? But even though you failed history, your pastor or priest should have told you the sorry story of Father Arthur Terminiello who never got the message that Christianity is "all about love and forgiveness." His speech in Chicago in 1946 criticizing Jews, African Americans and FDR provoked some 1000 protesters in the street to riot. They threw rocks, bricks, bottles and stink bombs, and they broke 28 windows. Seventeen of them were arrested. So much for tolerant Americans too civilized to get violent when another American exercises his right to malign their religion or race or president. In any case, the Supreme Court found 5-4 that Father T was doing just that, which is (as Justice William O. Douglas wrote for the majority) “protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest…. There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view.”
Given their history of violent reactions to previous insults targeting their prophet, Justice Douglas would surely have found Nakoula guilty of speech that he knew would incite Muslims to violence, i.e., “produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil.” That was, after all, his whole point: to provoke the Muslims to violence in order to show how evil they are.
Jordan - they were Christian in name only. They did not live up to the true Christian principles - which essentially is compassion.
Well - you can say the same about the small number out of the 1 billion Muslims who are not being tolerent, violent, don't respect the rights of others etc. They are not practicing true Muslim values -- which of course includes compassion.
Sugarcoating the history of "mainstrean protestantism" is ridiculous. Slavery and Jim Crow laws were solidly grounded into mainstream protestant ethos of southern baptistm and in catholicism in Louisiana . the koran is neither more nor less oppressive for women than the bible or for that matter any other of the major religions except Voodoo (maybe).
Liberties are protected trough secularism and the struggle to confine magical thinking called religion to the private sphere