So Thomas Friedman has a telling editorial in the NY Times today. (You probably need to be a registered user of NYTimes.com to access the story, but I recommend that you become a registered user. Last I checked, it was free.)
The article, "Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide," is an attack on international "hatespeech." Friedman writes:
Guess what: words matter. Bookstores matter. Video games matter. But here is our challenge: If the primary terrorism problem we face today can effectively be addressed only by a war of ideas within Islam - a war between life-affirming Muslims against those who want to turn one of the world's great religions into a death cult - what can the rest of us do?
His proposal? The State Dept, along with its annual human-rights report, "should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others."
Friedman identifies two other categories along with the "hatemongers" to be listed in this report. First, the top 10 "excusemakers," those with the audacity to "come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted." According to him, these "excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed."
The last category is the "truth-tellers," the "courageous Arab or Muslim intellectual, cleric or columnist publishes an essay in his or her media calling on fellow Muslims to deal with the cancer in their midst." These individuals, obviously, are to be commended.
Friedman ends his article with this: "[This report] would be a message to the extremists: you are free to say what you want, but we are free to listen, to let the whole world know what you are saying and to protect every free society from hate spreaders like you. Words matter."
A few points:
1) Once free societies seek to suppress ideas as "hate," it becomes necessary to make a judgment on what constitutes it. This is shaky territory. It is not the category of "hate" I am critiquing; instead, it is the determination of the boundaries of that category I find problematic. Essentially, it will come down to the dominant cultural force designating its speech acts as normative ("Axis of Evil" is not inciting violence against others) in opposition to those of the "hatemongers" ("The Great Satan," obviously, is). Clearly, it is not the speech acts themselves that are the problem -- it is the side of the fence on which the speaker sits that becomes the determinate factor.
2) The category of "excusemakers" is also quite conducive for eliminating opposition. It is a quick and easy way to de-politicize these terrorist acts. Terrorism is defined as the (unlawful) use of violence to influence governments usually for political or ideological reasons (I am paraphrasing the Amer. Heritage Dictionary here). By claiming that anyone who would raise these political considerations is simply an "excusemaker" who should be targeted for special attention is saying that these political issues are not and should not be part of the debate.
Listen carefully to what I am saying: I am not condoning terrorism, and I would argue that saying these acts are somehow politically "legitimate" is excusing them. But one can point out that something has a political, social, historical reason without excusing it. I can say that someone like Jeffery Dahmer had a miserable and abusive childhood that probably led to his becoming a serial killer. But that doesn't make him any less responsible for being a serial killer, nor does it make serial killing ok. And, moreover, if social workers, school teachers, and psychologists ignored the factors that made a person like Jeffery Dahmer who he was, how many more serial killers would only be stopped after it is too late? When we see children experiencing similar things, we recognize that those things can lead to dangerous behaviors down the road and we try to step in. If, however, we acted like those factors didn't matter, that anyone who brought them up was only an "excusemaker" who was apologizing for evil, then we would be making, I believe, a grave error.
(Of course, the exact nature, source, and effectiveness of all of those political factors in contemporary terrorism is another issue. See, for example, this article in the NY Times._
1) and 2) lead me to 3), which I can sum up by paraphrasing a line from the film Crimson Tide: "we are here to defend democracy, not practice it." In a globalized "War on Terrorism," this is exactly the situation we have gotten ourselves into, and this article from a somewhat moderate voice like Friedman reflects that. We are seeking to defend free societies by willingly adopting tactics of oppression; we are encouraging free speech by silencing it; we are liberating people by locking down on their behavior. This is a dilemma and I, for one, see no real way out of it. Why? Because it has always been nascent in Western versions of democracy. We only can do what we want to do by suppressing ourselves and expecting others to suppress themselves. We can only legitimize ourselves through illegitimate actions.
I'm not really sure where to go with this. My thoughts always come out incomplete.