By Victor Davis Hanson
Thursday, October 04, 2012
The American Left used to champion free expression. We
were lectured -- correctly -- that the price of being repulsed by occasional
crude talk and art was worth paying. Only that way could Americans ensure our
daily right to criticize those with greater power and influence whom we found
wrong and objectionable.
When 1950s comedian Lenny Bruce titillated his audiences
with the F-word and crude sex talk, liberals came to his defense. They reminded
us that vulgar speech is not a crime: The First Amendment was not just designed
to protect uplifting expression, but also rarer blasphemous and indecent
speech.
For liberals, the burning of a flag on campus and the
full frontal nudity of Penthouse magazine were also First Amendment issues.
When artist Andres Serrano photographed a crucifix in a
jar with his own urine ("Piss Christ"), the avant-garde Left not only
protected Serrano's constitutional right to offend millions, but also saw no
problem in the U.S. government subsidizing the talentless Serrano's sophomoric
obnoxiousness.
But the worldview of the Left is self-contradictory. One
of its pet doctrines is multiculturalism -- or the idea that non-Western
cultures cannot be judged critically by our own inherently biased Western
standards.
Female circumcision or honor killings in the Muslim world
don't merit our attention in the way that a woman's right to free abortion
pills from her Catholic employer does in the West. When it comes to the Middle
East, we neither criticize strongly enough the region's sexism, homophobia or
racism, nor do we defend without qualification our own notions of free
expression as inherently superior to the habitual censorship abroad.
Fear plays a role, too. Championing the right of Andres
Serrano to show his degrading pictures of Christ wins liberal laurels.
Protecting novelist Salman Rushdie's caricatures of Islam might earn death.
The Obama administration went to great lengths to blast
-- and even arrest -- an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian for posting on the
Internet a juvenile movie trailer ridiculing Islam and offending Muslims. After
riots across the Middle East and the murder of the U.S. ambassador in Libya,
American officials did not wish to concede that radical Islam hates the United
States -- even when Barack Obama is president. And they did not want to admit
that their own lax security standards, not a film trailer, led to the horrific
murders in Libya, or that in an election year their Middle East reset policy is
in shambles.
No obnoxious American in the last half-century -- not
Larry Flynt, not Daniel Ellsberg, not even Julian Assange -- has warranted so
much condemnation for his antics from the president of the United States, the
secretary of state and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as have one
crackpot preacher in Florida and an inept Coptic film producer.
Outraged Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Mich., demonstrated
in favor of anti-blasphemy laws last week. They demanded an end to any
expression that they find religiously offensive -- and thereby prove to be
embarrassingly clueless as to why many in their communities left their own
homelands to come to America in the first place.
The new Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim
Brotherhood, recently lectured the U.S. on its decadence and wants a global ban
on the caricaturing of Islam. He, too, forgot why he once fled to the United
States to be educated, employed and to freely say things that would have gotten
him killed in his native Egypt.
Another Egyptian immigrant, frequent CNN and MSNBC guest
pundit Mona Eltahawy, recently spray-painted over a public anti-jihadist poster
that she disliked. In her world, defacing public property is OK if by her own
standards she judges it offensive. Eltahawy, like the Dearborn protestors, is
oblivious to the fact that her self-appointed censorship would soon turn her
adopted country into just the sort of intolerant society from which she, too,
fled.
It is past time for U.S. officials to insist that our
traditions and laws apply equally across the board, regardless of where we come
from, or what we look like, or the anger and danger we incur from abroad.
Schools could do better by cutting back on their
multicultural classes and reintroducing study of the U.S. Constitution. All
immigrants need to pass a basic test on the Bill of Rights as part of winning
citizenship.
"Speaking truth to power" is not Sandra Fluke
grandstanding to ovations at the Democratic convention on behalf of
government-supplied free contraception. It is instead our elected officials
reminding rampaging Middle Eastern terrorists and bigots that they will not
alter our Constitution -- and better not try.
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