First, there is a fundamental disagreement between what the United States views as a basic right and what many Muslims living in Arab states view as a basic right. Where Americans prioritize freedom of speech as a value to be cherished and upheld no matter the circumstance, the Arab world sees sanctity of religion as a value that cannot be violated in any instance. While this is not new, the explosion in communications technology and the resulting dissemination of information, no matter how obscure or trivial, pushes this divergence of worldviews to the forefront.
Five years ago, nobody in the United States, let alone in Egypt or Libya, would have heard of "Sam Bacile," and not more than a handful of people would have seen any part of the infamous film. Now, however, anyone with a laptop can create an abhorrent masterpiece and ensure that it is viewed by millions of people the world over. The entire planet has become, in the words of Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, a "crowded theater" on the brink of stampede.Writer Michael Koplow concludes that embassy riots aren't going to stop any time soon because every little stupid thing produced by fringe idiots is so easily publicized to an inflammatory audience. By the way, if you're not following his blog Ottomans and Zionists, you should.
OK, I should add that we're talking here about communications technology and not so much about censorship or self-censorship. For the record, I'm a free speech absolutist of the Voltaire school. In the end, I'm with the late Hitchens, who declared that he was not willing to live his life under the veto of the most easily offended.
UPDATE 1: Maybe the "yelling fire in a theater" analogy is flawed? (See #3.)
UPDATE 2: Lest we forget, in the end, the moral agency and final responsibility rest with the rioters. I'm not calling them "protesters" because there's a clear difference between peacefully standing with a placard expressing opposition to policy and storming another nation's sovereign territory with intent to destroy property and harm people.
2 comments:
Re Nakoula/Bacile/AKA and the 1st Amendment, I only dimly remember the 1st Amendment tests from ConLaw, so I'll plagiarize this blog-comment by "Dexelpred":
"[This] doesn't fall into a 1st Amendment exception. It's not fighting words (Chapinsky) so let's leave that out. The other relevant exception is if the speaker, with the specific intent (that's a term of art) to incite violence, creates a clear and present danger of imminent lawless action. The danger has to be both imminent, and of a large magnitude.
This wouldn't qualify, because: (1) there was no specific intent to incite violence (he didn't say - "hey, go kill people" with the intent that they go kill people; (2) the lawless action was too speculative to be "clear"; and (3) the lawless action wasn't "imminent" - there was a temporal disconnect."
I imagine the ACLU and other legal pundits will be weighing in soon with meatier commentary on whether the youtube clip falls under an exception to protected First Amendment speech.
President Obama did lecture on ConLaw, no? I imagine Secretary Clinton took the class, too.
The thought occurs to me that if the president did do ConLaw, maybe he should have known better than to ask YouTube to consider taking that video offline (YouTube is keeping it online).
Anyway, the more I think about it, the more I think the "crowded theater" analogy is flawed though the author of the linked analysis used it, hence why I quoted it as the title. ConLaw aside, yelling "fire" in a theater sparks a panic about personal safety, not a murderous rage against the one who did the yelling.
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