Say Anything

Author: ANDREW CARNABUCI '06

If there is but one primal, universal and absolute first principle of moral philosophy, it is that killing innocent people is wrong. Even if you do not accept this principle as a moral imperative, you must accept it as a matter of praxis, for the sake of living together on this planet with others.

Likewise, if there is a first principle of democracy, it is the freedom of speech. Democracy functions as a marketplace of ideas, and the marketplace cannot work if we don't allow people to say what they want. It is in light of these two seemingly self-evident ideas that I am horrified by the public discourse surrounding the recent Danish cartoons of Mohammed.

I was raised Episcopalian. When, in 1999 Chris Ofili debuted his now-infamous painting "The Holy Virgin Mary" in the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I found it to be in bad taste. New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani did as well, and ordered that it be removed. The museum took him to court, and Federal district court found that Giuliani's order was unconstitutional. That was the end of the issue. That is an example of how a rational society deals with the conflict between religious values and the freedom of speech.

According to Wikipedia, the fallout from the Danish cartoons included the burning down of the Danish embassy in Beirut, the destruction of an American air base in Afghanistan and a staggering total of 139 murders (one of them, Andrea Santoro, a Catholic priest). This is by no standard acceptable.

The Middlebury community, however, seems to be singing a different tune. The real tragedy, I am told, is not the murder of 139 innocent people who had nothing to do with the cartoons. The real tragedy is that the West in general, and I in particular, are not tolerant enough of the Islamic faith. I was unaware that the murder of 139 people was either a part of the Islamic faith, or that it fell under the umbrella of things of which I must be tolerant.

But the real issue here has nothing to do with Islam. As Professor Murray Dry accurately noted at the forum, what is on trial here is not Islam, nor the Danish cartoonists, nor ourselves for our "intolerance." What is on trial is freedom of speech itself, and in the court of public opinion, it has been given a death sentence in the name of tolerance and sensitivity. What is the freedom of speech, if not the freedom to offend? If saying something is verboten the moment that someone else doesn't like it, what would we be allowed to say? Tolerance, in the last 15 or so years, has undergone a grotesque mutation. It has transformed from the noble virtue of accepting others who are different, to the insane and neo-Fascist dogma of speech censorship, sensitivity training and mindless totemistic invocations of the word "diversity," all conducted under the banner of a rainbow swastika. Tolerance as it exists today is an abomination and an enemy of democracy and free-thinking people everywhere. The international community is now at a crossroads. We must decide which we value more, the individual's right to speak his mind, or the individual's right to never hear anything he or she doesn't like. We can't have both. The rioters were wrong to kill people, the high-ups in the Iranian government who incited them to riot were wrong too, but the people history will remember as the true villains are those who remained silent as the freedom of speech was crucified upon a cross of tolerance.