Freedom to Inflame
Don’t encourage him by paying attention. Just ignore him.
It’s what your elders told you about the class clown, or the needy attention-seeking neighborhood kid fond of pranks, or maybe worse, and it’s what might have wisely been said about the theatrics of the pastor Terry Jones, who on March 20 made good on his plans to stage a public burning of a copy of the Koran. Jones, who is head of the World Dove Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., had originally intended to conduct this ritual on Sept. 11, 2010, but was talked down at the time by important people like President Obama, Gen. David E. Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates.
Despite some initial media reports about the burning, most seemed to follow that advice: just ignore him. But that strategy soon failed: news of the event soon spread and within a few days trouble began in Afghanistan and Pakistan (detailed by Robert Mackey at The Lede). Notably, President Hamid Karzai, to the dismay of many, added fuel to the fire by publicly denouncing Jones, as did several mullahs during last Friday’s prayers, sparking a series of violent and deadly protests against the pastor and his actions. The initial outburst and the murders of United Nations staff, were reported in The Times April 1:
MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — Stirred up by three angry mullahs who urged them to avenge the burning of a Koran at a Florida church, thousands of protesters on Friday overran the compound of the United Nations in this northern Afghan city, killing at least 12 people, Afghan and United Nations officials said.
The dead included at least seven United Nations workers — four Nepalese guards and three Europeans from Romania, Sweden and Norway — according to United Nations officials in New York. One was a woman. Early reports, later denied by Afghan officials, said that at least two of the dead had been beheaded. Five Afghans were also killed.
More violence erupted in Kandahar and elsewhere in the following days, and protests continued through today.
This video posted online by Tolo TV, an Afghan television station, reportedly shows the scene on April 1 after Friday prayers in Mazar-i-Sharif, and protesters storming the U.N. compound:
Almost immediately, Una Moore, an aid worker writing from Kabul at U.N. Dispatch, sounded the alarm about the meaning of such an attack for the broader mission in Afghanistan.
Kabul, Afghanistan — Foreigners have been killed in Afghanistan before, and today’s attack was not the first fatal attack on UN staff. But it was different than previous fatal attacks. Very different. The killers were ordinary residents of a city deemed peaceful enough to be one of the first places transferred to the control of Afghan security forces. The men who broke into the UN compound, set fires and killed eight people weren’t Taliban, or henchmen of a brutal warlord, or members of a criminal gang. They weren’t even armed when the protests began — they took weapons from the UN guards who were their first victims.
Foreigners committed to assisting in the rebuilding of Afghanistan have long accepted the possibility that they might die at the hands of warring parties, but this degree of violence from ordinary citizens is not something most of us factored into our decision to work here. …
This is not the beginning of the end for the international community in Afghanistan. This is the end. Terry Jones and others will continue to pull anti-Islam stunts and opportunistic extremists here will use those actions to incite attacks against foreigners. Unless we, the internationals, want our guards to fire on unarmed protesters from now on, the day has come for us to leave Afghanistan.
Joel Hafvenstein at Registan, though, did not see the attacks as heralding the end of aid groups in the region:
I don’t think they fit a pattern of growing violent rejection of all aid work in Afghanistan, let alone a shift toward insurgent targeting of aid agencies. Yes, foreigners in Afghanistan will always be vulnerable to violence incited by extremists both Afghan and Western; foreigners working for agencies with a political mandate will be even more vulnerable. And yes, Afghan disillusionment with aid work is widespread. It’s not seen as “the solution,” because there’s now an ingrained expectation that most of it will be lost to corruption and expensive foreigners. At the same time, humanitarian aid workers and organisations who focus on delivering assistance at community level — rather than trying to contribute to a politically charged campaign of national stabilization — are still able to operate in most areas of Afghanistan at acceptable levels of risk, even without armed protection. They’re still saving lives, and I definitely don’t think the day has come for them to leave.
Back at home, of course, blame for the events — aimed at Jones, Karzai and of course the mobs themselves — came from every direction. But even more hackles were raised after Gen. David Petraeus condemned the Koran burning and members of Congress started discussing the matter — in particular, on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” where Sen. Harry Reid admitted the possibility of a congressional investigation into Jones’s actions and Sen. Lindsey Graham alluded to the First Amendment. Graham said: “I wish we could find some way to hold people accountable. During WWII, you had limits on what you could say if it would inspire the enemy. Free speech is a great idea, but we are in a war. Any time in America we can push back against actions like this that put our troops at risk, we ought to do that.”
That sparked a number of free speech manifestos from commentators, all unflattering to Graham, who attempted to further articulate his views in an interview at N.R.O., to little effect as far as his critics were concerned. The road that apparently no one was willing to go down: that Jones could be held at all responsible for the killings in Afghanistan. If so, they argued, then the whole idea of free speech in the United States would be compromised. Thus arose a sort of dissonance in the pundit zone: a stream of posts condemning Jones but defending his right inflame and offend.
Andrew Exum, at his blog Abu Muquwama, offered a political-theological view, as an “American Christian,” on why acts such as holy book burning should be protected under the First Amendment:
As a practicing, believing Christian, I honestly understand the frustration. I too am disgusted by cheap artistic stunts that denigrate the religious traditions of others and also rabble-rousing “pastors” who burn the Quran and think they are doing the Lord’s will. But as an American Christian, I am comfortable talking about how the United States was founded and why we all agree, in our social contract with one another, to not establish any laws that constrict one’s freedom to worship. We are a nation founded by the political and religious dissidents of Mother Europe, and we reject the ways the tired old nations of that continent forced us to worship in a certain way, or denied our right to free political speech and assembly.
We keep organized religion out of government, to protect the integrity of the government, and we keep the government out of organized worship, to protect a man’s freedom to worship God — or not worship God — as he pleases.
This is who we are as America. This is our DNA.
A thorough secular defense came from Glenn Greenwald, who wrote, “The whole point of the First Amendment is that one is free to express the most marginalized, repellent, provocative and offensive ideas.” He continued:
If you’re someone who wants to vest the state with the power to punish the expression of certain views on the grounds that the view is so wrong and/or hurtful that its expression should not be permitted — as European countries and Canada routinely do — then you’re someone who does not believe in free speech, by definition; what you believe is that one is free to express only those viewpoints which the majority of citizens (and the State) allow to be expressed. Many of the most important views throughout history have been, at some point, hurtful, dangerous and even violence-engendering. The whole reason for free speech protections is to safeguard such ideas — despised by the majority — from suppression. Burning the Koran is despicable, but it’s every bit as much core political speech as burning the American flag or an effigy of a hated political leader, or tearing up a picture of — or publishing cartoons unfavorably depicting — a religious leader.
And James Joyner at Outside the Beltway also let Jones off the hook:
Should Jones have burned the Koran? No. But not because doing so might incite some evil people halfway around the world to commit atrocities against innocents. Rather, he shouldn’t have done it was needlessly hurtful without adding any value to the debate. Indeed, aside from generating publicity for himself, he’s likely generated sympathy for Islam and disdain for churches of his ilk.
But Jones is not the slightest bit culpable for the actions of others. Yes, he was warned that violence might ensue. But we’re not responsible for the evil, illegal actions others might take in response to our freely expressing our thoughts. Even if they’re ill-informed, half baked, bigoted thoughts. If we allow the possible reaction of the most dogmatic, evil people who might hear the message to govern our expression, we don’t have freedom at all. It’s worse than a heckler’s veto; it’s a murderer’s veto.
At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey placed the blame for the murders squarely on the shoulders of the rioters:
The only people responsible for murders are those who commit them, and those who specifically incite them to kill. Any other position eventually wipes out free speech, free religious practice, and freedom altogether. If we held others responsible for the acts of every nutcase whose violent reactions may or may not have connections to something they did or said, we would have no speech at all …
The outrage, of course, was not confined to the States. Brendan O’Neill at The Telegraph colorfully laid out his dispute with the ” ‘blame Jones’ brigade,” which “lets rioting Afghans off the hook” and demeans them at the same time:
It says they’re not really responsible for the bloodshed they unleashed; Jones is. There’s a great irony here, because many of the commentators who make this argument do so in order to express their apparently enlightened and cosmopolitan sympathy with beleaguered Muslims in Afghanistan, yet in the process they patronisingly depict Afghans as overgrown children, as attack dogs almost, who hear a command or see an offensive image and act on it, robot-like. Modern-day liberal pity for Muslims would seem to be a comfortable bedfellow of the old-world colonial outlook: in both instances Third World people are treated as hapless, helpless creatures who must have their eyes and ears shielded from dodgy ideas.
At Slate Christopher Hitchens voiced his dismay eloquently, but had his sights set on Karzai as a villain:
Unlike some provincial mullahs, Karzai also knows perfectly well that the U.S. government is constitutionally prohibited from policing religious speech among its citizens. Yet, when faced with the doings of the aforementioned moronic cleric from Gainesville, he went out of his way to intensify mob feeling. This caps a long period where his behavior has come to seem like a conscious collusion with warlordism, organized crime, and even with elements of the Taliban. Already under constant pressure to make consistent comments about Syria and Libya, the Obama administration might want to express itself more directly about a man for whose fast-decomposing regime we are shedding our best blood.
One commenter who had no problem laying responsibility on Jones was not a regular blogger — Dr. Geoff Tunnicliffe, the head of the World Evangelical Alliance, “a global association, serving 600 million evangelical Christians.” In a guest post at a Washington Post blog, Tunnicliffe wrote, “as someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus Christ, what we say and what do actually trumps our right to say it.”
Now that the worst case scenario has happened, I ask Terry Jones again: Will you go to Afghanistan and look a widow in the eye and explain your compulsion to pull off a publicity stunt? Will you meet with the families of the U.N. workers and explain to them your provocative actions?
While those who committed the atrocities in Pakistan and Afghanistan are responsible for their actions and must be brought to justice, Terry Jones must ask himself some deeper questions. As someone who calls himself a Christian, why would he knowingly put his fellow Christians and other human beings at risk? As someone who says he is fighting for the rights of persecuted Christians, why would he want to add to their difficulties?
At Der Spiegel, Hasnain Kazim made a noble attempt to transcend by suggesting that what we’re witnessing is not a “clash of civilizations” but rather a “clash of the extremes,” and that both sides of this battle are suffering from the same delusion:
On the one side are the radical, evangelical Christian pastors who offer blanket condemnations of Islam, knowing full well what the consequences might be. On the other side are the Muslim extremists who react reflexively and kill indiscriminately as revenge. Both sides think they are right. And they play by rules that disregard basic tenets of civilization. Man does not kill man. And man does not insult man, either.
One could certainly pose the question: What is worse, the deaths of people or the burning of a book, even if it is a holy book? The answer should be clear to a civilized person, whether Christian or Muslim. But this question is secondary. The root of the problem is the claim made by both radical Christians and radical Muslims: that their belief is the only absolute truth.
To which the dispirited among us might say, Amen to that.
9 READERS' COMMENTS