We must defend free speech. Even when we find it repulsive
The true test for those defending free speech is to do so even when they find it repulsive, writes Caroline Marcus. Turning to violence is indefensible.
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It was only a couple of years ago that millions of people flooded the streets of France in solidarity with those killed in the horrific Charlie Hebdo terror attack.
The marchers waved placards and chanted “Je Suis Charlie” in honour of the 12 killed and several injured when three Islamic terrorists stormed the satirical magazine’s Paris offices on January 7, 2015, later killing four more people at a kosher supermarket.
French President Francois Hollande — walking side-by-side with world leaders — proclaimed: “Today, Paris is the capital of the world.”
Back in Australia, you couldn’t open Facebook, Twitter or Instagram without being accosted by thousands of posts repeating that #JeSuisCharlie catchcry.
Despite my usual loathing for hashtag activism, even I was moved to leap on the online bandwagon (quelle horreur!).
Back then, virtually everyone bar fanatical Islamists and the odd brutal dictator was in agreement: free speech is worth protecting and violence against those who say things you find offensive is unjustifiable.
Fast forward to February 2017.
A group of people meet at a Q Society fundraising dinner in Sydney on Thursday night to raise money for far-right Australian Liberty Alliance candidate Kirralie Smith to defend defamation action stemming from her anti-halal campaign.
Highly off-colour comments are made, particularly by cartoonist and professional provocateur Larry Pickering, who says while he “can’t stand Muslims… they’re not all bad; they do chuck pillow-biters off buildings, I suppose”.
No question — it was disgusting.
(Less widely reported, Pickering also called the Bible a “load of shit” in the same speech but, presumably, his critics have no issue with offending Christians.)
My Sky News colleague, Ross Cameron, was also admonished for his own speech renaming a Fairfax newspaper The Sydney Morning Homosexual for its obsession with marriage equality and calling his own former party, the NSW Liberals, a “gay club”.
Cameron has since apologised.
Instead of condoning hatred towards gays or Muslims, Pickering (or indeed Cameron or another speaker) could have used the opportunity to make the point that the hypocritical Left continue to apologise for fundamentalist Islam under the guise of pre-empting hypothetical Islamophobic retaliation, while conveniently overlooking the very real, deadly homophobia (the Left’s other pet cause) exhibited by Islamic State in throwing gays off buildings.
But as distasteful as we may find Pickering’s comments, we must defend his right to say them.
It shouldn’t be brushed over that this is an artist who has received death threats over his work, to the point where national security agents have advised him to move house.
Pickering’s cartoons are not far removed in ideology from Charlie Hebdo’s, which frequently lampoon not just Islam, but Christianity and Judaism.
It was Charlie Hebdo’s controversial illustrations of the Prophet Mohammed, including one depicting him as gay and locked in a slobbery French kiss with one of its own journalists, that were blamed by fundamentalists for the attack.
Prior to the 2015 killings, the magazine had defended lawsuits from the Islamic community for its caricatures of the prophet and was the target of a 2011 petrol bomb attack over a special “Sharia Hebdo” edition which depicted the prophet as a “guest editor” on its cover and jokingly threatened, “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”.
Of course, violent threats and fatwas over anti-Islamic work are nothing new.
British-Indian author Salman Rushdie was the target of one such fatwa, backed by the then Iranian government, for his controversial 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
Last year, on the anniversary of the original fatwa, 40 Iranian state-run media outlets jointly offered a fresh US$600,000 ($840,000) bounty for Rushdie’s death.
Let’s not forget, either, the 2012 protests in Sydney which turned violent after hundreds of Muslims gathered to protest against a controversial American film again depicting their prophet in a less than flattering light.
Six police officers were injured, two requiring hospital treatment, and a young child was photographed holding a sign reading: “Behead those who insult the Prophet”.
Some observers have made the point that comments such as Pickering’s are unhelpful and represent an own goal in the free speech debate, in particular, the argument Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act should be repealed.
But the true test for those defending free speech is to do so even when we find it repulsive.
Other than incitement to violence (indefensible and rightly illegal), we should not try to shut it down but rather discuss why it is wrong.
The real danger now is that some groups are justifying violence as a means of silencing dissenting views.
The night following the Sydney dinner, “anti-racist” protesters violently clashed with guests attending a similar event in Melbourne, to be headlined by Liberal MP George Christensen and newly Independent Senator Cory Bernadi.
The demonstrators rocked the bus transporting guests to the function, attacked cars and one man was photographed grabbing another by the throat.
There were clear parallels with the recent violent anti-Trump and campus riots in the US, one of the worst at the University of California, Berkeley — ironically, considered the birthplace of the free speech movement — over a scheduled speech by right-wing, gay provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos on February 1.
A few hours before the talk was due to begin, protesters, some of whom were dressed in black ninja-like outfits, pulled down police barricades, hurled Molotov cocktails, smashed windows and threw rocks at police, resulting in $130,000 in property damage.
Yiannopoulos’ appearance had to be called off due to the threat to public safety.
The great irony is rather than silencing him, the hysterical, illiberal reaction only led to more prime-time television appearances and Yiannopoulos’ book, Dangerous, skyrocketing to the top spot on Amazon’s bestseller list.
There are now worrying calls to “punch a Nazi”, after alt-right figure Richard Spencer (a white nationalist who denies he is a Nazi) was whacked while giving an interview — and I say “worrying” despite the fact my own Jewish ancestors have perished under the Nazis.
Violence makes you worse than those you rail against.
Caroline Marcus is a journalist with Sky News.
@carolinemarcus
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