There are limits

I recently read a pro-gun slogan that said something like, “No registration, no licensing, no training, no magazine limits. Any gun, anywhere, any time” (I can’t retrace my steps to the exact quote). Absolutism is always the refuge of small-minded people, but in this case it’s easy to see that this is a lie. Even in America you cannot legally own a fully automatic weapon, a rocket launcher, a tank, a nuclear bomb. So the question of whether there should be restrictions on weapon ownership has already been answered in the affirmative, but by pretending that it's still open, pro-gun fanatics (and what else can you call them) can stop the discussion of where the dividing line between legal and illegal weapons should be. Nobody, in America, can ask whether semi-automatic weapons should be heavily restricted or banned, because gun fanatics can lie by saying that NO weapons should be banned. It’s an outrageous lie, but it does the trick and shuts down the conversation.

Back to the tragic events at the Charlie Hebdou offices in Paris. No speech, no matter how vile, no matter how distasteful, justifies the killing of the author. No exceptions. The murderers were criminals who will make the world a worse place for everyone except for those who glorify violence.

No writer or artist should be killed for their work. Neither should they received 1000 lashes as in Western ally Saudi Arabia. Neither should they receive decades in jail, as did Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning.

But that doesn’t mean that there should be no moral limits on free speech.

The “I am Charlie Hebdou” and "Je suis Charlie Hebdou” movements are being hypocritical because they are implying that the unforgivable crime of the murderers proves that there should be no limits on free speech.

But there are limits. Nobody can conceive of posing concentration camp victims in sexualized poses to satirize the current Israeli government. What about President Obama being anally raped with an assault rifle by Wayne LaPierre as satire on the failing of his gun control measures? Or the new Pope sodomizing a naked man representing the Vatican to symbolize his attacks on pedophiles within his own church?

There are limits, and they amount to widespread self-censorship. Charlie Hebdou itself fired a writer in 2009 who joked that Nicholas Sarkozy’s son, who had just married a Jewish woman, was going to convert to Judaism for greater social success. That seems mild by comparison to the anti-muslim cartoons, but it not only resulted in the author's dismissal by the magazine, but also led to hate crime charges.

Most of the journalists who are, this week, with Charlie Hebdou, are refusing to post the offensive cartoons. One reason is that the cartoons truly are offensive, and would not qualify for publication in these journals. Another reason might be that support for Charlie Hebdou (as opposed to support for the individual victims of the massacre) might dwindle if people saw what had been published – especially if accompanied by an editorial pointing out the self-censorship that would make such vile cartoons impossible in almost all other contexts, such as against powerful people or other religions.

The media outlets who “are Charlie Hebdou” but who refuse to republish the cartoons are being accused of being cowards. They are being cowards because they were shocked into defending the cartoons as freedom of speech before realizing that the cartoons are so shocking they don’t deserve republication. Now they are caught in the middle. They do not want to support what the murderers did. And they do not want to support what Charlie Hebdou did. So they are trapped.

The West is also being cowardly. Governments have no problem trampling on freedom of the press for a variety of reasons (critic of Middle Eastern policy, British MP George Galloway was recently denied permission to enter Canada, merely to give a speech). Media has no problem with self-censorship, in fact media could’t exist without choose what was worth publishing and what was not. So at times like this they are trapped. They want to pretend that there is no censorship in the West, that there are no limits on free speech. But there are.

I do not think that Charlie Hebdou should have been banned from printing the cartoons, but I think that all the media who claim to be friends with these cartoonists (including liberals John Stewart and Michael Moore) should have told their friends at Charlie Hebdou to imagine the cartoons redrawn in another context (including with powerful figures or other religions in place of Mohammed or a stereotypical ugly bearded muslim). And if they could’t imagine that, then as a friend-to-friend, they should advise them that they should not be published. They should have done this instead of unthinkingly invoking freedom of all expression when it is quite clear there is no such thing.

Charlie Hebdou’s cartoons did not illustrate freedom of expression, they illustrated freedom of oppression.