Weasel Words
David Aaronovitch writing in The Times delivers a passionate argument in favour of free speech in which he takes aim at various 'weasels' including Mehdi Hasan, a supposedly left-wing commentator who presumably believes that he and people like him should decide where lines should be drawn in relation to free speech.
Speaking personally, I'm quite content with the suggested formulation that there is no justification for limiting what people can say or express unless serious damage would result, since this rules out spurious objections on the grounds of religion, for example.
But it should be noted that Mehdi Hasan has form in this area and while I am offended by left-wing journalists who write grovelling letters to the right-wing Daily Mail, I nonetheless defend Mehdi's right to make a complete fool and hypocrite of himself.
By David Aaronovitch - The Times
Let’s be clear: there is no justification for limiting what people say or express unless serious damage would result
Of course we are not all Charlie. Many of us never were. So much so that in the days since the great Paris march a Venusian, scanning newspaper letter and comment pages, might be excused for imagining that last week a gang of armed cartoonists had stormed a houseful of slightly combustible Muslims and shot themselves. When the new Charlie Hebdo front-page cartoon appeared on Monday, an assistant editor at The Guardian wrote that in depicting Muhammad holding a “Je suis Charlie” placard the magazine was “adding insult to injury by claiming the prophet would support the values of the magazine”.
Not all the various ways that people found not to defend free speech were quite so inane. But find them they did and it is now time to strangle some weasels. They were to be spotted in the familiar red-brick rectory insistence, which found several niches on our own letters page, that (lamentably) the cartoonists had brought this upon themselves by being impolite to people whose capacity to withstand such robustness was not great.
This strand was familiar from the Rushdie days. Poke a hornet’s nest with a stick and what do you expect? I’ve written here before that we British do quite a line in victim-blaming: she must have said something, he must have provoked her and so on. My thought is that such a form of apologism makes the apologists feel safer, because they would never be so provocative, so under-dressed, so drunk. Therefore no one would kill or rape them.
The BBC reporter’s phrase du jour on Tuesday, much repeated, was that the new cartoon was “fanning the flames”, a suggestion that was a provocation in itself. Wouldn’t you, if you were a bit flamy, consider this an invitation to be fanned? An unconsidered possibility was that people might be sensible, look at the cartoon of someone supposed to be Muhammad saying “All is forgiven” and think “OK. Fair enough.”
In her column on this subject yesterday my colleague Alice Thomson referred the matter to the court of good manners. Just because you can say something, she wrote, doesn’t mean you should. Some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had been crude and a bit insulting. “There is a difference,” she pointed out, “between being informative, challenging and provocative and simply being offensive.”
The leap over complexity in that sentence is the word “simply”. What are we to do where a play or an artwork, say, is informative, challenging, provocative and offensive. Or where I say it’s offensive and you say it’s challenging?
Or where she says it’s offensive in one way, when she really means it’s offensive in another. On Tuesday I found myself on Radio 4 debating the latest cartoon with a Muslim commentator. I set out to discover what specifically she found offensive about the cartoon. She talked about other cartoons being racist stereotypes. She referred to Nazi era cartoons of Jews. She talked about how other people out there would be angry. It was one obfuscation after another, until finally she said: “As a deeply spiritual and religious person I cannot, I do not accept that the Prophet is depicted on the front page of a cartoon magazine.”
And that was it — the rest had all been like different tinted concealers applied with a mop. No matter how you dressed it up, you couldn’t draw something and call it Muhammad. Perhaps she knew and perhaps she didn’t that the origin of the proscription was a fear of the Prophet being over-exalted, not of his being insulted, and that — in any case — perfectly spiritual Persians had depicted him for centuries.
Part of the rectory response was an assertion that people’s deep “beliefs” are not to be mocked. But when people say this they always mean religious beliefs. They accord religion a special status of protection that does not apply to politics. But Stalin was genuinely venerated, as was Mao. Kim still is. If we are talking offence to belief, should we have held off satirising the Great Leaders of Humanity because of the sensibilities of their followers?
I have little time to discuss the proposal that Islam is not a fair target for lampooning because its adherents in the west are a powerless minority. Even if that were a good reason (and it is actually a condescension) there are five Islamic republics and 21 other countries where Islam is the official religion and where mighty and usually despotic governments lay claim to legitimacy based on Islamic precepts.
Possibly the grubbiest and most disreputable of the weasels used to justify or offset threats to free speech concerns the hypocrisy of those who are defending it. This one runs thus: X who wants freedom for Y doesn’t support it for Z, therefore we shouldn’t worry about Y. Ugh.
But the greatest and most common weasel is what I would now call the Hasan formulation, laid down by the Muslim commentator Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman this week. After the usual light-footed trip round the outhouses he stayed still long enough to deliver this oh-so-plausible proposition. “None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.”
The Hasan formulation (which is to be found everywhere) is pernicious because it is both superficially true and utterly untrue. I shouldn’t have to rehearse why freedom of speech is a good, and why, consequently, there has never been a tyrant or despot in history who hasn’t tried to restrict it. An absence of freedom of speech distorts and terrorises. It creates ignorant, cowed people and vile, unaccountable government.
It follows from this that the test for limiting speech or expression would have to be a stringent one. Only if you could show that people would suffer significant damage as a direct and intentional result of this expression do I think bans can be justified.
So when someone says “we differ only in where those lines should be drawn” — the critical word being “only” as in “just” or “merely” or “in the insignificant matter of” — they are engaging in an intellectual fraud. Mehdi Hasan, for whom freedom of speech may be significantly less important than, say, community cohesion or order or his idea of his prophet, does not differ with me only about lines. He differs with me — and, I hope many of you — about principles. Essential principles.
Let’s be clear: there is no justification for limiting what people say or express unless serious damage would result
Of course we are not all Charlie. Many of us never were. So much so that in the days since the great Paris march a Venusian, scanning newspaper letter and comment pages, might be excused for imagining that last week a gang of armed cartoonists had stormed a houseful of slightly combustible Muslims and shot themselves. When the new Charlie Hebdo front-page cartoon appeared on Monday, an assistant editor at The Guardian wrote that in depicting Muhammad holding a “Je suis Charlie” placard the magazine was “adding insult to injury by claiming the prophet would support the values of the magazine”.
Not all the various ways that people found not to defend free speech were quite so inane. But find them they did and it is now time to strangle some weasels. They were to be spotted in the familiar red-brick rectory insistence, which found several niches on our own letters page, that (lamentably) the cartoonists had brought this upon themselves by being impolite to people whose capacity to withstand such robustness was not great.
This strand was familiar from the Rushdie days. Poke a hornet’s nest with a stick and what do you expect? I’ve written here before that we British do quite a line in victim-blaming: she must have said something, he must have provoked her and so on. My thought is that such a form of apologism makes the apologists feel safer, because they would never be so provocative, so under-dressed, so drunk. Therefore no one would kill or rape them.
The BBC reporter’s phrase du jour on Tuesday, much repeated, was that the new cartoon was “fanning the flames”, a suggestion that was a provocation in itself. Wouldn’t you, if you were a bit flamy, consider this an invitation to be fanned? An unconsidered possibility was that people might be sensible, look at the cartoon of someone supposed to be Muhammad saying “All is forgiven” and think “OK. Fair enough.”
In her column on this subject yesterday my colleague Alice Thomson referred the matter to the court of good manners. Just because you can say something, she wrote, doesn’t mean you should. Some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons had been crude and a bit insulting. “There is a difference,” she pointed out, “between being informative, challenging and provocative and simply being offensive.”
The leap over complexity in that sentence is the word “simply”. What are we to do where a play or an artwork, say, is informative, challenging, provocative and offensive. Or where I say it’s offensive and you say it’s challenging?
Or where she says it’s offensive in one way, when she really means it’s offensive in another. On Tuesday I found myself on Radio 4 debating the latest cartoon with a Muslim commentator. I set out to discover what specifically she found offensive about the cartoon. She talked about other cartoons being racist stereotypes. She referred to Nazi era cartoons of Jews. She talked about how other people out there would be angry. It was one obfuscation after another, until finally she said: “As a deeply spiritual and religious person I cannot, I do not accept that the Prophet is depicted on the front page of a cartoon magazine.”
And that was it — the rest had all been like different tinted concealers applied with a mop. No matter how you dressed it up, you couldn’t draw something and call it Muhammad. Perhaps she knew and perhaps she didn’t that the origin of the proscription was a fear of the Prophet being over-exalted, not of his being insulted, and that — in any case — perfectly spiritual Persians had depicted him for centuries.
Part of the rectory response was an assertion that people’s deep “beliefs” are not to be mocked. But when people say this they always mean religious beliefs. They accord religion a special status of protection that does not apply to politics. But Stalin was genuinely venerated, as was Mao. Kim still is. If we are talking offence to belief, should we have held off satirising the Great Leaders of Humanity because of the sensibilities of their followers?
I have little time to discuss the proposal that Islam is not a fair target for lampooning because its adherents in the west are a powerless minority. Even if that were a good reason (and it is actually a condescension) there are five Islamic republics and 21 other countries where Islam is the official religion and where mighty and usually despotic governments lay claim to legitimacy based on Islamic precepts.
Possibly the grubbiest and most disreputable of the weasels used to justify or offset threats to free speech concerns the hypocrisy of those who are defending it. This one runs thus: X who wants freedom for Y doesn’t support it for Z, therefore we shouldn’t worry about Y. Ugh.
But the greatest and most common weasel is what I would now call the Hasan formulation, laid down by the Muslim commentator Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman this week. After the usual light-footed trip round the outhouses he stayed still long enough to deliver this oh-so-plausible proposition. “None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.”
The Hasan formulation (which is to be found everywhere) is pernicious because it is both superficially true and utterly untrue. I shouldn’t have to rehearse why freedom of speech is a good, and why, consequently, there has never been a tyrant or despot in history who hasn’t tried to restrict it. An absence of freedom of speech distorts and terrorises. It creates ignorant, cowed people and vile, unaccountable government.
It follows from this that the test for limiting speech or expression would have to be a stringent one. Only if you could show that people would suffer significant damage as a direct and intentional result of this expression do I think bans can be justified.
So when someone says “we differ only in where those lines should be drawn” — the critical word being “only” as in “just” or “merely” or “in the insignificant matter of” — they are engaging in an intellectual fraud. Mehdi Hasan, for whom freedom of speech may be significantly less important than, say, community cohesion or order or his idea of his prophet, does not differ with me only about lines. He differs with me — and, I hope many of you — about principles. Essential principles.
Height of Hypocrisy (6 October 2013)
I nearly died laughing reading the following 'job application' letter from Medhi Hasan to the Daily Mail - following Medhi's entertaining rant on the BBC's Question Time programme the other night.
Seems like his passionate denouncement of the Mail and all it stands for has been acquired only recently - since there's no sign of Medhi's dislike for the newspaper in this obsequious 2010 letter to Paul Dacre, the Mail's editor.
Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely,
Mehdi Hasan
Seems like his passionate denouncement of the Mail and all it stands for has been acquired only recently - since there's no sign of Medhi's dislike for the newspaper in this obsequious 2010 letter to Paul Dacre, the Mail's editor.
Dear Mr Dacre,
My name is Mehdi Hasan and I’m the New Statesman’s senior political editor. My good friend Peter Oborne suggested I drop you a line as I’m very keen to write for the Daily Mail.
Although I am on the left of the political spectrum, and disagree with the Mail’s editorial line on a range of issues, I have always admired the paper’s passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values. I believe the Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life, and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists. I also believe – as does Peter – that I could be a fresh and passionate, not to mention polemical and contrarian, voice on the comment and feature pages of your award-winning newspaper.
For the record, I am not a Labour tribalist and am often ultra-critical of the left – especially on social and moral issues, where my fellow leftists and liberals have lost touch with their own traditions and with the great British public. In my column in this week’s issue of the New Statesman, for example, I offered a critique of the five Labour leadership candidates, and their various inadequacies, accusing them all of lacking what George Bush Snr once called “the vision thing”.
I could therefore write pieces for the Mail critical of Labour and the left, from “inside” Labour and the left (as the senior political editor at the New Statesman).
I am also attracted by the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies. I’d like to write a piece for the Mailmaking the left-wing case against abortion, or a piece on why marriage should be a Labour value, and not just a Conservative one. My own unabashed social conservatism on such issues derives from my Islamic faith. But as a British Muslim, I have also upset some of my more hardline co-religionists in the past by arguing, in print, for a change in Islam’s draconian apostasy laws to allow Muslims to convert to other faiths (like Christianity). Here is a New Statesman column I wrote on the subject in April.
In addition, I wrote a column last year condemning suicide bombings, from an Islamic and moral perspective, in which I also castigated Muslims for failing to unequivocally condemn such acts of terror wherever in the world they occur.
And, earlier this year, I wrote a piece for the Guardian belittling Muslim extremist Anjum Choudary and his crude, headline-grabbing attempt to carry “coffins” through Wootton Bassett.
A bit of background: I am 31, and was born and brought up in the United Kingdom, the son of Indian immigrants (an engineer and a doctor) who came here in the 1960s. I am an Oxford graduate. Prior to joining the New Statesman in June 2009, I spent a decade working in television as a news-and-current-affairs producer at ITN, the BBC, Sky News and Channel 4.
I do hope you’ll consider me for future columns and features in the Daily Mail on political, social, moral and/or religious issues. I believe you once told sports columnist Des Kelly that he should “make them laugh, make them cry, or make them angry”. That’s something I believe I could do for you, and for your readers, on the pages of the Mail.
Thank you very much for your time.
Sincerely,
Mehdi Hasan
Senior Editor (Politics)
New Statesman
