By Timothy Garton Ash (THE GUARDIAN, 05/10/06):
Almost every day brings a new threat to free expression. A French philosopher is in hiding, running for his life from death threats on Islamist websites, because he published an article in a French newspaper saying that Muhammad is revealed in the Qur'an as a "master of hate". A production of Mozart's Idomeneo, which at one point displays the severed (plastic? papier mache?) head of Muhammad, alongside those of Jesus, Buddha and Poseidon, is pulled off the stage of the Deutsche Oper in Berlin after a telephoned threat of violence was reported to management by local police. And that's just the past week.
Going slightly further back, there's the murder of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh and the murderous hounding of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie. A British anti-fascist activist is beaten up following the publication of his photograph and address on a far-right website called Redwatch. Animal rights activists make death threats to medical researchers and their families. Sikh extremists force a play they dislike to be taken off the British stage. Christian extremists threaten BBC executives because they broadcast Jerry Springer: The Opera. Need I go on?
Fanatiques sans frontières are on the march. It's wrong to describe this as a single "war on terror"; our adversaries and their ideologies are so diverse. But if you think we are not engaged in a struggle against manifold enemies of freedom, as potentially deadly as those we faced in the 1930s, you are living in a fool's paradise. Which is to say: you are a fairly typical contemporary European. (And most Brits are, in this respect as in many others, closer to Europe than to America.)
In the first decade of the 21st century, the spaces of free expression, even in old-established liberal democracies, have been eroded, are being eroded and - if we don't summon ourselves to the fight - will continue to be eroded. Free expression is not just the particular preserve of writers and artists. It's a first-order freedom, the oxygen on which other liberties depend. Not for nothing did John Stuart Mill devote a whole chapter in his On Liberty to "the liberty of thought and discussion".
The erosion of free expression comes in many different ways. Most obviously, there is violence or the threat of violence: "If you say that, we will kill you." This is dramatically facilitated in our time by the internet, email and mobile phones. The French philosopher Robert Redeker went into hiding after an Islamist website called for him - "the pig" - to be "punished by the lions of France" as "the lion of Holland, Mohammed Bouyeri did", and then gave Redeker's home address, photograph and phone number. Mohammed Bouyeri was the slayer of Theo van Gogh.
Down the scale, there is peaceful public protest, sometimes with an implicit threat of violence. There are also other forms of less visible pressure, including the use of economic weapons - the boycott of Danish goods in some Islamic countries following the Danish cartoons scandal, for example, or the Chinese state's covert pressure on satellite providers, for whom China is a major customer.
Then there's self-censorship in the face of such threats. Chancellor Angela Merkel aptly described the Deutsche Oper Berlin's decision to pull Idomeneo as "self-censorship out of fear". But self-censorship can also flow from a well-intentioned notion of multi-cultural harmony, on the lines of "you respect my taboo and I'll respect yours" - what I've described in this column as the tyranny of the group veto. And there are misguided attempts by democratic governments and parliaments to ensure domestic peace and inter-communal harmony by legislating to curb free expression. The British government's original proposal for a law on incitement to religious hatred was a case in point.
The threats also come from the most diverse quarters. It would be absurd to pretend that Islamist extremists are not among the current leaders in intimidation, at least in relation to Europe and America. After all, Christians, Buddhists and, indeed, Poseidonites did not - so far as we know - threaten violent retaliation because the severed heads of their all-holiest were displayed on a Berlin opera stage. But my opening case-list shows that it's not just jihadists who want to squeeze the oxygen pipe of free expression.
Even as I write, news reaches me of a good friend, Tony Judt, a historian of modern Europe and outspoken critic of recent Israeli policy, finding a venue in New York suddenly withdrawn after telephone calls to the host institution, which happened to be the Polish consulate. (He proposed to talk about "the Israel lobby and US foreign policy".) According to the Polish consul, those telephone calls came from "a couple of Jewish groups", including the Anti-Defamation League and "representatives of American diplomacy and intelligentsia". Such phone calls are, of course, not comparable with death threats. But this is all part of a many-fronted, incremental erosion of free expression, even in the classic lands of the free, such as the United States, France and Britain.
What is to be done? First, we need to wake up to the seriousness of the danger. I repeat: this is one of the greatest challenges to freedom in our time. We need a debate about what the law should and should not allow to be said or written. Even Mill did not suggest that everyone should be allowed to say anything, anytime and anywhere. We also need a debate about what it's prudent and wise to say in a globalised world where people of different cultures live so close together, like roommates separated only by thin curtains. There is a frontier of prudence and wisdom which lies beyond the one that should be enforced by law.
I believe, for example, that Redeker's article in Le Figaro was an intemperate and unwise one, with its claim that Islam (not just Islamism, or jihadism, but Islam tout court) is today's equivalent of Soviet-style world communism - yesterday Moscow, today Mecca - and his denunciation of Muhammad as a "pitiless warlord, pillager, massacrer of Jews and polygamist". But once the fanatiques sans frontières respond by proposing to kill him, then we must stand in total solidarity with the threatened writer - in the spirit of Voltaire.
Never mind that Voltaire probably never said exactly what is so often attributed to him: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." That famous quotation seems to have originated in an early 20th-century paraphrase. But this was indeed the spirit of Voltaire.
The order of phrases is vital. Too many recent responses in such cases - from the Rushdie affair onward - have had this backhanded syntax: "Of course I defend his/her freedom of expression, but..." The Voltaire principle gets it the right way round: first the dissent, but then the unconditional solidarity. Now we are all called upon to play our part. The future of freedom depends on words prevailing over knives.