Gunslinger's Journal: Stand Firm or Be Doomed

I received this via email from my friend, Pete. He is reliable, but I cannot personally confirm the accuracy of the source of this piece. However, the facts are accurate and the sentiments righteous:

Statement prepared for the U.S. Department of Justice “First Freedom Project” Seminar in Kansas City, Mo., March 29, 2007

Good morning. By way of introduction, my name is Paul Green, and I’m from Tempe, Arizona. For 15 years I was an editor and editorial writer for the East Valley Tribune of Mesa, Arizona, before resigning last year in protest over my newspaper’s refusal to print any of the Danish Muhammad caricatures to illustrate a piece I had written on the controversy surrounding them. I’m now at work on a book about Muslim demands for restrictions on freedom of expression and the media’s deference to them.

Religious freedom is a central part of both America’s heritage and my own. Some of my forebears came to this continent in 1630 to escape the religious restrictions then in force in England. As the historian David Hackett Fischer noted in “Albion’s Seed,” when these English Christians “explained their motives for coming to the New World, religion was mentioned not merely as their leading purpose. It was their only purpose.” But the religious persecution to which they had been subjected in the Old World did not preclude them from inflicting their own brand of it in the New. Such dissidents as the cleric Roger Williams had to flee New England to establish their own religious communities elsewhere, and generations were to pass before freedom of conscience became a widely accepted value in America.

Religious freedom is thus indeed a “first freedom” of our nation — but there are other “first freedoms” as well, such as the freedom of speech, of the press, and the right to peaceably assemble to petition for redress of grievances. That these are equal in stature to freedom of religion was confirmed by no less an authority than James Madison, author of the Bill of Rights, who in his Jan. 7, 1800 Report to Congress On the Alien and Sedition Acts declared that “Both of these rights, the liberty of conscience and of the press … are equally secured by the supplement to the Constitution; being both included in the same amendment, made at the same time, and with the same authority.”

I’m here today because I’m concerned that some of these “first freedoms” are in danger of being compromised by an excessive regard for another: to wit, that freedom of expression could in due course fall victim to the kind of religious zealotry that gave rise to the Puritan injustices. During last year’s Muhammad cartoon controversy, only three major newspapers in the United States had the courage to print any of the offending images, despite their comparatively innocuous nature and their manifest centrality to the story. The rest, using one specious excuse after another, all demurred.

And to what were their editors deferring? A militant, religiously based demand for censorship, as revealed by slogans on huge signs carried by Muslim demonstrators worldwide:

In Pakistan: “Our religion does not allow freedom of speech”
In London: “Freedom go to hell”
In Indonesia: “A Muslim’s faith is above Western values”
In Nigeria: “Free expression is Western terrorism”
In Bangladesh: “Free speech symbolizes war on Islam”
and “Punish the Danish cartoonists and publishers”

The latter demand was echoed in a February 2006 article in the University of Pennsylvania School of Law journal “The Jurist” by Seton Hall University law professor Bernard Freamon, a self-described “Muslim African-American law professor” who asserted that his co-religionists “are very right to vigorously condemn the publication of the cartoons and to seek to punish the editors through the criminal law process.” Moreover, he declared, the uproar and accompanying violence “raise profound questions about the continued viability of a liberal and universalist approach to free expression in our rapidly changing and increasingly pluralist world.”

Nor has Freamon’s been the only Muslim voice arguing in American law journals for restrictions on free expression. In the Winter 2000 issue of the Cumberland Law Review, Washburn University law professor Ali Khan propounded the novel theory that the scriptures sacred to his faith — to wit, the Quran and the Sunna” — constitute “protected knowledge, a form of intellectual property” that must be preserved “from the irreverence of misinformed critics.” “Islamic moral rights,” declares Khan, “mandate that the Quran’s integrity and honor be upheld against any physical or verbal attack. … Likewise, any attack on the person of the Prophet infuriates the entire Islamic community. In fact, any derogatory remarks about Allah or the Quran or the Messenger are occasions for Muslim revenge and punishment.”

Khan further complains that “secular speech has placed religion in the open market of ideas” which “allows artists and authors to challenge what religion holds beyond doubt.” But the tone and content of some of the Quranic injunctions Professor Khan’s religion holds beyond doubt — such as Sura 48, Verse 29, which states that Muslims “are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another” or Sura 9, Verse 123, which commands believers to “fight the unbelievers who are near to you, and let them find in you a harshness” — make it clear that the open market of ideas is a very good place for them. Criticism and analysis — and even satire and mockery — are potent antidotes to exhortations to hostility and insularity that, left unchallenged, can have dire societal consequences.

But the right to apply such antidotes is coming under increasing attack, both from advocates for religious zealots and their allies in the media and the academy. Spurious charges of “Islamophobia” and “Muslim-bashing” are routinely flung in the faces of those who attempt to point out the inimical aspects of Islamic belief, and institutions such as the newspapers that refused to print any of the Muhammad cartoons (which, be it said, made exactly the kind of political and social points that are clearly meant to be protected under the First Amendment and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights) are tending to keep their heads down as a result. Books critical of Islam have been withdrawn from a Web site where they were offered. A movie adaptation of a book depicting Muslim terrorists was altered to make the villains neo-Nazis instead. And a Web site where users may post their homemade videos has taken to removing those critical of Islam, even as they ignore ones full of jihadist propaganda.

In this era of jihad revival there is a pressing need for criticism and analysis of Islam, which must not be construed as “Islamophobia” or legally restricted as so-called “hate speech.” No religion, despite religion’s “first freedom” status, may be accorded primacy over the right to free expression — a central element of the liberty that, as the Declaration of Independence, affirms, is an inalienable right endowed to us by our Creator. That is something I hold sacred — and that neither I nor many other Americans will ever yield. Thank you.