Royal boobs and free speech

One expects this type of moral confusion from diplomats gone native, diplomats who spend less time serving their country's interests and more effort articulating the interests of the country where they happen to serve.

Nor was it a surprise that the political correctness police and the Orientalist thought control crowd called for YouTube to shut down the video.

Same for those enlightened members of the mainstream media (with small, not capital letters, since acts of self-censorship have been remarkably bipartisan in this respect) who did not dare show the movie out of panicked sensitivity for the aggrieved murderers -- both actual and potential -- while perfunctorily condemning the violence or opining with their usual gravitas about cause and effect, who is to blame and what went wrong. After all, within a week, the apologiser in chief was doing much the same on America's behalf. But the real scandal has to do with some of those who took to the airwaves to defend free speech.

It is a scandal that, with but a few exceptions, no one could utter a coherent defence of freedom of speech without first condemning the movie, disparaging its poor quality, lamenting its release or sympathising with the sense of grievance of those aggrieved while complaining about their excessive response.

It is a scandal that no one is actually responding to the violence by doing what a free society that believes in the freedoms it enjoys would do -- air the movie, over and over, until we can all recite its raunchiest lines by heart as if it were Dirty Harry or Monty Python, and let the public be the judge of quality, sensitivity and appropriateness. It is an even greater scandal that the publication, by French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, of cartoons mocking Islam's prophet, was almost universally described as "pouring gasoline on the fire". So what if it was?

Isn't it the point of freedom that we learn to react to what offends us by speaking against it, rather than silencing and murdering those who offend us?

Whatever happened to the free market of ideas? Can we keep it open only when the product offends no one? Is that the 21st-century litmus test for Western societies? Judging by the way no American mainstream outlet is showing the movie or reproducing the cartoons, the answer appears to be, sadly, yes. The market is open to those who pass the group think test and who practise enough self-censorship in the public space. Everyone else beware.

We have grown too cosy with our freedom to remember that we earned it at the cost of not just condescendingly tolerating but actually vigorously protecting offensive things against the violence of the offended.

America is the country where burning the flag is still offensive and still constitutionally protected speech; the country where Nazis can march in Skokie and the Ku Klux Klan can hold openly their cross-burning activities. Those who do not find either to be deeply offensive have a democratic deficit of their own, but those who believe in freedom have no problem defending even the most hateful form of speech. The only pertinent question about the movie should have been: did it break any laws? And if it did not, then it should be a sacred democratic duty to protect it, not indulge those who wish it off the air at all costs.

How often we forget that free speech is the history of offended sensitivities. D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover or a publicly naked Jane Fonda were both deeply offensive to public morals at the time; and though only one of them may have an enduring cultural value, defending both had to do with protecting a principle, not expressing an aesthetic judgment.

Think about it -- Hustler magazine's owner Larry Flynt won, not lost, his court case, though few would recommend him as a role model or would prescribe his magazine for educational reading.

Not only is freedom of speech not particularly sensitive. It is deeply offensive by definition. When this elemental aspect of freedom is under threat from the lynching crowd, we should defend it vigorously; we should not retreat and apologise.

The quality or wisdom of the video that murderous barbarians took as a pretext for their bloodthirsty anti-Americanism should have never been the excuse for the embarrassed silence and the embarrassing apologies of the past few days. That even most of the staunch defenders of free speech felt obliged to pay lip service to the clamour of a religion of peace on the path of war speaks volumes about our resolve to defend free speech at crunch time. Meanwhile, in Europe, tabloid magazines are courageously lining up, in the name of the public's sacred right to know, to challenge court injunctions against publishing photos of a pair of bare royal breasts. Western societies will fight for nudity but deplore an inconvenient opinion. In the end, they shall be entitled to neither