MARK STEYN” FREE SPEECH HAS TO INCLUDE THE RIGHT TO INSULT ISLAM” JOSEPH BREAN
http://news.nationalpost.com/2015/01/25/mark-steyn-on-charlie-hebdo-attacks-free-speech-has-to-include-the-right-to-insult-islam/
Flying James Taylor to Paris to sing You’ve Got A Friend as a gesture of sympathy to France over the Charlie Hebdo attacks, as U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry did, was barely less ridiculous than if Canada had dispatched Céline Dion to sing My Heart Will Go On, according to Mark Steyn.
“I would fully have supported Paris nuking Ottawa over that,” said Mr. Steyn, the famously witty cultural doomsayer who is in Toronto this week to be interviewed by Indigo Books & Music Inc. chief executive Heather Reisman about his new book The [Un]documented Mark Steyn on Wednesday night at Indigo Manulife Centre.
“I’m glad that Canada did not descend to the level of the government of the United States,” he said. “I’m also glad that Stephen Harper was not in that lineup of prime ministers holding hands in the street, because I think what was going on there was really an appropriation of the sacrifice of these men.”
The typical cultural response to the terrorist atrocity initially reflected the “moral vanity” of showing solidarity by “waving pencils” and publishing cartoons about the pen being mightier than the sword, Mr. Steyn said, but then it tipped over into “absurdity” as so many media refused to publish the cartoons for fear of causing offence.
“Free speech has to include the right to insult Islam,” Mr. Steyn said. “Not because necessarily anyone approves of insulting Islam, but simply because free speech by definition is for the stuff you don’t approve of. And that is why it’s important for deeply observant Catholics to recognize that a foul-mouthed beery comedian on open-mike night in Hamilton has the right to urinate all over the Catholic Church. Not because it’s a good thing to do, and not because you approve of what he’s saying, but because free speech is in the end for all the stuff you revile and that offends you. So when the CBC say they’re not going to show these critical elements of a news story because it will offend people, they are on the wrong side.
“Extending special privilege to Islam corrodes free speech,” he said.
He compared the responses to the Charlie Hebdo attacks and Salman Rushdie fatwa affair, which was similarly followed by declarations of solidarity, and he criticized the inclination to defend Mr. Rushdie on the grounds that he is a high-minded literary artist, a sympathy that typically does not extend to the crass cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo.
On the contrary, Mr. Steyn said he was uncomfortable with that argument as it applied to Mr. Rushdie, and thought he should be supported on more basic grounds, that as a British subject, he has a right to say what he wants.
The terrorist atrocities of Paris have brought new attention to freedom of expression, an issue on which Mr. Steyn has fought some high-profile battles, including a human rights tribunal hearing into his writing in Maclean’s magazine, an episode that inspired the repeal of Canada’s Internet hate speech law. He is now engaged in another fight that involves some of the same themes, a libel claim brought against him by the climate scientist Michael Mann, who created the famous “hockey stick” graph of historical global temperatures.
His experience in the plodding U.S. court system — the claim is almost three years old and still no trial date is set — has given him a new perspective on the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of expression.
“Here I am now in court in the land of the First Amendment and what seems likely to happen is that after I’ve been in the system for another two, or three, or four more years, and I’ve spent another two or three million dollars, some judge somewhere will tell me that in fact it was entirely legal for me to write my 270-word blog post about Michael Mann and his hockey stick. But if it takes half a decade of your life and a seven-figure sum, then as a practical matter, the First Amendment actually doesn’t offer that big a protection on free speech,” he said.
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