The Tyranny of Silence

by Flemming Rose

  16 Ivan Hare, “Extreme Speech under International and Regional Human Rights Standards,” in Hare and Weinstein, Extreme Speech and Democracy, pp. 62–80.

  17 United Nations Human Rights Commission, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx.

  18 United Nations Human Rights Commission, International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CERD.aspx.

  19 According to the British government’s Equality Bill of 2010, vegans and teetotalers should be accorded the same degree of protection against discrimination as religious groups. See Marie Woolf, “Don’t Mock My Lentils: Vegans to Get Discrimination Rights,” Sunday Times (London), March 7, 2010.

  20 Tim Black, “After the Convention, What Next for Liberty?” Spiked (London), March 2, 2009.

  21 Dominique Moïsi, The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the World (New York: Anchor, 2009).

  22 Jacob Mchangama, “Fri tale: Om venstrefløjens multikulturalistiske udvanding af ytringsfriheden,” in Friheden flyver: En debatbog om mangfoldighed, Dennis Nørmark, ed. (Copenhagen: Cepos, 2010).

  23 Anne Weber, Manual on Hate Speech (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2009).

  24 Robert Post, “Hate Speech,” in Hare and Weinstein, Extreme Speech and Democracy, pp. 123–38.

  25 Vagn Greve, Bånd på hånd og mund: Straffforfølgelse eller ytringsfrihed (Copenhagen: Djof, 2008).

  26 Ibid.

  27 Flemming Ytzen, “Radikal næstformand anmelder drabschef,” Politiken (Copenhagen), March 6, 2010.

  28 Steven Lukes, The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat (New York: Verso, 1996).

  29 Ronald Dworkin, “The Right to Ridicule,” New York Review of Books, March 23, 2006.

  30 Flemming Rose, Amerikanske Stemmer (Viby: Indsigt, 2006), pp. 117–27.

  31 Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment (New York: Basic Books, 2007).

  32 Guy Carmi, “Dignity versus Liberty: The Two Western Cultures of Free Speech,” Boston University International Law Journal 26, no. 2 (Fall 2008): 277–374; Guy Carmi, “Dignity—The Enemy from Within: A Theoretical and Comparative Analysis of Human Dignity as a Free Speech Justification,” University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 9, no. 4 (2007): 958–1001; Adam Liptak, “U.S. Court Is Now Guiding Fewer Nations,” New York Times, September 18, 2008.

  33 European Union law website, http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:32008F0913:en:NOT.

  34 James Weinstein, “An Overview of American Free Speech Doctrine,” in Hare and Weinstein, Extreme Speech and Democracy, pp. 81–91.

  35 Peter Walker, “Man Guilty of Inciting Murder at Cartoon Protest,” The Guardian (London), July 5, 2007.

  36 Dirk Voorhoof, “European Court of Human Rights: Case of Leroy v. France,” IRIS Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory, 2009.

  37 Weinstein, “An Overview,” in Hare and Weinstein, Extreme Speech and Democracy, pp. 84–85.

  38 Ibid., pp. 81–91.

  39 C. Edwin Baker, “Autonomy and Hate Speech,” in Hare and Weinstein, Extreme Speech and Democracy, pp. 139–57.

  40 Liptak, “U.S. Court Is Now Guiding Fewer Nations”; Carmi, “Dignity versus Liberty.”

  41 Interview with author, Amsterdam, January 22, 2009. See also Paul Scheffer, Immigrant Nations (London: Polity, 2011).

  42 Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate, pp. 11–112.

  43 Michael Scammell, “Censorship and Its History: A Personal View,” in Information, Freedom and Censorship, Kevin Boyle, ed. (London: Times Books, 1988), pp. 1–19.

  44 Carmi, “The Enemy from Within.”

  45 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, Stefan Collini, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Richard Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (London: Atlantic Books, 2007).

  46 Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, Vejen,jeg valgte (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2007).

  47 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, http://www1.curriculum.edu.au/ddunits/downloads/pdf/dec_of_rights.pdf.

  48 Douglas Murray, “Fire in a Crowded Theatre,” Standpoint (London), March 2009; Tim Black, “Britain Is Not a ‘Crowded Theatre,’” Spiked (London), February 16, 2009.

  49 The context of Oliver Wendell Holmes’s wording, “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic,” is illuminated by Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate.

  50 Alan Dershowitz, “Shouting ‘Fire!’” Atlantic Monthly, January 1989, p. 72.

  51 Jeevan Vasagar, “Schools Drop Holocaust Lessons,” The Guardian (London), April 2, 2007.

  Chapter 8. From Russia with Love

  1 Kronid Lyubarsky, Kronid: Izbrannye stati K. Lyubarskogo (Moscow: Rossiiskii Gos. Gumanitarnyi Universitet, 2001), p. 60.

  2 Ibid., pp. 54–60.

  3 Interview with author, May 1993.

  4 The standard work on the history of Soviet dissent is Ludmila Alekseyeva’s Istoriya Inokomysliya v SSSR: Noveishiy period (1984). English translation: Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movement for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987). For an early history of the Moscow Helsinki Group, see Paul Goldberg, The Final Act: The Dramatic, Revealing Story of the Moscow Helsinki Watch Group (New York: Morrow, 1988). The history of the human rights movement is presented from more personal angles in the memoirs of those who took part: Andrei Amalrik, Zapiski Dissident (Moscow: Slovo, 1991); Yuri Orlov, Opasnye mysli: Memuary iz russkoi zhizni (Moscow: Argumenty I Fakty, 1992); Anatoly Marchenko, To Live Like Everyone (New York: Holt, 1989) and My Testimony (New York: Penguin, 1971); Lyudmila Alexeyeva and Paul Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1993); Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1990); Boris Weil, Osobo Opasny (London: OPI, 1980); Natan Sharansky, Fear No Evil (New York: Random House, 1988); and Yelena Bonner, Alone Together (New York: Vintage, 1986).

  5 Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom (New York: Norton, 1968). (The New York Times published the full text on July 22, 1968.)

  6 Goldberg, The Final Act; G. V. Kuzovkin, ed., K istorii moskovskoi khelsinskoi gruppy (Moscow: Zatsepa, 2001); Lyudmila Alexeyeva, Dokumenty Moskovskoi Helsinskoi Gruppy (Moscow: Zatsepa, 2001).

  7 Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, p. 292.

  8 Märta-Lisa Magnusson, ed., The Louisiana Conference on Literature and Perestroika (Esbjerg, Denmark: South Jutland University Press, 1989).

  9 Kronid Lyubarsky, “Islam i Musulman’e,” in Strana i Mir (Almaty), 1990, no. 4.

  10 Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope against Hope (New York: Scribner, 1970).

  11 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1980).

  12 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag (Paris: YMCA Press, 1973).

  13 Vadim Medvedev’s statement was related to me in the beginning of 1989 by the writer Viktor Astafyev.

  14 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live Not by Lies,” Washington Post, February 18, 1974.

  15 Amalrik, Zapiski Dissident, p. 37.

  16 A. V. Korotkov, S. A. Melchin, and A. S. Stepanov, eds., Kremlevskiy Samosud: Sekretnye Dokumenty Politbyuro o Pisatele A. Solzhenitsyne (Moscow: Rodina, 1994).

  17 Ibid., pp. 319–26.

  18 Ibid., p. 361.

  19 Ibid., p. 353.

  20 Interview with author, September 2, 2007.

  21 Natan Sharansky, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 39–64.

  22 Ibid., p. 40.

  23 Jacob Mchangama, “Fri tale: Om venstrefløjens multikulturalistiske udvanding af ytringsfriheden,” in Fr
iheden flyver: En debatbog om mangfoldighed, ed. Dennis Nørmark (Copenhagen: Cepos, 2010), pp. 94–95.

  24 Flemming Rose, “Muhammeds ansigt,” Jyllands-Posten (Copenhagen), September 30, 2005.

  25 Ibid.

  Chapter 9. Questioning the Harassers

  1 Jyllands-Posten (Copenhagen), March 2, 2006. For the full text in English, see BBC News, March 1, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4764730.stm.

  2 Riazat Butt, “New Ex-Muslim Group Speaks Out,” The Guardian (London), June 22, 2007. See also the websites of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, http://ex-muslim.org.uk/; Zentralrat der Ex-Muslime, http://www.ex-muslime.de; and Centralrådet för ex-muslimer i Skandenavien, http://www.ex-muslim.net.

  3 Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Ibn Warraq, ed., Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (Amherst, MA: Prometheus, 2003).

  4 Submission: Part 1, Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, 2004, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6bFR4_Ppk8.

  5 Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ayaan: Opbrud og oprør (Copenhagen: Jyllands-Postens Forlag, 2006), p. 335; Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007).

  6 A wealth of material on Maryam Namazie’s activities and her commitment can be found on her website: http://www.maryamnamazie.com.

  7 For a selection of Afshin Ellian’s columns translated into English, see Social Affairs Unit, http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000644.php.

  8 Ludmila Alekseyeva, Soviet Dissent: Contemporary Movement for National, Religious, and Human Rights (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1987).

  9 All 65 issues of the samizdat periodical Khronika tekuschikh sobytiy (Chronicle of Current Events), which appeared from 1968 to 1982, are collected at http://www.memo.ru/history/DISS/chr/.

  10 Phillipe Demenet, “Adam Michnik: The Sisyphus of Democracy,” UNESCO Courier (Paris), September 2001.

  11 Kathleen Parthé, “For Their Freedom and Ours: Alexander Herzen and the Liberation of Poland,” Skalny Center newsletter, University of Rochester, 2012.

  Chapter 10. A Victimless Crime

  1 The Story of Michael Servetus is based on Roland Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus (Providence, RI: Blackstone Editions, 2005); Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, Out of the Flames (New York: Broadway Books, 2003).

  2 Quoted in Zagorin, Religious Toleration, p. 77.

  3 This is a key point in Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (London: Belknap Press, 2007).

  4 Zagorin, Religious Toleration, pp. 114–22. The following is based on Zagorin’s account.

  5 Quoted in Stefan Zweig, chap. 7 in The Right to Heresy, or How John Calvin Killed a Conscience: Castellio against Calvin (New York: Viking Press, 1936), http://www.gospeltruth.net/heresy_toc.htm.

  6 Zagorin, Religious Toleration, p. 119.

  7 Michael Walzer, On Toleration (London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 14–36.

  8 I thank Magnus Ranstorp for the Swedish example concerning the Rosengården public housing complex in Malmö. Ranstorp is one of the authors of the cited report.

  9 See “Sharia Law in Britain: A Threat to One Law for All and Equal Rights,” a report by One Law for All, June 2010, http://www.onelawforall.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/New-Report-Sharia-Law-in-Britain_fixed.pdf.

  10 Walzer, On Toleration, pp. 30–35.

  11 The Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, August 5, 1990, http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/cairodeclaration.html.

  12 The strong influence of the EU on the UN Human Rights agenda in the years after the end of the Cold War and its decline since 2000 are documented by Richard Gowan and Franziska Brantner, “The EU and Human Rights at the UN: 2009 Review,” European Council on Foreign Relations, http://ecfr.3cdn.net/c85a326a9956fc4ded_qhm6vaacc.pdf.

  13 See Koenraad Elst’s postscript in Daniel Pipes, The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah and the West, 2nd ed. (London: Transaction Publishers, 2003), pp. 257–89.

  14 Karin Deutsch Karlekar, “Press Freedom in 2009: Broad Setbacks to Global Media Freedom,” overview essay for the report Freedom of the Press 2010 (New York: Freedom House, 2010).

  15 On the decline of freedom of expression and freedom of the press in Western Europe, see statement by Article 19, “Western Europe: Freedom of Expression in Retreat in 2009,” December 21, 2009, http://www.article19.org/pdfs/press/western-europe-freedom-of-expression-in-retreat-in-2009.pdf.

  16 Ann Elizabeth Mayer, “From Islamic Particularism to Pseudo-Universalism: The Organization of the Islamic Conference and Its Resolutions on Combating ‘Defamation of Religions’” (unpublished paper, University of Pennsylvania, 2010).

  17 Morten Vestergaard, “Kritik af religion er velkommen,” Jyllands-Posten (Copenhagen), October 28, 2008.

  18 United Nations Human Rights Commission, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx.

  19 Anne Weber, Manual on Hate Speech (Strasbourg: Council of Europe Publishing, 2009).

  20 Ibid.

  21 Stephanie Farrior, Molding the Matrix: “The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of International Law Concerning Hate Speech,” Berkeley Journal of International Law 14, no. 1 (1996): 3–98.

  22 Vestergaard, “Kritik af religion er velkommen.”

  23 Kenan Malik, From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy (London: Atlantic Books, 2009).

  24 See, for example, Matt Cherry, “Blasphemy 2010: An Old Whine in New Battles,” International Humanist and Ethical Union, March 10, 2010, http://iheu.org/content/blasphemy-2010-old-whine-new-battles.

  25 Mayer, “From Islamic Particularism to Pseudo-Universalism.”

  26 Ibid.

  27 See, for example, P. K. Abdul Ghafour, “OIC Chief: Global Action to Fight Islamophobia Is Needed,” Arab News (Jeddah), May 2012.

  28 Nina Shea and Paul Marshall, Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes Are Choking Freedom Worldwide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

  29 Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman (Kareem Amer), “The Naked Truth of Islam as I Have Seen in Alexandria,” Free Kareem Coalition, October 22, 2005. The story of Kareem Amer is based on information contained on the website, http://www.freekareem.org.

  30 Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman (Kareem Amer), “The Events of Al-Azhar Inquisition,” March 15, 2006; “The University of Terrorism,” May 7, 2006; “Your Blessings, O Azhar,” October 28, 2006. All articles are available on the Free Kareem Coalition website, http://www.freekareem.org. To access the articles, click on About at the top of the page; in the fourth paragraph, click on what he said.

  31 Magdy Samaan, “Prison Didn’t Change Me: Kareem Amer,” Daily News Egypt (Cairo) July 12, 2007.

  32 Konstantin Akinsha, “Orthodox Bulldozer,” Art News (New York), May 1, 2003.

  33 Quoted from the guilty verdict, March 28, 2005, Tagansky Court, Moscow, http://old.sakharov-center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/hall_exhibitions_obvinenie.htm.

  34 Steven Lee Myers, “In Test of Free Speech, Russian Court Rules against Art Show,” New York Times, March 28, 2005.

  35 Edward Kline, “Art on Trial: The Case of Samodurov, Vasilovskaya and Mikhalchuk” (briefing paper, Andrei Sakharov Foundation, March 11, 2005), http://asf.primetask.com/cgi/ASFdbs.pl?&pass=&action=Linkview&link_res_doc=kline-artOntrial-brief.1110648245.html.

  36 European Court of Human Rights, Partial Decision as to the Admissibility of Application no. 3007/06 by Yuriy Samodurov and Lyudmila Vasilovskaya against Russia, December 15, 2009, http://www.article19.org/data/files/pdfs/analysis/russia-first-decision-yuriy-samodurov.pdf.

  37 Ros Wynne-Jones, “Film Director Fights Blasphemy Ban,” The Independent (London), March 28, 1996; “Artists Defend Banned Film on St. Th
eresa’s Visions,” New York Times, December 9, 1989; Patricia Wynn Davies, “Archaic Blasphemy Law Faces Last Judgment,” The Independent (London), November 25, 1996.

  38 Quoted from the decision by the European Court of Human Rights in Wingrove v. the United Kingdom, http://original.religlaw.org/template.php?id=370.

  39 Quoted from the guilty verdict, http://old.sakharov-center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/hall_exhibitions_obvinenie.htm.

  40 Yuri Samodurov, March 10, 2003, http://old.sakharov-center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/religion_notabene/.

  41 Frederik Stjernfelt, “Må vi se Jul I Valhal,” Weekendavisen (Copenhagen), February 17, 2006.

  42 Sakharov Museum, “Public Debate on Taboos in Modern Russian Art,” March 28, 2007, http://old.sakharov-center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/forbidden-art/tabu-art/texts/.

  43 Yelena Bonner, letter to Sakharov Museum, March 16, 2007, http://old.sakharov-center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/forbidden-art/discussion/.

  44 Sergei Kovalyov, “My Opinion on the Exhibition,” http://old.sakharov-center.ru/museum/exhibitionhall/forbidden-art/discussion/sergey-kovalev/.

  45 Salil Tripathi, Offense: The Hindu Case (London: Seagull Books, 2009). Husain’s story is based on Tripathi’s book and Somini Sengupta, “A Muslim Artist and Hindu Images: It’s a Volatile Mix,” New York Times, June 16, 1998; and Somini Sengupta, “An Artist in Exile Tests India’s Democratic Ideals,” New York Times, September 9, 2008.

  46 Jerome Starkey, “He Just Shared an Article with Friends. What’s the Problem?” The Independent (London), February 1, 2008.

  47 Jochen-Martin Gutsch, “Free Speech Case Tests Afghanistan,” Der Spiegel (Hamburg), May 19, 2008.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Kim Sengupta, “Sayed Pervez Kambaksh: How He Was Sentenced to Die,” The Independent (London), February 25, 2009.

  50 Austin Dacey and Colin Koproske, Islam and Human Rights: Defending Universality at the United Nations (New York: Center for Inquiry, 2008).

  51 Younus Shaikh, “Living among the Believers,” International Humanist and Ethical Union, February 1, 2002, http://iheu.org/content/living-among-believers.