USA Today on Friday re-affirmed its decision to publish an editorial penned by Anjem Choudary, a Muslim cleric in Britain whose pro-jihad defense of the Charlie Hebdo massacre angered many of the newspaper’s readers.
Choudary, who has in the past also defended the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks in the U.S., wrote in response to a separate USA Today editorial that condemned the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, which claimed the lives of 10 journalists and two police officers.
USA Today’s editorial page editor, Brian Gallagher, explained Friday that Choudary’s clout and visibility made him a “natural choice” to provide a counter-view to those who condemned the deadly attacks.
“His argument is neither an incitement to violence nor a defense of the murders. Both of those would have been unacceptable. Rather, it is a tempered analysis of the motivations behind tragedies like the Charlie Hebdo attack: Nothing is more central to Islam, he points out, than the sanctity of the religion’s founder, the prophet Mohammed,” Gallagher wrote.
“So Muslims, passionate in their faith, are duty-bound to reject Western standards of free speech that tolerate blasphemy to the prophet,” he added.
The USA Today editor acknowledged that most Americans reject this view outright, adding that many Muslims do as well, but he said these views exist nonetheless and therefore it’s important that they be heard so all sides can be understood.
“It needs to be understood and countered,” he wrote. “Yet our critics argue that the appropriate response is to blind ourselves. Hear no evil, see no evil, and all will be well.”
“[T]hey are just plain wrong. Ignorance is not bliss, and the long contest against extremist Islam will not be won by donning blindfolds,” he added.
He argued that, although certain opposing views may be offensive, they can also be informative.
“While the broad social media discussion about the wisdom of publishing Choudary’s opinion is predictably negative, internal reader commentary — reflecting people who actually read the debate — is more subdued than in some previous opposing view controversies, and it is about evenly split,” he wrote.
“Perhaps that’s attributable to the nature of the Charlie Hebdo story. French satirists were murdered for being bold enough to criticize Islam. We would have dishonored their memories by refusing to publish offensive commentary from the other side,” he added.
In the final paragraph of his “opposing view” editorial, Choudary argued that it “is time that the sanctity of a Prophet revered by up to one-quarter of the world’s population was protected.”
