No offence (4)

Confirmation has appeared here over the past two days, if I needed it, that lots of people do not really believe in free speech.

Why trouble the courts?
Picture: mcdowell

Richard of Orléans will forgive the thought that he would not be everyone's choice to lecture on the importance of expressing opinions without the least hint of rudeness.

No, I have not seen the Irish News article in full. I gave the flavour of it, as best I could from perusal of news reports (using sources I regard as usually dependable), and made it clear that the review contained further criticisms.

I do not even know if the article can be viewed on any news databases, given that it led to a libel action and newspaper librarians tend to get jumpy in such circumstances. Added point: you can read more about this in Roy Greenslade's blog at the Guardian Media website.

But my argument did not rest on the precise nature of the criticism. I was more concerned with the principle.

Take away a critic's right to criticise and you may as well empty whole shelves of public libraries, forbid serious discussion of any artistic, sporting or other human endeavour and ban Simon Cowell from the air. Well, maybe the last reference wasn't my strongest point.

The blogosphere seems, at first thought, an odd place for people to be applauding ferocious penalties for those who express views they find unpalatable.

But when you study some of the more obscene libel awards made particularly but not always by juries, it is not so surprising after all.

Since Britain, I am pleased to say, is still a newspaper reading country, many of the jurors taking part in the exercise are likely themselves to be avid consumers of the press.

Bill Taylor refers to critics on major Canadian papers (this is an amended reference; see my comment) making repeat visits before a stridently critical restaurant view appears and this seems eminently sensible and fair.

The fact that it would still not be enough for some, more concerned with clipping the wings of journalists, rather supports the opening lines of this post.

No offence (2)

The response to my posting about the Mohammed cartoons, and the preposterous trial their publication prompted in Paris, has been a disappointment.

Islam will dominate
Picture (and caption): El Marco.

This is not to say that I mind a serious topic being hijacked in the comments section for a spot of backbiting between feuding readers.

You do not actually have to wade through much of that to find some perfectly sensible and thought-provoking opinions and assertions posted here over the past 18/24 hours.

It just seems a little incomplete to have no one writing in to challenge my basic proposition: namely, that Muslims (and Roman Catholics, and Protestants and so on) have no right to demand the suppression of words and images about them or Islam (or other groups of believers, or their faiths) unless criminal incitement is involved.

The advantage of blogging for the Telegraph was that a big newspaper site was always likely to attract readers of all types.

Salut! has highly respectable levels of readership - well over 700 visits yesterday alone - and it boasts comment statistics most Telegraph bloggers can but dream of.

But it would benefit from some diversification among the ranks of readers willing to step forward, identified or otherwise, to let off steam.

With comments in response to No offence nudging 50 as I write, the nearest we have had to a Muslim point of view opposing my argument was the following, signed by an anonymous contributor:

As the comments seem to be a private conversation, (I) am a little wary of pointing out that the reason Muslims are offended by the cartoons, is not that they are terrorists, but that Islam proscribes pictorial representations of Mohammed, Xtianity on the other hand is full of icons, false or otherwise.

That comment could have been posted by a Muslim, though my guess is that it was not.

The obvious reply, incidentally, is that Muslims are fully entitled to expect one another to observe the rules of their faith, whether on pictorial representation of Mohammed or anything else.

They are not entitled to require others, outside their faith, to do likewise. That is where the trouble tends to start; many, many Muslims - and whoever said France has four or five million is almost certainly underestimating the true figure - do see Islam as so superior that it will one day rule the world whether the world likes it or not.

And that view is by no means restricted to extremists.

As for the quality of debate inspired by my blog, that is a matter I am perfectly happy to leave to you. My policy on censorship was established very early.

Only when a comment gives me serious cause for legal or other concerns will I step in. It has happened on perhaps three or four occasions, once or twice when I put on my media lawyer's hat, and otherwise when remarks about my former employers - and believe me, my own powers of self-restraint have been sorely tested - went too far.

* And for those who missed my update, the prosecutor in the Paris trial made the commonsense decision to urge the court to dismiss the charges.