It’s right, just and easy to condemn the barbaric attack on journalists in Paris this week. Count us among the many condemning it.
Islamic terrorists murdered 12 people, including two police officers, at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.
The magazine is no stranger to controversy. It routinely takes shots at all of the world’s major religions and prominent political figures (including Presidents George W. Bush and Obama). It has lampooned not just all of France’s Muslims (like its Catholics and Jews), but also specifically the jihadists and many jihadist wannabes in their midst. In 2011, those jihadists showed how thin-skinned and worthy of the mockery they were when they responded to a satirical provocation by firebombing the magazine’s offices.
There is no need to glorify Charlie Hebdo to see how this attack tests the mettle of western liberal democracies. Are the people of the West serious about protecting free speech or not? Whether they find the magazine content amusing or offensive, neither Americans nor Europeans should ever accept a precedent that lets violence and threats dictate what can and cannot be said in public.
Some speech makes people angry. Sometimes the anger is justified. But that is the entire point of protecting speech, the press, religion and assembly. No one assails the right to say that which is uncontroversial or to believe that which is popular. It is the unpopular belief and the provocative statement that requires protection.
Failure to protect unpopular and provocative speech is the same as failure to protect any speech, just as the failure to protect unfashionable or countercultural religious beliefs would eradicate the freedom of religion per se. The two principles are one and the same. To reject the freedom of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists and writers is to reject the freedom of Muslims to worship in western countries. This is why all decent Muslims in the West should be as gravely offended by this attack as anyone else, even if they feel justified in being angry about harmless satirical assaults on their religion.
The founders of the United States were very wise men, and they put the First Amendment first. No value is more American than freedom of belief and expression. The significance we place on this principle is one of the things that makes this country a stronger and better place than most others and of course inestimably preferable to the tyrannies that expressly deny this freedom.
For westerners to bow to the violent agents of theocracy who conducted the attack in Paris, or to anyone else hoping to dictate by force what others can and cannot say, is to place the freedom of speech at the mercy of the most sensitive and least mentally stable person in every room. All manner of opinion can be tolerated. Violence in answer to an argument or joke can never be tolerated.
