The Volokh Conspiracy

The Telegraph (UK) reports:

Turkey’s Supreme Board of Radio and Television (RTUK), the state broadcasting regulator, levied [an approximately $30,000] fine on the cartoon’s Turkish broadcaster for airing an episode on September 20 that was found to be insulting to religion ....

In one segment of the episode, titled “Dial D for Diddly”, the religiously-devout character Ned Flanders goes on a killing rampage after being given orders by what he thinks is the voice of God. Later in the episode, the Devil demands God bring him a cup of coffee. “Yes sir,” God responds, revealing it is actually the Devil that runs the world.

RTUK stated that the episode shows “one of the characters is abusing another one’s religious beliefs to make him commit murders.

The Bible is publicly burned in one scene and God and the Devil are shown in human bodies.”

RTUK also said that God serving the Devil coffee can be considered an insult to religious beliefs.

The fine was handed to Turkish broadcaster CNBC-E for “making fun of God, encouraging the young people to exercise violence by showing the murders as God’s orders.”

Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.

The AP reports that an Egyptian court has sentenced seven Egyptian Coptic Christians, plus American pastor Terry Jones, to death in absentia. (All are now outside the country, so the sentence won’t have any legal effect on them unless they return, or go to a country — likely a Muslim one — that is willing to extradite them to Egypt.) The sentences are to be automatically reviewed by Egypt’s “chief religious authority” over the next two months. “Egypt’s official news agency said the court found the defendants guilty of harming national unity, insulting and publicly attacking Islam and spreading false information.”

Those convicted include Mark Basseley Youssef, who was the chief creator of the film, Terry Jones, who was involved in its distribution, and Morris Sadek, who posted clips from the film; but they also include several Coptic activists who have opposed the Egyptian regime but say they have nothing to do with the film. “They include two who work with Sadek at a radical Coptic group in the U.S. that has called for an independent Coptic state, a priest who hosts TV programs from the U.S.[,] a lawyer living in Canada who has previously sued the Egyptian state over riots in 2000 that left 21 Christians dead,” and “a woman who converted to Christianity and is a staunch critic of Islam.”

Reuters reports:

Actors and the producer and director of an American play in Greece that depicted Jesus Christ and his apostles as gay ["Corpus Christi"] have been [criminally] charged with blasphemy [after Bishop Seraphim of Piraeus lodged a lawsuit against those involved in the play] ....

A production of “Corpus Christi” in Athens was canceled this month after weeks of almost daily protests outside the theatre by priests and right-wing groups, including deputies from the ultra-nationalist Golden Dawn party....

Dozens of demonstrators, including some from Golden Dawn, blocked the entrance of the theatre and clashed with police on the night of the play’s premiere last month.

Bearded black-robed priests holding crosses were shown on television tearing up posters promoting the play....

The Guardian (UK) reports:

A teenager arrested on Remembrance Sunday on suspicion of posting a picture of a burning poppy on Facebook is being questioned by police.

The 19-year-old was held after the image of a poppy being set ablaze by a lighter was reportedly posted online with the caption: “How about that you squadey cunts”.

Police said the man, from Canterbury, Kent, was detained on suspicion of an offence under the Malicious Communications Act after officers were contacted at about 4pm on Sunday....

In March last year, Emdadur Choudhury, a member of Muslims Against Crusades, was fined £50 after burning replica poppies on the anniversary of Armistice Day.

Choudhury had denied a charge under Section 5 of the Public Order Act of burning the poppies in a way that was likely to cause “harassment, harm or distress” to those who witnessed it. But he was guilty of a “calculated and deliberate” insult to the dead and those who mourn them when he burned two large plastic poppies during a two-minute silence on 11 November, a judge at Belmarsh magistrates court said....

Thanks to commenter Martin Holterman (martinned) for the pointer.

UPDATE: Just to make this clear, poppies are often used to memorialize the English and Commonweealth soldiers who were killed in World War I.

From Peta Deutschland v. Germany (Eur. Ct. Hum. Rts. Nov. 8, 2012):

6. The applicant association is the German branch of the animal rights organisation PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). It pursues, inter alia, the aims of preventing animal suffering and of encouraging the public to abstain from using animal products.

7. In March 2004 the applicant association planned to start an advertising campaign under the head “The Holocaust on your plate”. The intended campaign, which had been carried out in a similar way in the United States of America, consisted of a number of posters, each of which bore a photograph of concentration camp inmates along with a picture of animals kept in mass stocks, accompanied by a short text. One of the posters showed a photograph of emaciated, naked concentration camp inmates alongside a photograph of starving cattle under the heading “walking skeletons”. Other posters showed a photograph of piled up human dead bodies alongside a photograph of a pile of slaughtered pigs under the heading “final humiliation” and of rows of inmates lying on stock beds alongside rows of chicken in laying batteries under the heading “if animals are concerned, everybody becomes a Nazi”. Another poster depicting a starving, naked male inmate alongside a starving cattle bore the title “The Holocaust on your plate” and the text “Between 1938 and 1945, 12 million human beings were killed in the Holocaust. As many animals are killed every hour in Europe for the purpose of human consumption”.

8. In March 2004, three individual persons, P.S., C. K. and S. Korn, filed a request with the Berlin Regional Court to be granted an injunction ordering the applicant association to desist from publishing or from allowing the publication of seven specified posters via the internet, in a public exhibition or in any other form. The plaintiffs were at the time the president and the two vice-presidents of the Central Jewish Council in Germany. All of them had survived the Holocaust when they were children; C.K. lost her family through the Holocaust. They submitted that the intended campaign was offensive and violated their human dignity as well as the personality rights of C. K.’s dead family members.

9. On 18 March 2004 the Berlin Regional Court granted the injunction....

18. However, the Federal Constitutional Court did not find it necessary to decide whether the intended campaign violated the plaintiffs’ human dignity, as the impugned decisions contained sufficient arguments which justified the injunction without reference to a violation of the plaintiff’s human dignity. It was, in particular, acceptable that the domestic courts based their decisions on the assumption that the Basic Law drew a clear distinction between human life and dignity on one side and the interests of animal protection on the other and that the campaign was banalising the fate of the victims of the Holocaust. It was, furthermore, acceptable to conclude that this content of the campaign affected the plaintiffs’ personality rights. Referring to its earlier case law, the Federal Constitutional Court considered that it was part of the self-image of the Jews living in Germany that they belonged to a group which had been sampled out by their fate and that a special moral obligation was owed to them by all others, which formed part of their dignity.

The European Court of Human Rights upheld the German court’s decision, partly on the grounds of “the margin of appreciation,” which is the latitude given in close cases to national laws — a plausible position, and I fault here not the European Court but the German legal system itself — and partly because of “Germany’s history.” Two concurring judges, though, criticized reliance on Germany’s special history, and would have concluded that any country could and should (though not necessarily must) restrict such speech:

5. Here we may pause and ask, whether reasonable men could indeed or could not differ on the utterly distasteful and unacceptable comparison between pigs on the one hand and the inmates of Auschwitz or some other concentration camp, on the other hand. A few decades ago this kind of Denkexperiment, even in the American context, would only yield a result unfavourable to the applicants, because a few decades ago, reasonable persons could not possibly differ on the question we have before us in this case.

6. Apparently, things have changed to the extent that indeed both the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany, as well as our Court, are still able to say that such comparison is unacceptable, but only in the context of a country carrying a historical stigma concerning the concentration camps....

13. Here we are reminded of Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative. His position was that every human being must be treated as an end in himself. This perhaps coincides with the German constitutional concept of dignity.

14. But when human beings in their utter suffering and indignity are, as here, compared to hens and pigs for the lesser purpose of protecting otherwise legitimate advancement of animal rights, we are no longer in the position to maintain that the human beings seen in these pictures are treated as an end in themselves.

15. Clearly, these human beings, not only Jewish but of all nationalities, in a concentration camp, are here treated as an instrument for the advancement of animal rights. If their image is so instrumentalised, little is left of their human dignity, I’m certain, even in the context of German constitutional law.

A few thoughts:

1. I don’t think Germany’s history should be seen as reducing, in this respect, the free speech rights of Germans today. From a moral perspective, human rights ought not turn on the 65-year-old crimes of one’s countrymen, or of one’s listeners’ countrymen.

From an instrumental perspective, the chief reason free speech is valuable because restrictions on speech are likely to harm public debate in the present and in the future. People in Germany, like in all countries, have to face the question of how to judge the welfare of animals compared to the welfare of humans. People in Germany, like in all countries, have to judge how to evaluate the past actions of the Nazis. People in Germany, like in all countries, have to learn about what happened during World War II — and, as I have argued, restrictions on the freedom to debate such questions actually tend to lead to people having less confidence in the truth; as I’ve written before,

What is our main assurance that conventional wisdom among historians or scientists is likely to be correct, even when we ourselves lack the expertise to personally evaluate the question? Precisely the fact that scholars have reached and maintained a consensus on the conventional wisdom, in the face of others’ unfettered freedom to challenge and try to rebut that consensus. But say that factual criticism of a historical or scientific theory were banned, even using a ban limited only to criticism that a jury finds to be false and insincere. Confidence in the consensus view would then be less justified. First, we could not know whether the continued consensus stems from scholars’ not being exposed to outsider challenges, rather than from its continued scholarly acceptance despite the challenges. Second, we could not know whether the continued consensus is more apparent than real, because scholars who do find themselves having doubts are deterred from expressing them.

Restricting speech in Germany is thus just as dangerous as restricting it anywhere else. And whatever force there might be in arguments that some country’s situation is special because of a current menace — e.g., that this speech, even if not very dangerous in other countries is unacceptable dangerous in this one — I don’t think this argument can be made here, or is being made here: I would think that the risk of another Holocaust in Germany is no greater, and likely rather less, than in most other countries.

2. But of course this isn’t a case about Holocaust denial. The PETA people aren’t trying to deny that the Holocaust occurred — in fact, their argument is relying on its occurrence. Nor are they trying to encourage hostility or discrimination against Jews (not that I think this should suffice to justify restrictions on speech, but this is a common argument in favor of such restrictions).

Indeed, consider how far down the slope we’ve slipped, just as the ACLU and other free speech maximalists have predicted. Bans on advocacy of genocide, and “hate speech” more broadly gets banned. Holocaust denial isn’t quite that, but it might lead to that, so it’s banned, too. Unsurprisingly, this leads to punishment of other historical claims (see here, with regard to historian Bernard Lewis’s punishment in France for supposedly presenting an insufficiently “balanced presentation” of the killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I). Collecting and sale of Nazi memorabilia — well, that doesn’t advocate for anything as such, or deny anything, but that gets banned, too.

Now comparing certain actions to the Holocaust — again, with no denial of history, or advocacy of hostility to any ethnic or religious group — is punishable, too, on the grounds that it “banalise[s] the fate of the victims of the Holocaust.” Because government officials disagree with PETA’s viewpoint that the killing of animals really is pretty much as bad as the killing of humans, they suppress PETA’s expression of that viewpoint using references to the Holocaust. (I should note that I don’t agree with PETA’s view about the equivalence of the killing of animals and the Holocaust, either; I just think that it should be free to express that view.)

As I suggest in the title, this is secular blasphemy law (much as flag-burning laws are secular blasphemy laws, though I think even more dangerous, because they apply to a wider range of expression). The Holocaust is elevated to a sacred symbol that people can only use in officially approved ways. And, as the slippery slope so far shows, there’s no reason to think that this will remain here; indeed, such decisions encourage other groups to seek similar protection for their secular-sacred historical references. This is one reason I much prefer America’s free speech approach to the more “flexible” Western European approach.

Thanks to commenter Martin Holterman (martinned) for the pointer.

I was invited to testify on this subject at today’s U.S. Commission on Civil Rights briefing on Federal Civil Rights Engagement with the Arab and Muslim American Communities Post 9/11, so I thought I’d pass along my written remarks. You can read them in PDF form here, or in plain text below (though without the footnotes). My sense from the questions was that at least some commissioners (and not only the conservative ones) found the subject matter of the remarks interesting.

October 29, 2012

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
624 9th St., NW
Washington, DC 20425

Dear Members of the Commission:

I entirely agree that the religious freedom rights and free speech rights of Muslim Americans, as well as all other Americans, should be protected. I have publicly spoken out, for instance, in favor of applying religious accommodation law to Muslim employees as well as to others. I have condemned attempts to criticize Muslim office-holders for taking their oath of office on a Koran. I have spoken in favor of extending mosques the same property rights extended to other property owners, and against attempts to exclude mosques from particular areas. And I agree that the government should take steps to make Muslim Americans, like Americans of all religions, feel welcome in America.

At the same time, attempts to make adherents of minority religions feel welcome should not end up suppressing the free speech rights of others who seek to criticize those religions. Islam, like other belief systems — Catholicism, Scientology, libertarianism, feminism, or what have you — merits evaluation and, at times, criticism. And under the First Amendment, even intemperate and wrong-headed criticism is fully constitutionally protected. Yet unfortunately attempts at suppression of criticism of Islam have been distressingly frequent.

Universities: Thus, for instance, San Francisco State University’s College Republicans held an anti-terrorism rally at which they stepped on homemade replicas of Hamas and Hezbollah flags, which contain the word “Allah” in Arabic. The students were apparently unaware of the flags’ Arabic content, but the students’ symbolic expression of contempt for Hamas and Hezbollah would be constitutionally protected even if they knew what the flags contained — Hamas and Hezbollah are not immunized from such expressions by the religious content of their flags.

Yet offended students filed charges of “attempts to incite violence and create a hostile environment” and “actions of incivility,” prompting a university “investigation” that lasted five months. The university defended the process, noting that the complaint was not “about the desecration of the flag,” but about “the desecration of Allah.” It took a federal lawsuit and an injunction by a federal judge to strike down the unconstitutional speech code under which these complaints were filed.

Likewise, at Century College, a public school in Minnesota, administrators ordered a professor to take down copies of the Mohammed cartoons that she had posted on a bulletin board outside her office. At Purdue University, Muslim students claimed that a professor’s statements criticizing Muslims on his Facebook page were “discrimination” and “harassment,” and called for his firing; it took several months for the university investigation to absolve the professor of these charges.

Continue reading ‘U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Testimony on the First Amendment and Anti-Muslim/Anti-Islam Speech’ »

Thenews.pl reports:

“The crime of offending religious sensibilities is committed not only by he who intends to carry it out, but also by he who is aware that his actions may lead to offence being taken,” [Poland's Supreme Court concluded on Monday].

Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) points to the court decision, and my father knows Polish and helpfully translated some passages for me. Here’s the scoop:

1. This all started in 2007, when defendant Adam Darski — lead singer for the Polish death metal band Behemoth, and apparently quite a celebrity in Poland — tore up a copy of the Bible at a concert, threw the pieces in the direction of the audience, while saying, “This is a book of lies. Fuck this shit. Fuck this hypocrisy. Eat that shit.”

2. A lower court had acquitted Darski, on the grounds that he did not specifically intend to offend religious sensibilities, and that his speech was “‘a form of art” consistent with the style of his band” (Guardian (UK)).

3. The Supreme Court has now reversed that decision, and ordered that Darski be retried; he faces up to two years in prison if convicted.

4. The court concluded, as noted above, that the statute applied not just to people who have the purpose of offending religion, but also those who know that their actions may lead to such offense. And the criminal statute, the court argued, actually advanced the “freedom of conscience and religion” secured by the Polish Constitution and European human rights law, because the right to protection of religious sensibilities was itself a part of the listeners’ freedom of conscience and religion.

Moreover, the court reasoned, the provision did not violate the freedom of speech and artistic freedom, because those rights could be restricted in order to protect (quoting the Polish Constitution) “the freedoms and rights of other persons.” The court extensively cited interpretations of European human rights law that, the court said, supported its conclusions. And it favorably cited the view of a Polish commentator (W. Wróbel) that,

The nature of the speech, behavior, or artistic work should be assessed objectively, by referring to the cultural norms of the community. The person’s artistic or scientific purpose is not sufficient to counteract the insulting nature of the actions based on their form.

5. Just stepping back a bit: There seem to be not two general approaches to blasphemy and to hostility towards religious groups throughout the world (treat it as protected speech, as in the U.S., or view it as an extremely serious, even capital, crime, as in some Muslim countries), but at least four.

(A) In the U.S., blasphemy and the expression of religious hostility is viewed as constitutionally protected.

(B) In many Western European and Western-European-settled countries, blasphemy as such is generally not criminal (or at least hasn’t been punished in decades) but expression that it seen as intended or likely to incite religious hostility is punishable, through legal processes and with significant but not extremely serious punishments. (Ireland retains a blasphemy ban, and there was a blasphemy conviction in Austria in 1985, but I don’t know of any more recent incidents in Western Europe and in what was called Central Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall.)

(C) In some European countries — in recent years, we’ve seen this in Poland, Russia, and Greece — blasphemy is criminal (and expression of religious hostility might be, too), and again is punished through legal processes and with significant but not extremely serious punishments. This is not vastly different from category B, but the rationale (offense to religious sensibilities vs. tendency to incite religious hostility towards the criticized group) is different, and the potential scope of punishment is different. Among other things, such blasphemy prosecutions tend to be more focused on speech that offends majority or plurality religious groups, while inciting religious hostility prosecutions tend to be focused on speech that offends minority religious groups.

(D) In many Islamic countries, blasphemy is viewed as an extremely serious offense, and can be punished by severe punishments and extralegal violence, whether by mobs or by individual actors (the latter leaking over sometimes into Western countries).

The News-Herald reports:

Mike Mohamad Agemy, who drove his SUV at a group of Christian demonstrators [the "Bible Believers"] in front of the Islamic Center of America on June 17 ... enter[ed] a no-contest plea ... to two lesser charges of aggravated assault, which each carry a sentence of up to six months in jail. [Judge Mark] Somers sentenced him two years’ probation, an anger-management class of about 12 weeks and $1,150 in fines and court costs....

Agemy, 47, initially was charged with seven counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and one count of reckless driving. The $2,000 bond he previously posted will be applied to his fines and court costs, meaning he’ll get $850 back. He’ll also be credited with three days he spent in jail.

Agemy’s attorney, Christopher Andreoff, and Kal Najar, Wayne County assistant prosecuting attorney, worked out the deal ahead of time. The attorney for the “Bible Believers’” leader also agreed to it.

The nine “Bible Believers” were protesting at about noon June 17 when Agemy drove by, saw them, turned around and drove to the mosque. Two police officers who were monitoring the protest wrote in a report that Agemy pulled his Explorer onto the circle drive in front of the mosque and spoke with a man. Agemy later told officers that the man said he wanted the protesters to stop....

According to a Police Department dashboard camera, Agemy drove across grass toward the protesters, swerving to his right about 8 feet in front of them and not hitting anyone....

A photo introduced as evidence Aug. 3 showed a sign that a protester was holding that said the Prophet Muhammad was a “liar” and a “child-molesting pervert.”

I appreciated Sen. Kyl’s recent op-ed on “the freedom to offend”:

Last month at the United Nations General Assembly, several Muslim-majority countries pushed for the implementation of a so-called “blasphemy ban,” with countries like Iran arguing that religiously insensitive language should be classified as “hate speech” and banned under international regulations.

The U.N rightly did not enact this unprecedented attack on one of our most fundamental rights –- at least for now.

Yet, the fact that such an outrageous proposal could even be seriously considered speaks volumes about the fierce global debate underway regarding the proper bounds of free speech in the 21st century. It’s a conversation Arizonans should watch with great interest, because it deals with our most fundamental of rights.

“What is freedom of expression?” the author Salman Rushdie once pondered. “Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” And he is correct. The heart of this debate mostly turns on whether or not individuals have the right to say or write things that might offend others. In America and across the Western world, we firmly believe that, yes, individuals do have that right....

I hope this means Sen. Kyl has changed his views on whether we should allow bans on flag burning; he voted for a constitutional amendment that would allow such bans in 1995, 2000, and 2006, and defended such an amendment in Congress in 1995. (Note also that the 2012 Republican Party platform continues to call for bans on “desecration” of the flag, though that is likely not Sen. Kyl’s doing.)

Note that Sen. Kyl isn’t even taking the view that words should be protected but nonverbal expression shouldn’t be — he says that publishing cartoons should be protected as well. I suppose he might take the view that verbal and pictorial depictions should be constitutionally protected even if they convey offensive messages, but symbolic expression should be punishable if it conveys offensive messages. But that doesn’t strike me as a particularly sensible distinction, given that a picture of a flag or of Mohammed and the burning of a flag or a Koran are similar means of conveying messages that some might offensive. As I argued in this article, Anglo-American law has long treated verbal expression and symbolic expression the same, from the Framing era on. And indeed one of the very first Supreme Court cases striking down government action on free expression grounds was a symbolic expression case, Stromberg v. California (1931).

For more on why banning flag burning would endanger other speech as well, see this op-ed.

UPDATE: Note that at least one Senator has indeed changed his position on this issue — Senator Mitch McConnell supported an anti-flag-burning amendment in 1990, but has opposed it since. According to Roll Call, May 31, 1993, “in an unusual admission, [Sen. McConnell] said that, of all the votes he had cast in his tenure, there was none he regretted more than that on flag-burning.”

Here’s the atheist group’s statement about the incident, which seems consistent with a Daily Mail (UK) account and with a statement from the student union (quoted in the article):

Today, the Reading University Atheist, Humanist, and Secularist Society (RAHS) participated in the Freshers’ [i.e. Freshmen's -EV] Fayre organised by Reading University Students’ Union (RUSU).

We spent several hours talking to other students and visitors, promoting the society and encouraging people to attend our forthcoming discussion on the topic “Should we respect religion?”

Among the material displayed on our stall was a pineapple. We labelled this pineapple “Mohammed”, to encourage discussion about blasphemy, religion, and liberty, as well as to celebrate the fact that we live in a country in which free speech is protected, and where it is lawful to call a pineapple by whatever name one chooses.

Towards the end of the afternoon, we were informed by a member of RUSU staff that there had been complaints about the pineapple, despite the fact that no complaints had been made at any point to anybody on the stall. Our commitment to freedom of expression meant that we refused to remove the pineapple from our stall. After a few minutes, we were told by another member of RUSU staff that “Either the pineapple goes, or you do”, whereupon they seized the pineapple and tried to leave. However, the pineapple was swiftly returned, and shortly was displayed again, with the name Mohammed changed to that of Jesus....

The RAHS believes in freedom of expression. Our intent in displaying a pineapple labelled “Mohammed” was to draw attention to cases where religion has been used to limit this and other fundamental rights, such as the imprisonment of Gillian Gibbons. We did not expect to be forced out of the Freshers’ Fayre because of a pineapple, and we are disappointed that RUSU took this action....

It’s a sad situation, I think, when a university student government is excluding student group speech from a student group event on the grounds of blasphemy. And while in some situations such speech by groups can be vulgar or juvenile, it seems to me that in this case it was an important and sensible part of the atheist group’s message: We don’t accept the legitimacy of the attempts to suppress blasphemy, the group is saying, and we insist on speaking notwithstanding others’ irrationally based demands that our speech be suppressed.

For an even more serious incident of attempted censorship by a university itself (San Francisco State University), see here and here). Thanks to Ken Braithwaite for the pointer.

A generally very good discussion, I think, from a State Department online press conference on Sept. 27. One can debate whether or not some of the condemnation of certain kinds of speech might go a bit far (though it doesn’t go as far, I think, as the general condemnation of “denigration of religion” that I had earlier criticized). But that’s much less significant in this context, I think, than the detailed, repeated, and unembarrassed reaffirmation of free speech protection:

MR. BUFFINGTON: ... As our first question, Satya Festiani from The Republika Online, her question is: What is the U.S. response over the video Innocence of Muslims? Is there any limitation to what kind of freedom of expression is allowed?

MR. BAER: Thanks very much. I – the response from – to the film itself has been made clear both by Secretary Clinton and President Obama in his speech to the UN this week where he said – repeated the statements that we’ve made numerous times now, which is that the content of that film is not something that the U.S. Government had anything to do with or that we support in any way. We reject that, the content of that film, as we reject any kind of film or other speech that would seem to be encouraging people to take hateful attitudes.

That being said, there are protections in international law and in domestic U.S. law for freedom of expression, and those protections are in place and have been in place for a long time. And they have good reasons. And the reasons are that while we certainly deplore the content of certain speech, we protect people’s right to say pretty much all manner of speech. There are some limitations. They are very, very, very limited limitations. And so the response to the film has been both to make clear that we do not in any way support the content or have any connection with it, as well as to reaffirm our commitment to freedom of expression.

I should say also that it’s not just the U.S. Government that deplores the content of this video. Many, many Americans who have no connection to the U.S. Government have made clear that they too are offended by the video. Of course, there are millions of Muslim Americans who – in our country, but also people of other faiths have made clear that they deplore the content of the video. So the response in this country has been quite, quite strong in terms of deploring the content of that video.

MR. BUFFINGTON: As a follow-up to Republika Online, do you think it’s possible the Muslim ask the government to curb Islamophobia in the same way as countries restrict anti-Semitic speech?

MR. BAER: I’m sure that there will be, and have been, requests for that. But I think one of the things that we’ve seen – and it should be clear to everybody that in the United States we do not restrict anti-Semitic speech; we don’t restrict offensive speech pertaining to any religion. Sometimes people think that we do restrict certain speech in certain ways related to religion. We don’t, across the board.

There are some countries that do. And one of the things that we’ve seen, not only do we think that that’s inconsistent with freedom of expression, but we’ve also seen that it’s not effective. Obviously the reason that people usually give for why they might restrict offensive speech is that they think that will help create a more tolerant society. And there’s been a recent study that’s come out, actually in the last month, that confirms again the reality that that’s just not the case. The Pew Foundation did a study of social attitudes around the world, and they found that where restrictions on religious expression are strongest, so is the social hostility toward minority religious groups, et cetera.

And so one of the arguments that we would make, and we have – there are countries that do restrict offensive speech about religion, and one of the arguments we would make is that the goals, the good goals that people might have in mind, aren’t met by those restrictions. And there are many, many costs to them because what ends up happening up happening, almost uniformly, invariably across the board, is that any kinds of justification for the government to punish people for speech ends up getting used for intentions that are not consistent with the original justification for such restrictions.

Continue reading ‘Daniel Baer (U.S. State Department) on Freedom of Speech and Hostility to Religions’ »

Here’s the story, from the AP:

Ikramullah Shahid, a former Pakistani legislator, has offered a $200,000 (£123,800) bounty for anyone who kills the maker of an anti-Islam film that has angered Muslims around the world.

He made the offer at a rally on Monday in the northwestern city of Peshawar, before a crowd of about 15,000 people....

This is the second such offer made by someone in Pakistan. A federal cabinet minister [Ghulam Ahmad Bilour, the railways minister] earlier offered $100,000 [from his own pocket] for the man behind the American-made film that portrays Islam’s Prophet Muhammad as a fraud, womanizer and child molester....

Say an American was angered by this speech — understandably so — and offered a $100,000 bounty to anyone who killed Mr. Shahid and Minister Bilour for what they said. Or even if you want to control for Bilour’s being a sitting government official (which in my view is an aggravating factor, not a mitigating one), say that the bounty was only for Shahid. How would the Pakistani government demand that the American government act? Why should we demand any less of the Pakistanis?

To be sure, I don’t want to suggest that solicitation of murder (which leads to the American bounty in my hypothetical) is equal in gravity to blasphemy (which led to the real Pakistani bounty) — it’s much worse, which suggests that we should be even more insistent in the real case than the Pakistanis would be in the hypothetical.

So reports the AP:

Ihsanoglu, whose organization represents 57 Muslim-majority countries, said they respect the right of freedom of expression, but believed a line had to be drawn at incitement.

“We are not saying stop free speech. We are staying stop hate speech,” Ihsanoglu said.

This further illustrates how vague and potentially broad the term “hate speech” is. In related news, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman seems to join those suggesting that First Amendment law be changed to suppress the expression of ideas and symbols that sufficiently offend foreign thugs:

[The existing incitement exception] requires not only high probability [of violent reaction] but also imminence. Who is to say exactly when a group of people will watch a speech that took place in another land, organize themselves into a crowd and commit violence? Perhaps if the speaker were seen live and the crowds were already gathered, we could imagine blocking remote speech without compromising on our values. But that’s a far cry from a Web posting that is sent out into the ether in the hopes that it will find an audience. And it certainly does not apply to speech that is calculated to offend listeners rather than to encourage them to protest.

Yet we should also acknowledge that the Supreme Court has recently compromised free-speech principles in the area of terrorism. In a 2010 decision, Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the court upheld the federal law that criminalizes speech that materially supports terrorism. That case involved human rights groups who wanted to teach nonviolent advocacy techniques to Kurdish nationalist groups who were on the State Department’s terrorist list.

The court said that the law could prohibit speakers from advising terrorist groups on how to advocate peacefully in lieu of violence. To reach this conclusion, the Supreme Court simply sidestepped the traditional speech-protected rules for incitement. The implication was that speech supporting terrorism deserved its own legal regime.

Justice Breyer dissented from this decision, bemoaning the court’s failure to consider the usual rules. He clearly doubted that the peaceful advocacy resembled incitement. But the result suggests that the Supreme Court is, in fact, willing to find creative ways to deal with serious threats to public safety.

President Obama’s free-speech rhetoric was inspiring. It remains to be seen if emerging realities of transnational responses to domestic speech will make that rhetoric eventually look dated.

The op-ed doesn’t mention that Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project several times stressed that the law banned only speech that’s coordinated between American speakers and foreign terrorist groups (there, because the speech was focused on face-to-face teaching). Speech that ends up helping foreign terrorist groups remains protected, so long as it’s entirely independent of those groups. But in any event, note the logic that so worries those concerned with slippery slopes: Each precedent allowing restriction of speech can be used as an argument for still further restrictions, even restrictions quite a bit removed from that precedent. If the precedents are extended to govern speech that creates a “serious threat[] to public safety” by offending members of certain religions, what further restrictions will those precedents in turn be deployed to support?

RT.com reports:

Rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar has been pulled before a performance in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don following complaints from Orthodox Christians. The believers claim the production is in breach of a controversial new religious offense law.... “In our view the image of Christ presented in the opera is incorrect. If they want to stage a play about the life of the Savior, they should first clear it with the local church authority,” one of the offended believers told Life News....

The religious offense law was drafted in the wake of performance group Pussy Riot’s “punk prayer” in Moscow’s central cathedral earlier this year.... The bill calls for up to three years’ imprisonment for disrespecting religious sensibilities and is currently being discussed in the Duma.

The city’s administration has instructed the local theater to stop selling tickets for the production....

Despite the apparent success of the current attempts to ban the play, the local church does not actually appear to support the complaints....

Though the story says that the claim is that the production violates a new law, at this point it looks like the law is only under consideration (as the story itself acknowledges); the precise basis for the city’s order is thus not clear. The BBC reports that the play had been performed in Russia for decades. Thanks to Prof. Howard Friedman (Religion Clause) for the pointer.

The AP reports:

Thousands of Bangladeshi Muslims angry over an alleged derogatory photo of the Islamic holy book Quran on Facebook set fires in at least 10 Buddhist temples and 40 homes near the southern border with Myanmar, authorities said Sunday....

[A police chief] said at least 20 people were injured in the attacks that followed the posting of a Facebook photo of a burned copy of the Quran. The rioters blamed the photo on a local Buddhist boy, though it wasn’t immediately clear if the boy actually posted the photo.

Bangladesh’s popular English-language Daily Star newspaper quoted the boy as saying that the photo was mistakenly tagged on his Facebook profile....

More details from the Daily Star:

Home Minister Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir ... promised to rebuild the Buddhist monasteries and temples and compensate the victims whose houses were destroyed.

The minister assured that the miscreants who stirred the violence would be traced and brought to book within 15 days....

Also addressing the rally, Industries Minister Dilip Barua said that in 1971 the country was liberated to establish a secular state. “The unprecedented events in Ramu have tarnished its reputation and our belief in secularism,” he said....

Thanks to Charles Chapman for the pointer.