How one video has us rethinking free speech, and for good reason
Anti-American protests in the Middle East are nothing new. In fact, they’ve become so common that they are practically a part of the cultural landscape.
Voice of one, anger of all
TRUTH’S FIRST VICTIMBy Adam Salazar
How one video has us rethinking free speech, and for good reason
Anti-American protests in the Middle East are nothing new. In fact, they’ve become so common that they are practically a part of the cultural landscape.
On Sept. 11, 2012, the world woke to a siege on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, by protesters and armed assailants. U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed. In subsequent days protests erupted all over the world. The result: dozens of deaths and a further-damaged world standing for the U.S.
What caused this flurry of violence and unrest? It wasn’t the assassination of a politician, or the invasion of a militant behemoth in a quest for power or supremacy. No, the main catalyst for this current situation came from a most unlikely source: YouTube.
On July 2, a trailer for a film entitled Innocence of Muslims, which consisted of poorly shot scenes depicting the prophet Muhammad as a lecherous tyrant, was uploaded to YouTube.
Discontentment over the film spread throughout the Muslim world and reached a fever pitch with the events in Libya in September.
While it’s fair to say that a myriad of other factors contributed to many of the protests around the world, we cannot deny the film’s significant role in the resulting violence and outrage.
Neither can we deny the need to address an equally pressing concern: If this means of expression can be such a contributing factor to all of this international discord, should it be allowed to exist?
Free speech is one of the most hallowed rights we possess as U.S. citizens. It can be used by the virtuous to address government corruption or dubious corporate practices, and at the same time may be used by religious fanatics to incite hatred by crying “God hates fags” and “thank God for dead soldiers.”
It can’t be disputed that for this cherished right to work it must be applied fairly and evenly. We must accept popular and distasteful manifestations as equal exercises of that right, even if the former is in shorter supply than the latter. There are, however, conditions to this freedom.
In the 1969 case Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that speech could be prohibited if it is “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and it is “likely to incite or produce such action.”
Determining whether or not Innocence of Muslims meets these standards is a complex process. Though the film was obviously inflammatory and created to mock Islam, there’s no way of knowing if its intent was to directly incite violence, and it’s doubtful that its creators would confess to such intent.
It doesn’t take a foreign policy analyst to know that the relationship between the U.S. and the Muslim world is precarious at best. Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, now believed to be the film’s creator, aggressively promoted it when its initial July posting to YouTube failed to gain viewership.
The video was dubbed in Arabic and copied thousands of times in order to enhance its visibility. These actions show that the film’s champions did indeed want as many Muslims to see it as possible. This effort, coupled with the knowledge that the U.S. isn’t held in very high esteem in the Muslim world, means that the likelihood of violence was high.
It can’t be decided at this moment if the film should be banned. That is a complex and cumbersome judicial process that will create much controversy. In the meantime it’s up to us as ordinary citizens to counter its malicious effects in our own way—by ignoring it.
Innocence of Muslims is just the most recent example of a cultural grenade, detonating crude and mean-spirited garbage that does nothing to further the dialogue on any issue.
The film possesses no value or reputable endorsement, and instead banks on having its worth measured by the visceral response it provokes in those who view it.
In this regard it can be viewed as a success. If that power is taken away en masse, then its message of intolerance and prejudice can be filed away in the endless collection of eccentric and hateful individuals to be ignored and forgotten.
Let us start with the factual errors, which are easy to over-look because for some reason the media are ignoring them. First calling the location of the Ambassador and his “staff” a U.S. Consulate is not correct at all. Initially the building was called a consulate but has since been changed to a mission. Every U.S. Consulate that I seen over-sea’s had big walls around it. The house in Benghazi was just that a house, no walls, but it was a nice house. It went from Consulate to Mission, why? Because they were on a mission; and that was to resecure the shoulder fire missiles that the Obama administration supplied the Libian rebels during the “Arab Spring.” The house, sorry ah, Mission, was most likely a CIA mission, which explains why the Ambassador’s staff were former Navy Seals, now working for the State Department? The Ambassador and his “staff” were not killed in a protest over a crappy movie trailer, they were killed because Al-Quida did not want to give the weapons back. As for restraining ourself’s and our free speech, let’s use liberal attorney Alan Dershowitz’s words. Alan Dershowitz said in response to anti-jihad ads in NY’s transit system, the MTA, that regulations barring ads that may cause people to react violently to “incentivizes people to engage in violence. What it says to people, is that if they don’t like ads, just engage in violence and then we’ll take the ads down.” The same could be said for the youtube video. BTW, religion is an idea, and ideas are open for debate about their content.