Index For Censorship

How would you feel if you were a Greenpeace supporter, visited the group's website, and found a big fat feature article celebrating the joys of whale hunting? Or if you were a conservative, opened the latest issue of the Weekly Standard, and were confronted with a fiery editorial advocating the imprisonment of George W. Bush for alleged war crimes? Baffled? Betrayed, perhaps?

That's how a lot of free-speech advocates felt recently when they read this article on the site of U.K.-based Index on Censorship (IOC). Index — both an advocacy group and a well-regarded magazine — is a prominent, decades-old bulwark against the muzzling of artists, journalists, and others who take the right to freedom of expression seriously. It's hardly the kind of organization you would suspect of blaming the victim for the crime. And yet: Index associate editor Rohan Jayasekera argued that the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist was understandable — that, in some measure, van Gogh had brought the brutal slaughter on himself — because the caustic Dutchman had been "furiously provocative," and had supposedly "roared his critics into silence."

It doesn't seem to have occurred to Jayasekera that publishing is a lot like real estate, where three things matter most: location, location, location. His piece would scarcely have received international notice if it had been published almost anywhere else. In Index, however, it is a thing of great foulness, a howler that amounts to a sellout of the very principles Jayasekera is paid to defend. He cleared his throat, took aim, and spat in the face of his employer and his readers. It was an astonishing performance.

I won't recount the brouhaha that followed, but you can tell from the comments on Index's site, and also here, that most of it wasn't pretty. The matter probably came to something of a close yesterday, almost three weeks later, when former Index staffer Frank Fisher published a spirited rebuttal of the Jayasekera article on the organization's site. Fisher spoke his mind nicely. I have just two more points of my own.

In a cordial e-mail exchange with IOC's acting chair Jonathan Freedland, I learned that he thinks that Index didn't sanction or support Jayasekera's vile piece — the organization just offered the guy a platform, no endorsement implied. I don't doubt that Freedland is sincere in parsing the situation that way, but I do doubt that the outside world will see it as he does. Let's get real: Jayasekera is on staff. In fact, he's fully one-third of the editorial team, as I understand it. When he writes an essay and publishes it in Index, what reader is not going to assume that that's the magazine talking — that the article represents IOC's views?

And finally: While Freedland, in the five e-mails I got from him, was perfectly gentlemanly and forthcoming, he repeatedly neglected to answer one simple question I posed. This one:

"If, heaven forbid, the Iranian fatwa against Index contributor Salman Rushdie indeed results in his murder, will the magazine eulogize him in the same manner it commemorated Theo van Gogh? Or is it possible that Index only gives the Jayasekera treatment to murdered writers whose politics the staff happens to dislike?"

Inquiring minds, and all that.

Comments

[Harlan]

The really sad thing about Rohan's article was it's daftness. It made no attempt to argue a case.
He made vague attacks such as "abuse of his freedom of speech" "bullshit" etc , intimated that there should be limits to freedom of speech , that Theo had somehow "roared moderate Muslims into silence" , yet failed to back any of this up by explaining what on earth it was supposed to mean.
How did one person "roar" others into silence ?
How was freedom of speech to be limited and by whom ?

Behind the bombast and provocation of Rohan's purple prose, serious points were alluded to :
discrimination against Muslim minorities in the West, suppression of thier rights and freedoms, scapegoating them as targets for our fears..
but by focusing on Pim and Theo's right to freedom of expression, he missed the vital point.
Minorities need to empower themselves and be empowered, rather than the likes of Pim and Theo losing their power to speak.
Nowhere on this earth was there freedom of speech.
There were only varying degrees of retrained speech .
As a result, a mag like Index had more than enough of a task working to push for less restraints, not least here in UK where the Govnt is attempting a serious further restraint on our right to speak out with it's hideous "incitement to religious hatred" bill.
Are we to believe that a senior editor of Index favours this abomination ?
This bill is the first step in what will be a series of logical steps following the reprehensible Incitement to Racial Hatred laws already in place.
Supposedly introduced to protect minorities, most prosecutions to date have been against them !
Logic demands, surely, that either it is an offence to incite hatred in general or it is not.
A blanket law forbidding any type of supposed incitement to hatred, would potentially envelop huge swathes of previously protected speech and expression.
But laws aiming at specific types of hatred have revealed how difficult it is to remian focused on supposed racial discrimination when words can be used in such varied and ambiguous and contradictory ways.

Perhaps the best argument for maximising freedom of expression was that attempts to restrict it resulted in crude brutal tools ill suited to cope with the myriad complexities, subtleties, ambigueties, paradoxes, dualities .. etc of language.

In language, unlike other areas of life, mankind should be free to explode into unhindered expression.