{"id":28490,"date":"2014-11-07T00:01:53","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T05:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28490"},"modified":"2014-11-02T11:16:15","modified_gmt":"2014-11-02T16:16:15","slug":"qotd-freedom-of-speech-versus-fear-cowardice-and-rationalization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/07\/qotd-freedom-of-speech-versus-fear-cowardice-and-rationalization\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Freedom of speech versus “fear, cowardice and rationalization”"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Feb. 14, 1989, I happened to be on a panel on press freedom for the Columbia Journalism Review<\/em> when someone in the audience told us of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini\u2019s religious edict for blasphemy against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. What did we think? We didn\u2019t, as I best recall, disgrace ourselves. We said most of the right things about defending freedom of thought and the imagination.<\/p>\n

But the death sentence from Iran\u2019s supreme leader seemed unreal \u2014 the sending of a thunderbolt from medieval Qom against modern Bloomsbury \u2014 and we didn\u2019t treat it with the seriousness that it deserved. I recall, alas, making a very poor joke about literary deconstructionism. My colleagues, though more sensible, were baffled and hesitant. Was it even true \u2014 or perhaps just a mistranslation?<\/p>\n

We knew soon enough that it was true. The literary, media and political worlds rallied in defense of Mr. Rushdie. He became a hero of free speech and a symbol \u2014 even if a slightly ambivalent postcolonial one \u2014 of Western liberal traditions. But he also went, very sensibly, behind a curtain of security that was to last many years.<\/p>\n

And by degrees \u2014 when it seemed that not only Mr. Rushdie\u2019s life but the lives of his publishers, editors and translators might be threatened \u2014 his base of support in the literary world thinned out. Sensitive intellectuals discovered that, in a multicultural world, respect for the Other meant understanding his traditions too, and these often were, well, sterner than ours. Freedom of speech was only one value to be set against\u2026ahem, several other values. Fear, cowardice and rationalization spread outward. <\/p>\n

John O’Sullivan, “No Offense: The New Threats to Free Speech”, Wall Street Journal<\/em><\/a>, 2014-10-31.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Feb. 14, 1989, I happened to be on a panel on press freedom for the Columbia Journalism Review when someone in the audience told us of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini\u2019s religious edict for blasphemy against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. What did we think? We didn\u2019t, as I best recall, disgrace ourselves. We said most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,28,370,41],"tags":[459,287,47],"class_list":["post-28490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-media","category-middle-east","category-quotations","tag-censorship","tag-iran","tag-islam"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7pw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28490"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28491,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28490\/revisions\/28491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}