The Thin End Of The Wedge

If you're not familiar with the name Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, he's the "filmmaker" who produced the YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims," on which the Obama Administration blamed the riots in Cairo and the lethal assault on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. He was arrested by the FBI and incarcerated for "parole violations" immediately afterward, and remains in jail to this day.

Columnist Rich Lowry has produced the ideal denunciation of this miscarriage of justice:

Nakoula Basseley Nakoula deserves a place in American history. He is the first person in this country jailed for violating Islamic anti-blasphemy laws.

You won’t find that anywhere in the charges against him, of course. As a practical matter, though, everyone knows that Nakoula wouldn’t be in jail today if he hadn’t produced a video crudely lampooning the prophet Muhammad.

Alone among all the nations of the world, the United States of America has this statement in its chartering document:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have extended that statement to apply to all forms of expression and have imposed it upon state and local governments as well as on our federal Congress. So what's Nakoula Nakoula doing in jail?

The "filmmaker" has been lambasted from many directions as a lowlife, a slanderer, an incompetent, and so forth. So what? He's as entitled to the protections of the First Amendment as anyone else within American jurisdiction. But he's not enjoying any such protections at the moment.

Some years ago, dissident historian David Irving came out as a Holocaust denier: that is, one who disputes the generally accepted history of the Nazi slaughters of European Jews. The German government prosecuted Irving for his dissent, which he dared to express in several publications, and eventually succeeded in penalizing him for it with a substantial fine. Similarly, the French government successfully prosecuted academic Robert Faurisson for Holocaust denial. Such things have never occurred in the United States...until Nakoula Nakoula.

We have a few rather prominent Holocaust deniers here in the U.S. Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton come to mind at once.

Make no mistake: Irving and Faurisson are sons-of-bitches. (Yes, so are Farrakhan and Sharpton.) I'd cross the street to avoid them. I'd never endorse their odious views. Nor do I consider Nakoula Nakoula an icon of truth or fine filmmaking. But what did these men do that deserved criminal prosecution or punishment?

Does the "shouting 'Fire!' in a crowded theater" exception apply to videos or other odious publications?

The judges on the post-World War II Nuremberg tribunals thought so. They sentenced Julius Streicher, editor-publisher of the Nazi rag Der Sturmer, to death by hanging, even though he'd never laid a finger on anyone. Their rationale was that by advocating and approving the Nazi regime's activities, he'd made himself culpable in their atrocities against Europe's Jews, much as one who commissions an assassin-for-hire is culpable in any homicides that ensue.

The rationale strikes me as thin. Nearly all Americans would agree that Streicher was a vile person of odious beliefs, but when you put the proposition to us in the abstract:

Should an individual be criminally liable for advocating or approving atrocious deeds?
How about for an opinion offensive to some recognized group or demographic?
How about for saying something the government would prefer not be said?

...we're likely to think it over a while, no matter how we answer.

We have a tangential situation developing today, illuminated by a man with whom I disagree about virtually everything:

I personally never expected anything of Obama, and wrote about it before the 2008 primaries. I thought it was smoke and mirrors. The one thing that did surprise me is his attack on civil liberties. They go well beyond anything I would have anticipated, and they don't seem easy to explain. In many ways the worst is what you mention, Holder vs. Humanitarian Law Project. That's an Obama initiative and it's a very serious attack on civil liberties. He doesn't gain anything from it – he doesn't get any political mileage out of it. In fact, most people don't even know about it, but what it does is extend the concept of "material assistance to terror" to speech.

The case in question was a law group that was giving legal advice to groups on the terrorist list, which in itself has no moral or legal justification; it's an abomination. But if you look at the way it's been used, it becomes even more abhorrent (Nelson Mandela was on it until a couple of years ago.) And the wording of the colloquy is broad enough that it could very well mean that if, say, you meet with someone in a terrorist group and advise them to turn to nonviolent means, then that's material assistance to terrorism. I've met with people who are on the list and will continue to do so, and Obama wants to criminalize that, which is a plain attack on freedom of speech. I just don't understand why he's doing it.

(Courtesy of Bayou Renaissance Man)

Chomsky, while he's no beacon of freedom, occasionally says something respectable, though one might have to swallow hard to admit it. A few years ago, he came out in defense of the above-mentioned Robert Faurisson, not because he agreed with Faurisson, but because he thinks that a government should claim the power to "define historical truth and punish deviations from it" is fascism, plain and simple. I find that I must agree.

Defending the rights of sons-of-bitches is one of the hardest things to do...and one of the most important, because that's where a would-be tyrant always plants the thin end of the wedge.

Think it over -- and remember Martin Niemoller as you ponder it.