Defending free speech and free press rights, which typically means defending the right to disseminate the very ideas society finds most repellent, has been one of my
principal
passions
for the last 20 years:
previously
as a
lawyer
and
now
as
a
journalist
. So I consider it positive when large numbers of people loudly invoke this principle, as has been happening over the last 48 hours in response to the horrific attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris.
Usually, defending free speech rights is much more of a lonely task. For instance, the day before the Paris murders, I wrote
an article
about multiple cases where Muslims are being prosecuted and even imprisoned by western governments for their online political speech - assaults that have provoked relatively little protest, including from those free speech champions who have been so vocal this week.
I've previously covered cases where Muslims were imprisoned for many years in the U.S. for things like
translating
and
posting "extremist" videos
to the internet,
writing scholarly articles
in defense of Palestinian groups and
expressing harsh criticism of Israel
, and even
including a Hezbollah channel
in a cable package. That's all well beyond the numerous cases of
jobs being lost
or
careers destroyed
for expressing criticism of Israel or (much more dangerously and rarely) Judaism. I'm hoping this week's celebration of free speech values will generate widespread opposition to all of these long-standing and growing infringements of core political rights in the west, not just some.
Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only
the most simple-minded among us
are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU
vigorously defends
the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them. But this week's defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content of the speech itself.
Read the full article at
The Intercept
.
