Can we torch Time Magazine’s offices now?

I should declare an interest and say that I have always admired Time Magazine. It has great journalists. It has even commissioned your humble correspondent and allowed him to join its exalted company of writers – and more to the point paid your humble correspondent ready money for the privilege. In normal circumstances I would deplore the notion that its offices should be firebombed and editors, reporters, critics, subs, secretaries and IT support staff reduced to piles of smouldering ashes, so charred and diminished their next kin would not be able to identify them.

But what possible argument can those of us who shudder at the thought of arsonists torching Time, and immolating all who work there, now make in its defence? The latest issue contains a piece saying that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo deserved to have someone – maybe an Islamist, maybe not – firebomb its offices in Paris. It is worth studying because its author seems to be trying to provide a defence for anyone who attacks his own company’s premises.
 
1. He pooh-poohs the notion of personal responsibility. He says that the attack is not the fault of the attackers but of the magazine for publishing a “stupid and unnecessary edition mocking Islam” that begs “for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good”. If believers in freedom of speech and of the press were to find Time’s arguments in favour of censorship “stupid and unnecessary”, they would on this reasoning be no more responsible for their actions than the Parisian fire bomber. Time would have been “begging” for it. It would have deserved everything it got.

2. Provocatively, he goes on to insult the reader’s intelligence by implying that the edition of Charlie Hebdo was an attack on poor and marginalised Muslims, who can indeed be the victims of discrimination in France as elsewhere.

“Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile. Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well.”

The author’s idiocies pile one on top of the other. Freedom of expression is not a right that can only be exercised “in the face of oppression”; it is a universal right free men and women can exercise in all circumstances.  Being “obnoxious and offensive” may be in poor taste, but there is no law against it, certainly no law that mandates auto da fé for offenders. (If Time wants to propose one, it should have the guts to say so openly.) Meanwhile Time needs to be told that the “moderate people” it is so concerned about do not take offence easily. Indeed a working definition of moderation is a willingness to tolerate the arguments of others, even arguments one finds obnoxious and offensive. Most pertinently, Charlie Hebdo was not attacking immigrants to France but Rashid al-Ghannushi’s Islamist party which has just won a plurality of the vote in Tunisia. The religious right may soon become the “face of oppression” in Tunisia but according to Time it will be “obnoxious and offensive” to oppose, mock and satirise their religious beliefs. If Tunisian women begin to suffer, one wonders whether Time will find it “obnoxious and offensive” to take their side, and prefer in the name of good taste and gentility to line up on the side of their oppressors instead.

3. Finally, the author hammers the reader with non sequiturs. He deplores France’s ban on the burqa and says it reflects “very real Islamophobic attitudes spreading throughout society”. I am not position to judge that, but am sure he is right to say that the state should not tell citizens how to dress. Many people find the burqa “obnoxious and offensive” – myself included. But in a free society all we can do is argue against the misogynists, who promote male ownership of women’s bodies. But if Time believes that the principles of religious freedom mandate that is wrong to ban the burqa, how can it then assert that it is right to forbid satires of religion? You cannot be a little bit free. You either believe in the freedom to practice and criticise religion or you do not.
 
Speaking of the noxious, I find something particularly offensive about Americans defending censorship. In the first amendment to the their constitution, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison declared:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

But then I often think that we misinterpret Jefferson and Madison’s motives. Far from celebrating religious freedom and freedom of speech as values upheld by Americans, they may have realised that they were values that needed to be protected from Americans.

P.S. Over at Index on Censorship James Kirchick makes the essential point that arguments about free speech are always simpler than they look:

“No one has the right not to be offended. No one has the right to firebomb a newspaper that offends them. It’s amazing, given all the struggles and sacrifices that have been made for freedom of speech over many years, that statements so simple bear repeating. But as long as we have moral cowards like Bruce Crumley [the Time journalist] around, repeat them we must.”