Galloway to God

Galloway to God

Have we forgotten the worldwide violence in the Muslim world surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses and the fatwa on his head by Iran’s mullahs? Or, the 2005 cartoon scandal in which the prophet Muhammad was depicted as a human bomb by the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten? More recently, controversial British MP George Galloway was barred from entering Canada for a speaking engagement in Toronto on March 30 because of his material support for Hamas, an outlawed terrorist organization in Canada. In turn, Galloway has backed the British government denying entrance to Geert Wilders, the anti-immigrant Dutch politician because his film Fitna paints Islam as a terrorist faith. Unfortunately, all political movements and regimes sometimes play God in respect of free speech.

Free speech problems have intensified in my own country: Canada. During “Israeli Apartheid Week” (IAW) from March 1-8, Carleton University took the step of banning the IAW poster: A defenseless Palestinian child about to be bombed by an Israeli jet. B’nai Brith sought to muzzle IAW, insisting it is a “hate-festival” that promotes demonisation of Jews under the cover of anti-Zionism.

In 2008, a human rights tribunal case against The Western Standard was finally dropped after complaints from Muslim groups as the press outlet decided to reprint the twelve Danish cartoons from Jyllands-Posten. In 2006, the Canadian Islamic Congress unsuccessfully sought to sue Maclean’s for a Marc Steyn article about the rise of Muslims as a political constituency that it claimed was Islamophobic. In disturbing events at Concordia University in 2003, university administrators shamefully gave in to violent student rioters seeking to prevent a speaking engagement from current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

What do all of these cases have in common? What do they say about free speech in Canada? They are united by chilling attempts of political movements or regimes to undermine political speech, the central value of a liberal democratic society. The hallmark of any democracy is the peaceful alternation of governments. This is only possible through the collision of divergent worldviews and political ideologies, as well as the legal protection of political speech.

The instinct of too many political movements is to ban odious speech of their opponents. In short, to play God when determining who can say what and where. Our government ought to know better. They must accord political speech the highest protection, even if it offends us. The alternative is a nanny state that jealously guards what it is we hear. We should promote healthy skepticism vis-à-vis political movements or governments that call for the silencing of free speech in the name of abstract “Canadian values,” “Peace, Order, and Good Government,” or disturbing moral or religious sensibilities. Are Canadian citizens young children that must be shielded from what others say?

Second, the cases highlighted also share the reality that political speech is often an absolute for our political cause or regime, but a privilege that can be taken away from our political foes. Galloway has became a free speech cause celebre for the left in Canada, while the British MP cannot stretch his arm out to extend the right to free speech to his right-wing Dutch political enemy Geert Wilders. IAW offended the sensibilities of many Canadian Jews, but Arab groups supported its presence in 13 Canadian cities. These same Arab groups were offended by Marc Steyn’s article and turned to legal mechanisms to silence its message. They also voiced outrage over the decision of The Western Standard to reprint the inflammatory Danish cartoons. While the IAW crowd promotes it as a free speech question in respect of Palestinian rights, one wonders if they might not call for the banning of festivals entitled Iranian, Pakistani, Saudi, Libyan or Gaza Palestine apartheid weeks, as Jews have been cleansed from those societies?

Thirdly, the free speech cases illustrate what the Viennese philosopher Karl Popper called the “democratic paradox”: Illiberal, anti-democratic political movements can utilize the liberal parliamentary framework to annul democratic processes. Did not the Nazi Party use Weimar’s parliamentary system only to abolish democracy in 1933? Did not an Islamist party, Hamas, win elections in Gaza in 2007 and proceed to liquidate Fatah secularists and democracy?

As the aforementioned examples demonstrate, democracy is a risky and open-ended historical process. Admittedly, the Nazi case was no mere free speech issue. It was a failure to clamp down on a movement that was annihilationist and used illegal violence in its rise to power. Nazis were outlandishly tolerated by timorous political elites. The final fateful error was made by an ailing President to incredibly grant Hitler the post of Chancellor after the Nazis systematically and violently targeted leftists and Jews.

In the Nazi and Hamas cases, people willingly escaped from freedom towards state authoritarianism and genocidal ideologies. In our free speech cases, we have the whiff of anti-democratic extremism and the desire to silence political foes. We have the worrying signs of creeping authoritarianism.

No doubt free expression is never an absolute, even in a liberal democracy. One cannot yell “Fire!” in a crowded theatre as it will cause “imminent harm and danger.” One cannot use national public radio to call for the extermination of specific ethnic groups. This is what the genocidal Hutu-led regime did to whip up hatred of Tutsis in 1994 resulting in one of the worst genocides of the 20th century. One cannot, as a public educator of young children, teach that the Holocaust was a Zionist hoax. This is what state-led media tragically teaches in theocratic Iran.

A liberal democracy like Canada must be cognizant that political speech is the highest constitutionally protected speech because of its impact on the functioning of a vibrant, pluralistic democracy. We cannot hypocritically protect political speech, only if it does not offend us. Political correctness does not cut it because it expresses the machinations of narrow partisan movements. As Canadians we must be less polite and understand that the political arena is a passionate realm that will have noxious views.

All politics, argued Carl Schmitt, was a struggle between friends and foes of antagonistic political camps. When we muzzle our political foes, we jettison the struggle for power that is politics. We accept the struggle of competing sports teams when Toronto FC plays the Los Angeles Galaxy. Why do we plays gods when it comes to protecting political speech of our opponents and the future of Canadian democracy?

Tamir Bar-On