RUTHFULLY YOURS

In the wake of today’s massacre in Paris, there has already been a lot of preening about journalistic bravery. Much of it has come from people who, it can be shown, don’t have the guts to work in Charlie Hebdo’s newsroom. Preening about free speech may be reassuring at times like this, but what we need are apologies from those who haven’t done enough to defend free speech, as well as a real desire to hold those journalists and politicians who have undermined free speech accountable. As a smart academic on Twitter put it, “Today, as journalists ‘bravely’ voice support for Charlie Hebdo, ask them for their piece calling on Yale to publish the Muhammad cartoons.”

 At the time, I was working at the op-ed desk of the Washington Examiner and I decided I wanted to write an editorial about this shameful state of affairs. The Washington Examiner’s able editorial page editor, Mark Tapscott, agreed. However, Tapscott, a diligent and professional editor if ever there was one, told me to make sure that I at least contacted some of journalism’s professional organizations to make sure that I wasn’t overlooking any of their efforts here before I castigated them for not speaking out about the plight of Molly Norris. And so I contacted the American Society of News Editors and the Society of Professional Journalists and asked if they had issued any statement on the silencing of Molly Norris. They had not, and I wrote the editorial:

 Freedom of speech and press are in deep trouble when the American government thinks the best it can do to protect a journalist from death threats is to counsel her to go into hiding, and when the elite voices of American journalism can’t be bothered to say anything in her defense. … And shouldn’t they be angered that her government believes it cannot protect her? Imagine what they would be saying if white-hooded members of the Ku Klux Klan were threatening to kill Norris in Selma, Ala., instead of radical Muslims in Seattle. Would the FBI tell Norris she had to stop being a journalist and go into hiding? And would ASNE and SPJ look the other way as the First Amendment and freedom of the press were symbolically turned to ashes by flaming white crosses?

The Society of Professional Journalists had a curious response to my column. It started emailing anyone who cited the Examiner editorial saying that the editorial was “misleading and was most likely written to gain headlines/SEO.” The one problem with this argument is that I happened to have recorded my conversation with SPJ’s spokesman. With the transcript handy, it was not difficult to sort out who was being misleading here. The whole episode was appalling and dispiriting.

If anything good is to come from this massacre, we have to first own up to and reflect upon the unbelievable cowardice and accommodation of our media and cultural elites in the face of literal assaults on our most basic freedoms. It’s not just that they stay silent in the face of threats. It’s not just that they don’t tell the truth about their own cowardice. It’s that they are so far around the bend they argue that speaking up against these threats is harmful to Muslims. Four days after Molly Norris went into hiding, The New York Times published this simpering apologia from Nicholas Kristof, “I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs.”

But is it really possible to openly demean Muslims? This is pretty rich coming in the pages of a newspaper that refused to print controversial Danish Mohammed cartoons back when they were the biggest news story on the planet. Their justification for this was that “This seems a reasonable choice for news organizations that usually refrain from gratuitous assaults on religious symbols.” Just about every devout Christian and Jew who has regularly read the Times likely did a spit-take reading that. The clear double standard would suggest fear of violence, not concern for readers’ delicate sensibilities, was the primary rationale for the Times’ questionable decision here.

The hypocrisy is bad enough, but so much of the supposedly liberal and enlightened Western media is heavily invested in false equivalencies even when they are forced to acknowledge Muslim extremism. A few years back Salon published this precious headline: “What’s the difference between Palin and Muslim fundamentalists? Lipstick: A theocrat is a theocrat, whether Muslim or Christian.” More recently, this past October, there was a minor kerfuffle when Bill Maher said on his HBO program, “[Islam is] the only religion that acts like the mafia that will [expletive] kill you if you say the wrong thing, draw the wrong picture, or write the wrong book.” His guest Ben Affleck responded disapprovingly. “It’s gross, it’s racist, it’s disgusting,” he said. “It’s like saying, ‘Oh, you shifty Jew!” Now theocrats of all stripes may be bad, but the degree to which they differ in how bad they are is certainly notable. (It’s also worth asking whether the parties in question are falsely being smeared as a “theocrat.”) I do not recall Sarah Palin shooting up a newsroom.

But it’s time to demand that the same media that never fail to see a nonexistent connection between benign Republican political rhetoric and senseless acts of violence start defending freedom of expression for real. Governments everywhere are punishing those who publicly criticize Islam. Already in Canada we’ve seen journalists dragooned and threatened with government fines for offending Muslims. Here in the U.S., President Barack Obama responded to an al Qaeda attack on U.S. embassy saying, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” That may seem reasonable enough, but the statement is really just one of his obnoxious false dichotomies. The future shouldn’t belong to those who slander Mohammed, but it damn well better belong to people who believe you have the right to do so. There are even those in the media that are not above blaming the victim, as Time’s former Paris bureau chief Bruce Crumley did when Charlie Hebdo was firebombed in 2011. There’s no question the lack of conviction in fighting Muslim threats, combined with the self-soothing prevarication and B.S. equivalencies from the media, is making us less safe and less free.

If you don’t believe me, just ask Molly Norris. Well, you could ask her if she wasn’t in hiding. Or you could have asked Charlie Hebdo’s famous cartoonists Charb and Cabu, but they were murdered today. “I’d prefer to die standing than live on my knees,” Charb famously said. Those words will be remembered. But it also speaks volumes that so many of Charb’s fellow journalists have long been aware of these threats, and have said nothing. And of those who have spoken up about Muslim terror, far too many have said things that in light of today’s tragedy are absolutely damning.