Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and civil servants to punish the speakers. The censors didn’t want to make us good or persuade us of anything in particular: Obedience would suffice. As we began, more or less, to govern ourselves, the first thing we did was rid ourselves of the informers, demote the priests and schoolteachers, and find other work for the cops.
What we’re doing these days is something quite new: The people themselves seek to rehire the censors, restore the (social) network of snitches, and redeploy the police—to govern our own speech. The aim is not to ensure the stability of a regime but to save us from being unkind to one another and encourage moral excellence. The notion that vigilantly watching what we say makes us better people is a crazy one. But it has an even crazier corollary: the widely shared conviction that what people say aloud is a reliable gauge of their private thoughts. Consider the case of the student journalist and the terrorist.
“That thoughtful, engaged student I had met the first day of classes had snapped. He had tried to kill people.”
In these words, Kevin Stankiewicz, a student journalist at the Ohio State University daily Lantern, describes two different people: The thoughtful engaged student is the late Abdul Razak Ali Artan, whom Stankiewicz had the luck to interview for a roving reporter feature for his paper on August 23, the day OSU classes began. By coincidence, the subject of his paragraph turned out to be the man who set out on November 28 to kill as many students as he could knock down with his car and then stab with a butcher knife. Artan had injured 10 students and a professor before an OSU policeman stopped his attack by shooting and killing him.
In a gracefully written op-ed for the Washington Post published two days after the Columbus attack, Stankiewicz describes his “quite intense” conversation with Artan last summer. Artan had given not the slightest hint that he considered himself a soldier of ISIS or intended any harm to anyone. Far from it: Artan shared his “thoughtful frustrations and fears” that the media had so badly informed American students about Muslims that other students might be afraid of him. Stankiewicz reported Artan’s own words in his original Lantern feature: “If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don’t know what they’re going to think, what’s going to happen. But, I don’t blame them.” Artan was “soft-spoken,” “friendly,” “measured and intellectual not angry or violent.” He indicated to Stankiewicz that he wanted to “spread understanding and awareness.” Artan mentioned violence only as something that might be directed at him, as a Muslim who wanted to pray in public. Stankiewicz told Sallee Ann Ruibal, another Lantern reporter, that Artan “specifically mentioned he was afraid someone might shoot him.”
On a Facebook page discovered by law enforcement officials, Artan had quite different complaints from the concern about the bigoted thoughts of OSU students. He was enraged at Burma’s oppression of its Muslim minority and connected it to the war on ISIS conducted by America and its “fellow apostate allies”: “We are not weak. We are [not] weak, remember that. If you want us Muslims to stop carrying [out] lone wolf attacks, then make peace with ‘Dawla in al sham’ [ISIS].” He advises Muslims to listen “to our hero Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki”—the prominent al Qaeda cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen in 2011. He fingers as traitors to Islam several prominent Islamic teachers and imams in Texas (where he and his family arrived as Somali refugees in 2014). He concludes by swearing on the deity that he is “willing to use a billion infidels in retribution.”
It is possible, if unlikely, that Artan only became persuaded of his duty to radical jihad at some point in the 97 days between his Lantern interview and his attack (in which case he concealed his change of heart from everyone who had contact with him in the interval). There is no way Stankiewicz could have known that Artan felt that way. But Stankiewicz lacks the journalist’s rage at finding himself misled. To him, the Artan who disclosed his hopes and fears without rancor or hatred was the true, the only Artan, not an agent of vengeance but a recipient of hatred. Well, to be more exact, he was only vicariously the object of hatred. Stankiewicz told another Lantern reporter that “Artan listed several instances of Islamophobia that Muslims and refugees have experienced.”
That Artan was gentle in speech and fearful in manner proves that something must have happened afterward. Stankiewicz remembers Artan’s “comments about his fears of a nation divided by hate and lack of understanding” and finds the discrepancy between his words and actions “chilling.” I am astonished that Stankiewicz didn’t even consider that Artan might have created the discrepancy by lying.
Why on earth not? That we are lying animals is the raison d’être for every institution—from marriage to justice—that mankind had to create to make it possible to live in communities and not as lone wolves. Brides, thieves, husbands, rustlers, farmers, murderers, shepherds—we suspect them all. Even the victim and witnesses to a crime must swear on penalty of being a criminal themselves to the truth of what they say about the accused, who is himself so likely to lie that common law excuses him from having to speak at all. Couples about to marry were, until quite recently, dragged before an altar or a judge with both their families and made to swear to their fidelity, so little do we trust young love.
Our reliance upon speech censors to detect and cure evil has disarmed us to such a degree that even a journalist forgets the first tool of his trade: suspicion. It doesn’t occur to Stankiewicz that a man who in November dies as a soldier of ISIS might in August have concealed his thirst for revenge on America and on Muslim scholars whom he considers heretics. (There is nothing particularly Islamic about deception; any secret agent in Artan’s position would dissemble, whether Nazi, Communist, Irish nationalist or French résistant.)
Stankiewicz is admirably careful about making too strong a case for the theory that hate speech against Artan’s religion caused the “thoughtful, engaged” student to “snap” and become the very different person who tried to kill as many of his fellow students as he could, using the techniques that ISIS recommends to its admirers in the West. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, is not so reluctant. Commenting on the attack, he told reporters, “If we respond to this situation by casting aspersions on millions of people that adhere to a particular religion or if we increase our suspicion of people who practice a particular religion, we are more likely going to contribute to acts of violence than we are to prevent them.” If expressing dislike of Islam to Muslims will cause them to become terrorists in the future, then this must be what the White House believes happened to Artan. There is an easy cure in that case: don’t cast aspersions, don’t say that a small minority of Muslims are more likely than a small minority of adherents of other faiths to become terrorists. If we watch our tongues, we don’t have to keep watch on radical mosques, which will please the ACLU.
I’m doubtful that a perfect control of speech and the militant guarding of the faith from aspersion would have prevented the Artan of August from becoming the Artan of November. The French journalist David Thomson just published a book of interviews with French Muslims who left the country to wage jihad with ISIS and have now returned to France, called Les revenants—the ghosts. Consider the words of Zoubeir, son of middle-class parents in Paris, describing his gradual radicalization as an adolescent. Whenever a terrorist attack takes place in France, Zoubeir’s high school teachers vigilantly mark the distinction between Islam and jihadism. The poor boy can’t bear it. “The more they told me that it wasn’t Islam, the more I was convinced of the opposite.” The massive and well-coordinated media and political enterprise intended to deny that there is any connection between terror and Islam is pointless and countereffective. Says Zoubeir:
The still-prospective terrorist Zoubeir testifies to the futility of permitting only those opinions that are flattering and chic. I wish others would mind attractive lies as much as he does—or be able to detect them.
Sam Schulman is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
