by Alexander Dietz | Free speech suffers a blow in the Middle East.
Mainstream news outlets have trumpeted the rise of blogging and other new media as a social, cultural, political, and technological revolution. Since its early days in 2001 when, as the saying goes, people grew tired of yelling at their television sets and began using services like Movable Type, these tools have expanded, advanced, and proliferated rapidly. Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in California called the phenomenon a “Cambrian explosion” of creativity, and the Economist has even compared it to the invention of the printing press. Yet for all the approbation of this force for freedom and openness, the new media are not immune to old-fashioned repression.
On February 22, an Alexandria court convicted Abdel Kareem Suleiman, one of Egypt’s thousands of bloggers, of insulting both Islam and President Hosni Mubarak. At a five-minute court session, the judge sentenced the 22-year-old former law student to four years in prison. His crime was to call Mubarak a dictator, and to accuse Egypt’s top Islamic institution, al-Azhar University, of suppressing free thought. They proved him right when the university expelled him and convinced prosecutors to arrest him last year.
Suleiman’s case has become a cause célèbre in the blogosphere as well as among human rights organizations. Bloggers from Cairo to California have organized to support the young man, most notably on FreeKareem.org, hosting petitions and holding rallies in Bahrain, London, New York, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, and Washington. And, of course, they have blogged about it. London-based Amnesty International denounced the move as “a slap in the face of freedom of expression in Egypt,” and considers the blogger a prisoner of conscience. Paris-based Reporters Without Borders suggested, reasonably, that the United Nations should disqualify the state from hosting an International Governance Forum in 2009.
The official American response has been limited, though in the right spirit. The only mention of the case on United States government websites is a response by State Department spokesman Tom Casey to a question at a press briefing. “While we have great respect for all religions, including certainly Islam,” he said, “the role of freedom of expression is critical for the development of a democratic and prosperous society.” He noted that the State Department was discussing or would soon discuss the matter with Cairo, though it is uncertain how much pressure the American government is willing to use.
The US has been reluctant to make a fuss about the human rights record of its allies in the Middle East before. When Ayman Nour, the runner-up in Egypt’s 2005 presidential elections, was convicted on the questionable charge of fraud, the White House issued a brief statement expressing concern. President George W. Bush put his commitment to liberty and democracy around the world front and center at his second inauguration, but has offered only nominal protest to the abuses of the regimes of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the like. The Middle East is an extremely unstable region, and America needs to keep the few friends it has. Still, the US has given Egypt over $9.6 billion in aid just in the last five years, and it is hard to tell whether it is getting its money’s worth.
Considerations of realpolitik aside, most readers will not hesitate to declare their solidarity with Suleiman. However, if the freedom of expression is to exist in fact as well as theory, it must protect all speech. Unfortunately, when the speech in question is especially offensive or inflammatory, people often stray from this credo. Students majoring in political science will recognize this as the principle-implementation gap, and it represents a significant problem.
After a Danish newspaper published cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in 2005, Islamist leaders instigated riots across the Middle East, causing a heated controversy in Europe and what Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen called his country’s worst international crisis since World War II. When Pope Benedict XVI quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who accused Islam of being violent, the Muslim world’s response included the fire-bombings of churches, death threats against the Pontiff and all Christians, and the murder of an elderly Italian nun in Somalia.
Even apart from the supposed clash of civilizations, the West’s adherence to the freedom of expression has faced regular challenges. In Austria, at the heart of enlightened Europe, British historian David Irving was imprisoned only last year for denying the Holocaust. Eleven European countries as well as Israel currently list Holocaust denial as an offense punishable by imprisonment. Finally, in the midst of the carol controversy sparked at Tufts last December by this publication, some student responses contained such Orwellian absurdities as “Hate speech is not free speech.”
Unless a clear and imminent threat to peace and order, free speech must be defended everywhere and in every situation. If any disagree, it is their right to say so.
Mr. Dietz is a freshman majoring in Political Science.
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