Free Speech for Terrorists?
LGF
Here’s an excellent essay by Andrew C. McCarthy on one of the global jihad’s most powerful weapons, a weapon we allow them to use against us: (Hat tip: aboo-Hoo-Hoo.)
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Free Speech for Terrorists?
With an enemy committed to terrorism, the advocacy of terrorism—the threats, the words—are not mere dogma, or even calls to “action.” They are themselves weapons—weapons of incitement and intimidation, often as effective in achieving their ends as would be firearms and explosives brandished openly.
Nevertheless, even in 2005, and even in the midst of a war against jihadists, it has become necessary to ask whether advocacy of terrorism can be effectively regulated in the United States. Our enemies, after all, swaddle their calls to barbarism in the language of religious duty and political dissent. These lie at the very core of liberty in an enlightened and thriving democratic order. So luminous does free speech shine among our values that it is enshrined in the very first amendment to the Constitution. Early Americans had known doctrinal tyranny. The framers fully understood that if their grand experiment in republican democracy was to flourish, the exchange of ideas prerequisite to an informed citizenry was a necessity.
There is a curious marriage of minds on this point between American absolutism, which is so certain of its capacity to achieve the right ends that it proclaims speech an inviolable good, and American pragmatism, which is certain of nothing so much as its capacity to be wrong. The result is a doctrinaire humility: we go forth assuming as an immutable truth that there are no immutable truths, and therefore that expression must be uninhibited. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. famously put it in 1919, “the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—[and] the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market.”
But does this self-correcting competition never end? Is everything, ultimately, relative—left forever to be weighed against everything else? Do we so lack confidence (except in the sacrosanct status of speech itself) that we are unable to say with assurance that some things are truly evil, and that advocating them not only fails to serve any socially desirable purpose but guarantees more evil? Must our historical deference to opinion, however noxious, defer as well to a call to arms against innocents, or a call to destroy a form of representative government that protects religious and political freedom? May we not even ban and criminalize the advocacy of militant Islam and its métier, which is the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians?
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