The violence over the publication of the Islam-mocking cartoons in Denmark continued this week. Fundamentalists demanded death to those who mocked Islam.
Tuesday was also the 17th anniversary of the fatwa by Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie for publishing what he saw as the Islam-mocking Satanic Verses.
Also this week the ACT legislated to join the national defamation code which provides a regime slightly more conducive to freedom of speech.
The new code, like previous law, provides no civil liability or criminal sanction (let alone death sentence) for defaming Islam, or any other religion for that matter. Nor is there any sanction for defaming whole classes of religious adherents.
The reaction of Muslim fundamentalists – including some leading clerics — to the mocking of Islam is similar to the reaction by Christian churches 350 or more years ago to publication of material that challenged Christian doctrine. The reaction is one of violence.
Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Inquisition 373 years ago for challenging the church view that the earth was the centre of the universe. Countless heretics were burned or beheaded by the Inquisition, the early American settlers and the Christian monarchs of Europe, especially in England.
These days the church and state are mostly separated in countries with largely Christian populations. There is no state-sanctioned inflicting of violence upon people who challenge the faith.
Rather the free-speech balancing act in places like Australia, Britain and the United States is between free speech and individual reputation and sometimes individual privacy, not between free speech and ideas or beliefs.
Only in Victoria is incitement to religious hatred a crime and even then it must be accompanied by incitement to violence against people or property – which is a crime in any event without the religious element.
A disturbing development in the most recent conflagrations is growing opinion that expressions of religious intolerance should be made criminal, or at least be banned. A further disturbing development is the inconsistency between attitudes to mocking Christianity and Judaism (blind eye) and attitudes to mocking Islam (how awful, we should show respect). Then we get a lot of pious opinion about “with freedom of speech comes responsibility”.
But freedom of speech is too important to be compromised by banning the unpalatable; fudging inconsistencies; and requirements for “responsibility”.
I prefer Voltaire’s view: “I disagree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it.” Or the view that “sticks and stones can break your bones but words will never harm you”. Who is doing the harm here: the tasteless cartoonists or the fundamentalists torching buildings and bashing people?
The price of freedom of speech is the publication of things that some people will find offensive. It is a price worth paying. Without freedom of speech the powerful can impose their own dogma (religious or political) and science cannot flourish.
Science could never flourish in societies without a deal of freedom of speech. The whole scientific method is dependent on the publication of evidence to back hypotheses and theories, however unpalatable that might be for some people. The world is round and goes round the sun and life on earth evolved.
On the question of religion, religious freedom itself requires freedom of speech. If you want to proselytise your religion, you have to accept that others might want to proselytise against your religion in favour of theirs, or against all religion.
Ultimately, people have to make up their own minds and not have some authority decide for them what they can see, hear and read.
It is only through the competition of ideas that you can arrive at the truth.
If you think that the publication of these cartoons should be a criminal offence, where do you draw the line?
Fortunately, the days suppression of ideas is becoming so difficult that it is impossible. The internet – unsurprisingly almost exclusively a vehicle for scientific and academic discussion in its early days – is so unlike the means of transmission of information in the past. You can burn books. You can smash printing presses. You can overrun radio and television stations. But the suppressers of ideas are finding it impossible to deal with the millions of servers and computers that comprise the internet.
Many of those newspapers which decided not to publish the cartoon – whether for fear of violent retribution or on grounds of “taste” or “respect” — happily published the details of precisely where the cartoons could be found on the internet.
Even our new national defamation code will find it difficult to deal with defamation on the internet (especially via email) unless some mainstream media company is involved.
Eventually, there will be so many publications like these cartoons on the internet that the violent frenzies cannot be kept up. The Islamic fundamentalists will just have to accept it. Then, of course, they will no longer be fundamentalists. They will do what the vast majority of Muslims have done about these cartoons – ignored them. That is a far more effective force than banning them. And one that allows all the good things that come from freedom of speech to flourish.