Restricting Speech

In the era of terrorism, both critics of the left and right acknowledge the existence of a continuum between civil liberties and effective counter-terrorism measures-- if you increase one you tend to get less of the other. Most of our debates boil down to an argument over where the line between the two should be drawn.

After London, the conservative punditocracy was outraged at how lax the Brits had become, allowing home-grown terror cells to germinate on English soil. But these criticisms, justified as they may be, fail to recognize the difficulty in acting against individuals who haven't actually done anything other than talk (a difficulty substantially reduced by Britain's new list of deportable terrorism-related offenses). Freedom of speech is a cherished ideal in Western democracies -- arguably, it is the ideal upon which all others rest.

Thankfully someone has finally acknowledged the problem. In an op-ed two weeks ago in the Times, Geoffrey Stone argues that even radical Islamists who rail against the government and extol the virtues of terrorism should be protected under the law. The distinction he draws is between speaking admirably of suicide bombing and outright incitement to violence. The former should be protected, the latter outlawed.

Stone's distinction is a hollow one. Islamists have declared war on the West and the growing roster of terrorist atrocities attest to their seriousness. A Muslim cleric who encourages suicidal terrorism is virtually indistinct from one who merely praises it. And yet, with those restrictions in place it becomes nearly impossible for a Muslim to severely criticize the government lest he be accused of inciting violence. But still, I think, it needs to be done. Noam Chomsky might make equally radical claims about the evils of British foreign policy or the legitimacy of terrorist grievances, but the fact is he has no followers with a distinguished history of putting those ideas into bloody practice. As is often the case, context matters.

This rather uncomfortable truth rubs up against another cherished democratic value, namely equality before the law. We shudder to think that a person's race or religion might be a factor in a court of law, or determine what views that person is permitted to express -- and rightly so. Guilt should be guilt, regardless of the ethnicity of the criminal.

What we are essentially weighing here is two competing democratic values -- free speech and color-blindedness -- and it is no simple matter to determine which should take precedence.