Sorry, but free speech is indeed the issue

This riposte to the essay by Elidor Mehilli GS, concerning the Danish cartoons is delayed because I had already submitted last week's column when his appeared last Friday, Feb. 2. I wrote one essay on this subject three weeks ago, but few issues are more pressing than intellectual freedom and few forces greater current threats to it than jihadist Islam. There is a good deal of peripheral sense in Mehilli's column, but its heart is a dangerous fallacy. Adopting a posture of apparent moderation quite familiar in the Eurabian press, he writes thus: "The Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was the astonishing example of this resurgence of intentional political incorrectness. On the other extreme was the murder of director Theo van Gogh by a second-generation immigrant."

Now as this grammatically poses a contrast between two deplorable extremes, we need to know who Fortuyn and van Gogh were before we can appreciate the implied middle ground being advocated by Mehilli.

Pim Fortuyn was an intense Dutch nationalist, a radical libertarian politician and cultural gadfly; he was assassinated in 2001. He was in favor of putting a moratorium on immigration, and he wanted to repeal the sales tax. He held many ideas deeply unpopular with emerging hegemonic European social theorists, and he advanced them provocatively. So far as I know, he was never charged with felonious crime. He does appear to have engaged in homosexual acts, but such behavior was decriminalized in the Netherlands some time ago. The murderer, a possibly deranged vegan animal rights advocate, justified the murder on the grounds of Fortuyn's dangerous ideas. Fortuyn's only criminality was metaphoric — the forceful expression of "thought crimes," or what Mehilli calls "intentional political incorrectness."

Theo van Gogh was another Dutch exhibitionist and another practitioner of intentional political incorrectness. He made a film on the subject of the widespread mistreatment of women in Islamic cultures, and like the many others who have dealt with this theme, he linked the phenomenon to certain verses from the Koran as interpreted in one long and unbroken Muslim tradition. He did this in striking cinematic fashion, by superimposing koranic text over the body of an actress. He was shot down on the street by an enraged Muslim who, then, with a carving knife, attached to the cadaver a jihadist rationale for murder, together with appropriate scriptures. Unlike the vegan, perhaps, this murderer was entirely sane. His demeanor was coolly rational as he refused to apologize to the victim's mother, explaining that he could have no human feeling for him, as he was an "infidel."

These are the two extremes deplored by Mehilli — the controversial expression of ideas and a murder of repellent barbarity. The one is apparently as bad as the other. I find this approach rather more "astonishing" than Pim Fortuyn's. Since our liberal press appears to be of the opinion that free speech is all well and good so long as nobody uses it, let me remind you that constitutional protection of speech was designed precisely for speech that needs protection — not for political pabulum and multicultural bromides that threaten only our insomnia. That means annoying speech, rude speech, stupid speech, provocative speech and speech very unlike this page's dulcet tones of sweet reasonableness and mutual respect. The exercise of free speech, even when aggravated by suspected carnivorism, is not an unacceptable "extreme" that finds its countervailing "extreme" in murder.

Mehilli fears that the episode of the publication of the cartoons will increase the vote for "right-wing parties" in Europe. I daresay it will, but the cause will be the reaction to the cartoons, not their publication. That response has included in Europe, a vacillating and mealymouthed rehearsal of multicultural doubletalk and in many Muslim countries, seething mobs and mayhem. In the new Londonistan spirit of Hyde Park Corner, truculent "youths," marching in facemasks and jihad headbands, exercised their free speech with signs reading "To Hell With Free Speech," "Behead the Blasphemers" and "Prepare for the Real Holocaust." Do grasp the force of the adjective "real."

To advocate prior constraint of speech because it might lead to a political outcome you don't like is to practice fascism, not to fight it. There is no reason to privilege Islamofascism over any other kind. Fascism has won at the ballot box only in situations in which the feeble democratic alternative had lost all credibility through its betrayal, incompetence, corruption or failure to honor its own ideals. That was the story with Hitler in 1933 and with Hamas in 2006. Nothing is more fundamental to the health of democracy than plenary and robust freedom of speech — the first freedom and the soil in which our other freedoms take root. John V. Fleming is the Louis W. Fairchild '24 professor of English. He can be reached at jfleming@princeton.edu. His column appears on Mondays.