In early August, late night talk show host David Letterman made a joke that led to an online threat from a contributor to a Jihadist website. Letterman’s joke referenced the death of senior Al-Qaeda member, Muhammad Ilyas Kashmiri. After stating that Ilyas Kashmiri had gone to join Osama binLaden in death, a threatening anti-Semitic post was made on the extremist site. Letterman now holds company with others who are threatened because of comments made that offend religious or political extremists.
The best-known victim of this growing trend is Salman Rushdie, who has lived under an Iranian execution order for over twenty years. His novel The Satanic Verses depicted the Prophet Muhammad in a way that offended some Muslim individuals. In response, Iran’s spiritual leader at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini, called for Rushdie’s execution. Soon after, book burnings were held in both Western and Middle Eastern countries. Rushdie lived through many attempted assassinations, including two bombings.
Although the previous examples involve retaliation by Muslim extremists, no one religion is free of its terrorist factions. Early Christmas morning in 1984, four young Christian extremists bombed an abortion clinic. They called the attack, “a gift to Jesus on his birthday.” This attack was only one of 8 murders, 17 attempted murders, 153 assaults, and 3 kidnappings committed against abortion providers in North America since the 1970’s. The Christian extremist organization, the American Coalition of Life Activists, created a website that compares abortion doctors to Nazi war criminals. The website included home addresses and contact information for many of the doctors and their families, but was shut down by a court order after being called a “hit list.”
Although retaliatory techniques are widely used, it is debatable whether censorship by force is effective. Famous editorial cartoons first published in 2005 illustrate how groups using violent retribution can fail to achieve their desired goal. On September 30th, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve editorial cartoons, some of which depicted the Islamic Prophet Muhammad in an unfavourable light. Islamic practices, most notably Sunni Islam, forbid images of the Prophet Muhammad. This violation of Muslim tenets, combined with the inflammatory nature of the cartoons, led to an outcry from some members of the Islamic community. Islamic community leaders attempted to draw attention to the controversial images, and this only caused them to be reprinted. After the cartoons were shown in newspapers around the world, riots erupted in many countries, leading to over 100 deaths. Danish embassies in Syria, Lebanon and Iran were set on fire, and the Danish embassy in Pakistan was bombed. This violence had the initial effect that its perpetrators had hoped for: the cartoons were censored.
Fearful of retaliation, many newspapers refused to print the cartoons. In 2009, Yale University removed the cartoons and all other images of Muhammad from a scholarly text written by one of its professors. Yale explained their decision to self-censor by saying that they feared violent retaliation, should the images be published.
However, in 2008, a failed assassination plot against the creator of one of the cartoons exactly the opposite effect. Police arrested three men who had allegedly been plotting to murder cartoonist Kurt Westergaard. Afterwards, more than 15 Danish newspapers reprinted the cartoons as a gesture of solidarity. Even the newspaper Politiken, which had condemned the original printing of the cartoons, participated in this show of support. They said that, “regardless of whether Jyllands-Posten at the time used freedom of speech unwisely and with damaging consequences, the paper deserves unconditional solidarity when it is threatened with terror.”
Similarly, a new health care legislation has led to a spate of death threats against Democratic Senators and Representatives in the United States. Though the threats have created fear among the politicians, they have also resulted in a show of solidarity. Two men have been arrested for threatening Senator Patty Murray and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In response to the threats, pleas for donations from Democratic organizations have been successful, and the Democratic National Committee has raised two million dollars more than the Republican Party.
As the global audience becomes increasingly accessible, more political and religious groups will feel threatened by the messages and actions of others. Violence and intimidation can silence the voices of opponents but it can also rouse them to retaliation. If society rejects the tactics of fear, they will stop working, and extremist groups will turn to other means to prove their points.
Ironically, it may come to pass that the only way to end censorship by terrorists is to stop being afraid of them.
