"Democratic" Afghanistan v. Free Speech.

by Liberty and Power

Jesse Walker has commented on my previous blog which deals with the anti-free speech stance taken by"free Iraq" against the Muhammed cartoons.

However, Iraq does not provide the only example of a U.S. backed democratically-elected government that supports banning the Muhammed cartoons. If anything, the current Afghan rulers are even more anti-liberty. President Hamed Karzai has taken the most moderate position. He has condemned the cartoons but has spoken out against violence. Unfortunately, other officials in both parliament and the courts have adopted a much harder line.

Again, when will the pro-war bloggers condemn, or even acknowledge, the anti-free speech attitudes of the U.S. supported Afghan and Iraqi governments? Also, how can these facts be squared with the apparent claim made by Dale Carpenter and others that the protection of free expression is "Why We Fight."

"This act by the Danish press is in clear conflict with Islamic law and is an insult to our religion," said Abdul Wakil Omari, head the Supreme Court’s publications department."We are not satisfied with an apology from the newspaper; the government of Denmark should officially apologise to Muslims, and it should not allow its media to insult other religions in the future." According to Omari, the Supreme Court was issuing an official statement to this effect.

Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, head of the conservative Islamic party Dawat-e-Islami and a prominent member of parliament, called the publication a criminal act, and demanded a strong response.

"Muslims should react in such a way that in the future, no one else will ever dare to do anything like this again," he told IWPR. "Muslims respect all religions and no one has the right to insult any of these religions," he said.

Sayyaf called on the United Nations Security Council to condemn Denmark and any other countries that published the cartoons.

The lower house of parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, passed a resolution on February 4 calling for the offending editor to be put on trial. The resolution also condemned in strongest terms the country in which the offending caricatures first appeared.
"We call on the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to express the deepest hatred of Afghans for Denmark," it said.

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Jason Pappas - 2/20/2006

I agree with that last sentance. And I think Flemming Rose would agree, also. He says, in the Washington Post: "I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper's ethical code. That other editors would make different choices is the essence of pluralism."

One would hope he also meant they should fall within the limits of the law. This article from the IHT calls him a "fundamentalist" for his willingness to stick to his principles. Perhaps we need more of that kind of fundamentalism. It also explains his concern from freedom of the press: "His worldview changed, Rose said, when he went to Russia in the 1980s and saw firsthand the repression of the Soviet regime. He befriended dissidents, devoured books by Solzhenitsyn, Hannah Arendt, and Ayn Rand, and traveled throughout Asia and the Middle East, eventually covering the fall of communism in the Baltics and the war in Chechnya."

David T. Beito - 2/18/2006

Good points. In many ways, the cartoon issue is rather trivial by comparison to other anti-liberty policies of the Iraqi, Afghan, and even Kurdish governments.

Of course, there is also an irony in the fact that conservatives have rallied so strongly for free speech in this case but have failed to do the same for David Irving, etc.

Jason Pappas - 2/17/2006

I emphatically agree but this is only the tip of the iceberg.

I’ve argued that Afghanistan has seriously abandoned freedom of speech by jailing pro-feminist dissidents for blasphemy. So it is not odd that they would jump on the band-wagon of those not only opposed to the “blasphemous” cartoons but also opposed to the very the freedom to publish those cartoons anywhere in the world. For the fundamentalist, the world is Islam’s jurisdiction.

Whether you are for or against the war over there, there’s an intellectual battle right here that’s required if we are not to surrender [more of] our most precious liberties. Indeed, fighting the war there means surrendering liberty here in more ways that people have imagined. If to “win their hearts and minds,” we have to prohibit blasphemous speech against Islam, we may win a battle but we’ll lose our souls ... and obvious our liberties. France, Italy, and Australia have laws against vilification of a religion. The UK came close. We’re next!

I suggest we need to test the limits of our freedom by defending those who speak out against Islam just as much as popular movies hold Larry Flynt up as a hero for free speech. What happened to all those civil libertarians who could defend the sleaziest publisher and carry him on their shoulders?

Flemming Rose is today’s hero. May there be many more like him!