From Seattle writer and consultant Matt Rosenberg...

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Impulse To Censorship Reveals Islamist, Socialist Fears

February 15, 2006

A hypothetical for you, sort of: What if Radio Tehran were being beamed into the United States, broadcasting a steady stream of Iranian government talking points (minus "wipe Israel from the face of the earth"). Would you be in favor of U.S. government counter-intel ops to override the signal, so no one could hear it? Or would you shrug, and say: "Hey baby, marketplace of ideas, whatever."

Here's my answer: unless the imagined Radio Tehran broadcasts into the U.S. contained direct incitement to violence, I'd say, let it be.

I'm laying out this scenario because of an interesting snippet in an op-ed today from John Hughes in the Christian Science Monitor, titled "Latin America's Leftist Regimes Get Cozy With Iran": Here's what grabbed me:

The growth of relations between Cuba and Iran has been under way for some years prior to (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's ascendancy to the presidency. Observers of Cuba say that Iran has made use of an electronic jamming station outside Havana from which Cuba blocks broadcasts beamed at it by the US-backed Radio Marti. Iran has apparently piggybacked on Cuba's expertise to jam American government broadcasting into Iran.

Why must Iran and Cuba jam American government radio signals unless they are deathy afraid some of their not-so-loyal subjects will hear an appealing message of freedom, self-determination, and uncensored public dialog? In contrast to the skittish censors who run Iran and Cuba, in the U.S., we already have homegrown dissonance - socialist and communist Web sites, not to mention Michael Moore and Media Matters, the rapid response media watchdog site advancing the agenda of leftist billionaire George Soros.

Plus there's easy Internet access here to Cuba's and Iran's online propaganda sheets, Granma and The Tehran Times. Whereas, censorship of Western media and homegrown dissidents and bloggers is the rule in Iran and Cuba. This is the same impulse that says, "behead the cartoonists." I hope the censorious champions of darkness keep at it. We ARE approaching a tipping point. I'm going to petition my local school board for K-12 immerison curricula on Iranian and Cuban media, and Western Civ. How about you?

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Comments:

The central idea of modern liberalism, embraced by both the left and the right, both here and in Europe, is that there is no such thing as a dangerous idea, or a population that could be corrupted by its dissemination. Hence the almost religious attachment to the principle that no speech short of incitement, and not merely incitement, but incitement in circumstances imminently likely to result in serious violence, should ever be prohibited. So deeply held is this principle that even a restraint permitted, but not required, by the law is viewed as "censorship." (Both the American and European defensiveness about the Danish cartoon slanders of Islam are good examples.)

Unfortunately, there really are dangerous ideas that appear from time to time, as fascism did in the 1930s and as Islamist extremism does today. When they begin to take root in certain quarters, the principle of free speech as it is understood by modern liberalism leaves it defenseless against the spread of the evil until it breaks out into overt action.

Many liberals sense the dilemma, but cannot bring themselves to combat a bad idea with anything more than a good one. And so we are left with these totured efforts, as in contemporary Britain, to proscribe incitements to terror without ever coming to grips with the ideas that inspire it or make a particular audience susceptible to them. We have lost the capacity to check sedition because we have lost the belief that in the realm of speech there could be any.

Guess again.

Posted by: Tom Rekdal at February 15, 2006 07:48 PM

On a similar note, the latest socialist posters being put up around Seattle Central Commun(ist) College are actually encouraging students to support... the suppression of the cartoons and the enraged, psychopathic reactions of "average Muslims" everywhere.

I knew the SCCC socialists were addled. I didn't know the half of it. To openly support the crazed backlash against the harmless Danish cartoons, and to do so in the name of stamping out "Islamophobia"?!! Reading further down the poster one inevitable gets to the "real reason" behind the rabid reaction to the cartoons across the Islamic world: U.S. troops occupying Iraq and slaughtering innocent Iraqis!

Yep.

Posted by: Brad R. Torgersen at February 17, 2006 02:28 PM
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