Reply #37: revisionism?

[iverglas]

Because some people (not DUers) were demanding the newspaper be punished and at that point, defenders of free speech spoke up.

The "defenders of free speech" hit the ground running en masse, and certainly didn't limit themselves to addressing demands for punishment. Lordy, one doesn't see such brouhaha hereabouts over most things the Bush administration does; why anyone would have got so worked up about things as they stood when this all started here (no embassy burnings, no KFC trashing, no Holocaust denigration ...) is kinda beyond me. Well, not really, but y'know. The "defences" were very certainly not directed only against persons not present calling for the publication to be suppressed/punished.

In very large part, they weren't defences of free speech at all; they were denials of the offensiveness of the materials themselves, along with many loud protestations of not giving a shit if a few ignorant/obnoxious Muslims were offended.

I'd like to see such denials and protestations now. That is, of course: I think the denials were pretty hollow, and the protestations were, well, we all know what I think they were.

Let's see someone deny that the materials are offensive, despite how pleasing they seem to be to an outfit like the BNP. And let's see some more of those protestations about how these "offended" Muslims are just trying to impose their theology on us.

This is similar to the David Irving case - when someone known to be a nasty turd was jailed for lying about the Holocaust, a lot of DUers denounced it. I think they're being consistent.

The thing is, I don't see very many denouncing anything -- not like the hundreds of posts standing up for the Danish newspaper and denouncing its detractors, which was the case I was referring to. That's the analogous one: no one's freedom of speech was being threatened by any authority (only an authority can actually threaten or restrict freedom of speech), and yet a gazillion people were ready to rumble about free speech and defend the speech itself -- which has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

The Danish newspaper story was actually about publication and response to publication, not "free speech" -- not as the subject of debate here. Everybody under attack from the free speech brigade here was indeed portrayed as opposing free speech, but that's determinative of nada.

I realize my point may have been a little obscure, but that's the gist of it: when a respectable periodical prints despicable crud about Muslims, there is a chorus of support for its right to speak, even though its right to speak was never in jeopardy; and denials of the inappropriateness of its speech, even though the inappropriateness of its speech was obvious to a blindfolded two-year-old.

I just want to hear the same chorus of support and denial when a nasty little neo-Nazi (y'know, anti-Semitic) outfit does it.