An eastern clash of western freedoms

In a photograph appearing in a recent edition of Britain’s Sunday Observer newspaper, a youngish
protestor, ostensibly of Middle Eastern extraction, displays a placard in capital letters, reading tersely; “Freedom of Expression go to hell”. Since it was unembarrassed by punctuation, we remain unclear as to whether he, in the exercise of his freedom of expression, is suggesting that the reader should journey to Hades or whether he is consigning that right, so jealously guarded in Western democracies, to the bottomless pits of fire and brimstone.

Whatever his intendment, we are of the opinion that he has captured the essence of the recent protests and deathly outrage in some Middle Eastern and North African countries over the YouTube released film “Innocence of Muslims”. What we in the West might view as freedom of expression availed of by the filmmaker, those in the Islamic world who incited the protests viewed as a blasphemy of their religion.

And it is not as if we too do not take religion seriously. Most of our supreme laws guarantee a right to freedom to manifest and propagate one’s religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance under the rubric of freedom of conscience that also includes freedom of thought. Further, with very few exceptions, there exist laws against blasphemy and blasphemous libel, committed at common law if a person publishes in a permanent form any matter attacking the Christian religion or the Bible or God, Christ or other persons sacred to the Christian religion, provided that the material is calculated to outrage and insult a Christian’s religious feelings.

It is true that this has never been the law in the United States of America and that Britain recently repealed this offence in 2008, but in both of these jurisdictions, as well as in some others, there are offences constituted by what has come to be known as “hate speech” – communication which is hateful, threatening, abusive, or insulting and which targets an individual on the basis of his or her colour, nationality, religion or sexual orientation. It should be noted, however, that such laws have not fared well in the US where hate speech is viewed rather as merely “a particularly intolerable and socially unnecessary mode of expressing what the speaker wishes to convey...”

On the other hand, in the more theocratic societies where an attack on the dominant religion challenges the very authority of the state, freedom of expression, already tenuous at best there, is trumped by the supremacy of the religion. Blasphemy is punishable by death, no less. Hence the official fatwa declared on Sir Salman Rushdie, the British writer, for his 1998 publication, The Satanic Verses; the violent reactions to the Danish editorial cartoons in 2005; and the recent furore raised when young Rimsha Masih was accused, wrongfully, as it eventuated, of burning pages of the Koran.

For us, the gratuitous insulting of a religion does not constitute a useful and valuable exercise of the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression or speech. It is, rather, an abuse of this right. In 1919, the great US jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, stated in a different context in the subsequently overruled Schenck v. US; “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre and causing panic…”

At the same time, there is much force in the point made earlier this month by the US Secretary of State, Mrs Hillary Clinton, that when one’s faith is insulted “…refraining from violence then, is not a sign of
weakness in one’s faith…it is a sign that one’s faith is unshakable…”

The loss of life is to be regretted…equally so is the needless insult to another’s religious belief.