Theocracy and tolerance

An Italian court has charged Oriana Fallaci with "defaming Islam" in her 2004 book The Force of Reason. Jeff Goldstein responds:

Another victory for the leftist gold standard of “tolerance,” the great enemy of free expression and the rhetorical mechanism by which totalitarianism is practiced by academic elites and leftist ideologues (on the right, this same impulse manifests itself in appeals to decorum or properly “moral” speech—impulses regular readers of this site will recognize as frequent targets of my scorn).

Make no mistake, people: what you are witnessing here is a carefully crafted velvet insurgency, a diminution of freedoms on the part of leftist governments and judiciaries by way of gaining control of the parameters for acceptable speech and discussion.

We see this impulse spreading through Canada (where criticism of certain groups is considered “racist” and is prosecutable by law), and we see harbingers of that same impulse here in the U.S. in things like hate crime legislation and in our mindless cultural surrender to the execrable and anti-individualist “diversity” movement.

Where reasoned criticism is successfully cast as “hate” or “intolerance,” freedom is a moribund ideal; and I don’t know how much longer we in the US—with a lingering guilt over our own historical intolerances fueling a subsequent nonconfrontational desire to do right by the Other—can keep the relentless tide of PC sanctimony at bay.

I have not read The Force of Reason, and I can't say whether Fallaci's attack on Islam is fair or not. (Daniel Pipes, for one, dismissed her previous book The Rage and the Pride as "primitive", though he seems more receptive to her argument in The Force of Reason.) But that isn't the point. Freedom of expression is meaningless if we aren't allowed to hurt other peoples' feelings, and religion - not just Islam, but all religious beliefs - should be fair game for criticism.

Either that, or the law should be applied consistently, and all denunciations of religion should be prosecuted. But even in Catholic Italy, something tells me you can attack the Vatican in the most brutal, defamatory terms, without fear of retribution by the state.

Posted by damian at May 26, 2005 07:44 AM | TrackBack