I not so reluctantly have come to the same conclusion. A couple of similar thoughts from two smart folks -- first digby:
I'm going to guess that many of the people who have been so defiant in the case the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, saying that despite their profane nature one must righteously defend the "practice" rather than simply affirm the magazine's right to publish, are not going to be wearing "Je Suis Dieudonné" t-shirts any time soon. Certainly, from what I'm seeing on twitter this morning, there are many people making the point that "this is completely different".
But from the young Muslim perspective, Jews are the powerful ones, both in France and in the Middle East. I think most of us in the West understand the horrifying historical resonance of all that, but that's probably not something marginalized young people are going to find very compelling. To them, that's ancient history and all they see is what's in front of them.
The horror of the killings transcends this academic debate and takes it into a different realm. Violence isn't speech. But in the end, I come back to where I was in the beginning, which is that free speech must be inviolate and that state censorship must be banned in all cases. However, social sanction and vigorous debate on all sides must also be defended.
Digby then refers to a very smart take from
Bob Wright, which I will excerpt on the flip.
From Bob Wright's 2006 NYT op-ed:
Even many Americans who condemn the cartoon's publication accept the premise that the now-famous Danish newspaper editor set out to demonstrate: in the West we don't generally let interest groups intimidate us into what he called "self-censorship." What nonsense. Editors at mainstream American media outlets delete lots of words, sentences and images to avoid offending interest groups, especially ethnic and religious ones. It's hard to cite examples since, by definition, they don't appear. But use your imagination.
[...] So why not take the model that has worked in America and apply it globally? Namely: Yes, you are legally free to publish just about anything, but if you publish things that gratuitously offend ethnic or religious groups, you will earn the scorn of enlightened people everywhere. With freedom comes responsibility.
[...] Some Westerners say there's no symmetry here — that cartoons about the Holocaust are more offensive than cartoons about Muhammad. And, indeed, to us secularists it may seem clear that joking about the murder of millions of people is worse than mocking a God whose existence is disputed.
BUT one key to the American formula for peaceful coexistence is to avoid such arguments — to let each group decide what it finds most offensive, so long as the implied taboo isn't too onerous. We ask only that the offended group in turn respect the verdicts of other groups about what they find most offensive. Obviously, anti-Semitic and other hateful cartoons won't be eliminated overnight. (In the age of the Internet, no form of hate speech will be eliminated, period; the argument is about what appears in mainstream outlets that are granted legitimacy by nations and peoples.)
But the American experience suggests that steadfast self-restraint can bring progress. In the 1960's, the Nation of Islam was gaining momentum as its leader, Elijah Muhammad, called whites "blue-eyed devils" who were about to be exterminated in keeping with Allah's will. The Nation of Islam has since dropped in prominence and, anyway, has dropped that doctrine from its talking points. Peace prevails in America, and one thing that keeps it is strict self-censorship.
And not just by media outlets. Most Americans tread lightly in discussing ethnicity and religion, and we do it so habitually that it's nearly unconscious. Some might call this dishonest, and maybe it is, but it also holds moral truth: until you've walked in the shoes of other people, you can't really grasp their frustrations and resentments, and you can't really know what would and wouldn't offend you if you were part of their crowd.
The Danish editor's confusion was to conflate censorship and self-censorship. Not only are they not the same thing — the latter is what allows us to live in a spectacularly diverse society without the former; to keep censorship out of the legal realm, we practice it in the moral realm. Sometimes it feels uncomfortable, but worse things are imaginable.
This makes a ton of sense to me. YMMV.