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Six writers have withdrawn from the PEN American Center's annual gala in protest over the organization's decision to give its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked on January 7th:
The writers who have withdrawn from the event are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, The New York Times reports. [...] Kushner, in an email to The Times, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with Charlie Hebdo's "cultural intolerance" and promotion of "a kind of forced secular view." Those views, The Times added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event. Carey told The Times that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression." A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?" he said in an email to the newspaper. Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel The Satanic Verses, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are "horribly wrong."
Glenn Greenwald has written about the controversy over at The Intercept, which is hosting letters and comments written by Deborah Eisenberg and Teju Cole. Greenwald notes:
Though the core documents are lengthy, this argument is really worth following because it highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression. Indeed, some of the most repressive regimes on the planet sent officials to participate in the Paris “Free Speech” rally, and France itself began almost immediately arresting and prosecuting people for expressing unpopular, verboten political viewpoints and then undertaking a series of official censorship acts, including the blocking of websites disliked by its government. The French government perpetrated these acts of censorship, and continues to do so, with almost no objections from those who flamboyantly paraded around as free speech fanatics during Charlie Hebdo Week.
From Deborah Eisenberg's letter to PEN's Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, March 26, 2015:
I can hardly be alone in considering Charlie Hebdo's cartoons that satirize Islam to be not merely tasteless and brainless but brainlessly reckless as well. To a Muslim population in France that is already embattled, marginalized, impoverished, and victimized, in large part a devout population that clings to its religion for support, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.
Was it the primary purpose of the magazine to mortify and inflame a marginalized demographic? It would seem not. And yet the staff apparently considered the context of their satire and its wide-ranging potential consequences to be insignificant, or even an inducement to redouble their efforts – as if it were of paramount importance to demonstrate the right to smoke a cigarette by dropping your lit match into a dry forest.
It is difficult and painful to support the protection of offensive expression, but it is necessary; freedom of expression must be indivisible. The point of protecting all kinds of expression is that neither you nor I get to determine what attitudes are acceptable – to ensure that expression cannot be subordinated to powerful interests. But does that mean that courage in expression is to be measured by its offensiveness?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Tuesday April 28 2015, @08:26PM
That's not what the term meant. It meant someone who used the ideals of social justice as a bludgeon to demand that their personal preferences in conversation are adhered to.
Things like playing oppression olympics where you try to pretend your group X is more oppressed than other group Y because of reason Z. Or things like saying that opinions "trigger" you, without any bearing or familiarity with actual PTSD and how it works, and how it causes people in the real world to suffer. Shallow understandings of important things used for selfish ends. That's where the "warrior" part came from.
That's not the same as being offended at shitty behavior. You're allowed to call a gross fucking bigot exactly that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 28 2015, @11:35PM
Correct. People using the term need to distinguish "SJW" from "cat lady". The latter is a fairly benign, harmless creature that shrieks at the top of its lungs about some trivial SWPL issue, such as the perceived racism presented by white men after their colleagues were killed by Islamic extremists. I know that creature is the courageous one; the one who will receive nothing but social praise from its circle.
A "SJW" is a recursive "cat lady".
(Score: 5, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday April 29 2015, @12:37AM
You're allowed to call a gross fucking bigot exactly that.
Exactly. You are allowed to respond to speech with more speech. But if you actually support free speech, the second somebody calls to force the 'fucking bigot' to shut up you are required to jump to their defense with "I hate that guy but I will defend his right to be an offensive bastard with my last breath.... and box of ammo if required. So if you can stop with the censoring crap we can both get back to denouncing and perhaps even shunning the bastard, K?"
I speak of it as Freedom Zero, the one the that implies all of the others: The Right to Be Wrong. As in I think you are wrong but you have the right to be wrong. If you can't say that you really haven't internalized the whole Freedom thing yet. You have the right to think the wrong things, you have the right to say the wrong things and within as broad a limit as compatible with a Civilization of Free Men, you have the right to do the wrong things. I believe you have that Right to be Wrong because I do not want to empower some tribunal to decide who is 'wrong' since it is a certainty that it will eventually decide I too am Wrong on some issue. No, no Western Civilization has yet fully realized that level of Freedom but it should be the star we guide our policy by.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Wednesday April 29 2015, @02:58AM
You have the right to think the wrong things, you have the right to say the wrong things and within as broad a limit as compatible with a Civilization of Free Men, you have the right to do the wrong things. I believe you have that Right to be Wrong because I do not want to empower some tribunal to decide who is 'wrong' since it is a certainty that it will eventually decide I too am Wrong on some issue. No, no Western Civilization has yet fully realized that level of Freedom but it should be the star we guide our policy by.
Maybe if we got rid of human beings and replaced them with some superior beings we could realize that level of freedom. Until then, we will have to accept that we need laws imposed by whatever society of which we are a part in order to continue as a just and civil society. We might have to invent another term, Libertarian Justice Warrior (LJW), for those who are having hissy fits whenever "SJW's" come down on them for their bigotry or whenever they get offended by society's disapproval of their position.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Thursday April 30 2015, @05:04AM
Libertarians ... bigoted? I've never heard of or witnessed that. Libertarians seem to be people with a coherent philosophy that unfortunately is premised on some wrong ideas (like markets being perfect, governments being the root of all evil, etc.). That leads to some strange positions that, taken alone, can misrepresent what they're about. For example, they'd probably disagree with the Civil Rights Act, but not because they're bigots: they just don't like government telling anyone what to do ever, for any reason, except for directly preventing physical violence.
They're also usually strongly in favor of drug legalization, but not necessarily because they think drugs are not harmful. They just think that people should have the freedom to hurt themselves without restriction. They also think said people should then suffer the consequences of their actions up to and including dying in the streets since they spent all their money on heroin and now can't afford medical care. Consistent, not bigoted or anything, but ... just ... wrong, at least for utilitarians (of which I am one).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:05AM
I speak of it as Freedom Zero, the one the that implies all of the others: The Right to Be Wrong, the right to pass the cobblestones and shout "Queer" in the company of homophobes, the right to point and shout "Jew" in front of a pack of neoNazis, the Right to Shout "Fire" in a crowded Theatre, the right to bully the weak, to subjugate, to gaslight, to mentally destroy.
FTFY.