Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who recently supervised a Koran burning, reveals something about liberty in America today: It’s being done a massive disservice by a brigade that deserves to be called the Faux Freedom Fighters.
In addition to Mr. Jones and his puny hive of followers, the Faux Freedom Fighters include luminaries of the U.S. conservative movement. Think Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. They pronounce themselves warriors against political correctness, yet they refuse to question one of history’s most obvious tactics for imposing political correctness: book burning.
To them, the Koran is an oppressive scripture, and torching it symbolizes the ultimate triumph of freedom over tyranny. But book burning itself is the antithesis of freedom.
To set any book alight is to insist that certain notions, once deemed threatening, don’t need to be debated further. They can be extinguished simply by watching the paper on which they’re written go up in smoke. This approach undermines the open exchange of views it claims to defend.
Moreover, it fails to discredit unsavoury ideas. Salman Rushdie, who knows a thing or two about book burnings, once explained the point to me. “Whenever a writer puts out a thought,” the novelist said, “it can be disagreed with vigorously, vehemently, even violently. But it cannot be unthought.”
In short, banning books – let alone burning them – doesn’t deal with perfidy. It merely gives rise to the mirage of having dealt with it.
That’s why I can’t go along with something else that reasonable people usually support in the name of freedom: censoring Holocaust deniers.
Make no mistake, I deplore anti-Semitism. But I also realize that laws against Holocaust denial get exploited to feed conspiracy-mongering that “the Jews” control everything, including speech. In my experience, suppressing Holocaust deniers does at least as much to prop up Jew bashing as the bigots themselves do.
So why not err on the side of freedom, obliging good folks to learn how to take on Jew haters? In a liberal democracy, isn’t counterargument more constructive than driving the haters underground, where their ugliness can fester faster?
The late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, among Europe’s most supple thinkers on this score, would have agreed and disagreed with my position. A prominent critic of Holocaust deniers, he nonetheless opposed the French law that turns them into criminals.
At the same time, Prof. Vidal-Naquet might have rejected my stand that responding to Holocaust deniers can strengthen democracy’s fabric. He held that it’s impossible to argue with people who claim that the moon is made of Roquefort cheese.
But my question is: Why must our yardstick of progress be the rehabilitation of liars? Instead, we ought to use the liars to reach those who might believe their bile. I’ve seen this strategy succeed through e-mails featured on my website.
Anonymous wrote to me, “Regardless of your religious views, you are indirectly supporting the Jewish-run media in North America and, of course, they will see to it that you get as much airtime as possible.”
Immediately after that message, I posted this one from Naomi: “As a Jew, I’m enraged at the number of times I hear about the global conspiracy I am a part of – mainly because nobody bothered to let me in on it! I thought that through your bosses at [the] Mossad, Irshad, you know people involved in the Jewish/Zionist conspiracy. Please be so kind as to forward them my details with a request for back payment.”
Naomi’s willingness to engage, coupled with her humour, has touched many of my website readers over the years. One of them, Navid, e-mailed to say that, for him, it “humanized” Naomi and other Jews.
Which brings me back to Terry Jones. On his own website, he preaches: “We, as Americans, have the great gift of freedom. … We must strive to give that gift of freedom on to the next generation.”
If America’s Faux Freedom Fighters want to drain the Koran of its ominous power, they should treat it as any other book, championing the right to circulate it openly while excoriating its content unapologetically. But in standing by as the Koran gets incinerated, they only reinforce its special aura.
The essence of liberty, meanwhile, disappears in flames.
