Europe and Free Speech

It appears that the Iranian paper that held the Holocaust cartoon competition was accurate in their conclusion that the taboo on defamation of the memory of Shoah victims is the best European analogy for mocking representations of Mohammed.

Austria's sentencing of Holocaust revisionist David Irving for denying that Jews were murdered by gassing at Auschwitz certainly seems to call into question all the self-righteous pontification about the inviolate nature of unhindered political expression in the West.

How should this obvious double standard be viewed by Muslims who are sympathetic to the vocal opponents of the cartoons? First of all, it's important to note that nobody rioted on the occasion of Irving's books being published. However, it's easy to see that the publishing of the turban bomb, etc., cartoons falls into the category of "speech we like," which requires no moral courage to protect, while Holocaust denial is clearly "speech we don't like," which, as the received wisdom goes, is the most important kind to defend. Sure, no one rioted against Irving, but then no one had to, since everyone knew that the power of the state would be brought to bear against him.

If you want to argue that some things are just too sacred, and that the sacredness of such things requires state protection--which is what most European countries do, whether it's the Holocaust, France's war crimes in Algeria, or any number of other historical sore spots--your protests that the Danish state rightly has no ability to regulate the conduct of its newspapers is going to seem pretty lame, and is going to go down as yet another public relations disaster in the fight to convince Muslims that our way of organizing society is better than theirs.