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The West's failure to defend our freedom to speak
By Onkar Ghate
Posted: May 9, 2006
To fathom our government's contemptible treatment of a handful of unbowed journalists, you must see
the roots of that treatment in the moral ideal Christianity bequeathed the West.
In the face of the intimidation and murder of European authors, film makers and politicians by Islamic
militants, a few European newspapers have the courage to defend their freedom of speech: they
publish twelve cartoons to test whether it's still possible to criticize Islam. They discover it isn't.
Muslims riot, burn embassies, and demand the censorship and death of infidels. The Danish
cartoonists go into hiding; if they weren't afraid to speak before, they are now.
How do our leaders respond? Do they declare that an individual's freedom of speech is inviolable, no
matter who screams offense at his ideas? No. Do they defend our right to life and pledge to hunt down
anyone, anywhere, who abets the murder of a Westerner for having had the effrontery to speak? No --
as they did not when the fatwa against Rushdie was issued or his translators were attacked and
murdered.
Instead, the U.S. government announces that although free speech is important, the government
shares "the offense that Muslims have taken at these images," and even hints that it is disrespectful to
publish them.
Why does a Muslim have a moral right to his dogmas, but we don't to our rational principles? Why,
when journalists uphold free speech and Muslims respond with death threats, does the State
Department signal out the journalists for moral censure? Why the vicious double standard? Why
admonish the good to mollify evil?
The answer lies in the West's conception of morality.
Morality, we are told incessantly, by secularists and religionists, the left and the right, means sacrifice;
give up your values in selfless service to others. "Serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than
yourself," Bush proclaims to a believing nation.
But when you surrender your values, are you to give them up for men you admire, for those you think
have earned and deserve them? Obviously not -- otherwise yours would be an act of trade, of justice, of
self-assertiveness, not self-sacrifice.
You must give to that which you don't admire, to that which you judge to be unworthy, undeserving,
irrational. An employee, for instance, must give up his job for a competitor he deems inferior; a
businessman must contribute to ideological causes he opposes; a taxpayer must fund modern,
unemployed "artists" whose feces-covered works he loathes; the United States must finance the UN,
which it knows to be a pack of America-hating dictatorships.
To uphold your rational convictions is the most selfish of acts. To renounce them, to surrender the
world to that which you judge to be irrational and evil, is the epitome of sacrifice. When Jesus, the great
preacher of self-sacrifice, commanded "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you," he knew whereof
he spoke.
In the left's adaptation of this perverse ideal, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of
self-loathing and "sensitivity," of spitting in America and the West's face while showing respect for the
barbarisms of every gang.
Bill Clinton, for instance, certainly no radical leftist, jumped into the recent fray to castigate us: "None of
us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different
religions . . . there was this appalling example in . . . Denmark . . . these totally outrageous cartoons
against Islam."
In the right's version, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-effacing service.
Our duty, Bush declares, is to bring the vote to Iraqis and Palestinians, but we dare not tell them what
constitution to adopt, or ban the killers they want to vote for. We have no right to assert our principles,
because they are rational and good. But the Iraqis and Palestinians have a right to enact their tribal and
terrorist beliefs at our expense, because their beliefs are irrational and evil.
In the present crisis, the State Department will not defend free speech, because this principle is
rationally defensible; to unequivocally assert this value would be selfish. But the Department will
suggest that we respectfully refrain from publishing cartoons that upset the mental lethargy of
self-made slaves to authority; Muslims have a right to their mystical taboos, precisely because the
beliefs are mystical.
Tonight, when you turn on the news and see hatred-seething hordes burning the West's flags and
torching its embassies, remember that this is the enemy your morality commands you to love and
serve -- and remember the lonely Danes hiding in fear for their lives.
And then, in the ultimate act of self-assertiveness, pledge to renounce the morality of sacrifice and
learn its opposite: the morality of rational self-interest.
Though the West's twilight has begun, the darkness of suicide has not yet engulfed us. We still have a
chance.
____________________________________________
Dr Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California.
By Onkar Ghate
Posted: May 9, 2006
To fathom our government's contemptible treatment of a handful of unbowed journalists, you must see
the roots of that treatment in the moral ideal Christianity bequeathed the West.
In the face of the intimidation and murder of European authors, film makers and politicians by Islamic
militants, a few European newspapers have the courage to defend their freedom of speech: they
publish twelve cartoons to test whether it's still possible to criticize Islam. They discover it isn't.
Muslims riot, burn embassies, and demand the censorship and death of infidels. The Danish
cartoonists go into hiding; if they weren't afraid to speak before, they are now.
How do our leaders respond? Do they declare that an individual's freedom of speech is inviolable, no
matter who screams offense at his ideas? No. Do they defend our right to life and pledge to hunt down
anyone, anywhere, who abets the murder of a Westerner for having had the effrontery to speak? No --
as they did not when the fatwa against Rushdie was issued or his translators were attacked and
murdered.
Instead, the U.S. government announces that although free speech is important, the government
shares "the offense that Muslims have taken at these images," and even hints that it is disrespectful to
publish them.
Why does a Muslim have a moral right to his dogmas, but we don't to our rational principles? Why,
when journalists uphold free speech and Muslims respond with death threats, does the State
Department signal out the journalists for moral censure? Why the vicious double standard? Why
admonish the good to mollify evil?
The answer lies in the West's conception of morality.
Morality, we are told incessantly, by secularists and religionists, the left and the right, means sacrifice;
give up your values in selfless service to others. "Serve in a cause larger than your wants, larger than
yourself," Bush proclaims to a believing nation.
But when you surrender your values, are you to give them up for men you admire, for those you think
have earned and deserve them? Obviously not -- otherwise yours would be an act of trade, of justice, of
self-assertiveness, not self-sacrifice.
You must give to that which you don't admire, to that which you judge to be unworthy, undeserving,
irrational. An employee, for instance, must give up his job for a competitor he deems inferior; a
businessman must contribute to ideological causes he opposes; a taxpayer must fund modern,
unemployed "artists" whose feces-covered works he loathes; the United States must finance the UN,
which it knows to be a pack of America-hating dictatorships.
To uphold your rational convictions is the most selfish of acts. To renounce them, to surrender the
world to that which you judge to be irrational and evil, is the epitome of sacrifice. When Jesus, the great
preacher of self-sacrifice, commanded "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to
them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you," he knew whereof
he spoke.
In the left's adaptation of this perverse ideal, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of
self-loathing and "sensitivity," of spitting in America and the West's face while showing respect for the
barbarisms of every gang.
Bill Clinton, for instance, certainly no radical leftist, jumped into the recent fray to castigate us: "None of
us are totally free of stereotypes about people of different races, different ethnic groups, and different
religions . . . there was this appalling example in . . . Denmark . . . these totally outrageous cartoons
against Islam."
In the right's version, selfless surrender to evil translates into a foreign policy of self-effacing service.
Our duty, Bush declares, is to bring the vote to Iraqis and Palestinians, but we dare not tell them what
constitution to adopt, or ban the killers they want to vote for. We have no right to assert our principles,
because they are rational and good. But the Iraqis and Palestinians have a right to enact their tribal and
terrorist beliefs at our expense, because their beliefs are irrational and evil.
In the present crisis, the State Department will not defend free speech, because this principle is
rationally defensible; to unequivocally assert this value would be selfish. But the Department will
suggest that we respectfully refrain from publishing cartoons that upset the mental lethargy of
self-made slaves to authority; Muslims have a right to their mystical taboos, precisely because the
beliefs are mystical.
Tonight, when you turn on the news and see hatred-seething hordes burning the West's flags and
torching its embassies, remember that this is the enemy your morality commands you to love and
serve -- and remember the lonely Danes hiding in fear for their lives.
And then, in the ultimate act of self-assertiveness, pledge to renounce the morality of sacrifice and
learn its opposite: the morality of rational self-interest.
Though the West's twilight has begun, the darkness of suicide has not yet engulfed us. We still have a
chance.
____________________________________________
Dr Onkar Ghate is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California.
| (c) 2006 New Criterion Foundation, London |
| Security. Ideologies. Multiculturalism. |