James Taranto:

“All the unsuspecting Ramada Inn guests, opening their freebie USA Today [Friday] morning to the illiterate ravings of a British jihadist,” quipped the Daily Beast’s Michael Moynihan last night on Twitter. He was referring to an op-ed by Anjem Choudary, whose author shirttail describes him as “a radical Muslim cleric in London and a lecturer in sharia“ in response to yesterday’s massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.

On one point Moynihan is unduly harsh: Choudary’s ravings were not illiterate, or if they were, his editors did a decent job of cleaning them up. The piece is readable and mostly coherent. It’s the substance that raised hackles.

Choudary opens with a frank rejection of a cherished Western ideal: “Contrary to popular misconception, Islam does not mean peace but rather means submission to the commands of Allah alone. Therefore, Muslims do not believe in the concept of freedom of expression.” He asks: “Why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?” (One assumes he means “safety,” though it’s possible he has in mind the “sanctity” of French Muslims.)

Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon, guest-blogging at the Washington Post, defends USA Today’s decision to publish the op-ed against criticism on Twitter (including from your humble columnist). “If this were actually the opinion of the USA Today editors, people would be right to be outraged,” Bunch observes. “But it’s not; it’s rather explicitly couched as the “opposing view” to the newspaper’s editorial, which is rather stridently pro-free-speech.”

Fair enough, though all the tweets Bunch cites acknowledge that fact. Ours observed: “This ‘opposing view’ thing is a really bad idea.” We’ve thought so for a long time, irrespective of the substance of any particular opposing view.

According to the USA Today website, “most editorials are accompanied by an opposing view—a unique USA Today feature that allows readers to reach conclusions based on both sides of an argument rather than just the Editorial Board’s point of view.” It is unique, if it is, only in print journalism; before the Fairness Doctrine’s abolition, it was common practice in broadcast radio and TV to air editorials by the station manager and editorial replies by members of the community. In 1991 we contributed a reply to New York’s WCBS (AM) on the topic of federal aid to New York state and city.

Those broadcast commentaries—including ours—were usually a snooze, and we dare say the same is true of USA Today’s editorial debates (though we should acknowledge we don’t read the paper nearly as closely as we do some of its competitors). The practice also involves a moral hazard: The editorial board might choose weak opponents in order to make its own positions look strong by comparison.

We don’t think that’s what happened here. The propositions that free speech is valuable and terrorism is repugnant are uncontroversial enough that it’s hard to find someone to argue against them.

The paper could have found a non-Muslim to denounce Charlie Hebdo without endorsing the terror attack as Time’s Bruce Crumley did in 2011, after Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed (“such Islamophobic antics . . . openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good”) and the Catholic League’s Bill Donahue did yesterday (“Stephane Charbonnier, the paper’s publisher, was killed today in the slaughter. It is too bad that he didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death”). Both included disclaimers to the effect that they opposed the violent attacks, though Crumley’s was especially grudging: “So, yeah, the violence inflicted upon Charlie Hebdo was outrageous, unacceptable, condemnable, and illegal. But apart from the ‘illegal’ bit, Charlie Hebdo’s current edition is all of the above, too.”

This was the approach USA Today took last month, when it editorialized against Sony Pictures’ decision to withdraw “The Interview” in the face of North Korean threats. “Sony Pictures did not respond to requests for an opposing view,” the paper noted after the bio of the guy who did: David Austin, who “served for five years as Mercy Corps’ program director in North Korea.”

Austin acknowledged that “the First Amendment gives people and institutions—Sony included—the right to make whatever movie they want.” But he insisted that “by dangerously teasing a nuclear state with artistic license, Sony doesn’t really honor our freedom of speech.” But his view was rather a narrow one:

When North Korea is provoked, there are consequences on real people, most of whom are already suffering terribly. I have been to North Korea nearly a dozen times, and life there for 95% of the people is brutally hard. Only a few U.S. humanitarian agencies have access into the country, where they treat tuberculosis patients, feed orphans, or provide medical equipment to helpless people.

No doubt it’s true that doing humanitarian work in North Korea necessitates some enormous moral compromises. But it is unreasonable to scapegoat Sony or Seth Rogen for the oppressive conditions the communist regime has imposed on North Korea’s people for nearly 70 years.

Compared with Austin’s opposing view, Choudary’s at least has the virtue of clarity. That’s the core of Sonny Bunch’s defense of its publication: “It’s important that USA Today published a terrorist-sympathizer like Choudary who believes that freedom of expression is not an absolute right. It’s important to make people understand that liberal democracy isn’t quite as secure as we’d like to think it is.”

We agree on the latter point: It’s important that citizens of America and other Western nations be aware of views like Choudary’s. Those views are certainly newsworthy; Reuters, for instance, had a dispatch yesterday titled “Islamic State Fighter Praises Attack on Paris Satirical Magazine.”

But giving someone like Choudary an op-ed platform and whatever legitimacy comes with it is necessary to raise awareness, perhaps it means news reporters aren’t doing enough.

By the way: Who is Choudary? Him:

Anjem Choudary Reuters

By the way: What if Chousary is reading the Koran wrong? Sarah Harvard says:

In an op-ed in USA Today on Thursday, Choudary seemed to try to justify the attacks. “[T]he potential consequences of insulting the Messenger Muhammad are known to Muslims and non-Muslims alike,” Choudary said. “The strict punishment if found guilty of this crime under sharia (Islamic law) is capital punishment implementable by an Islamic State,” he continued.
Choudary, radical extremists, and anti-Islam polemicists alike often resort to quoting scripture out of context, or taking advantage of transliteration, as a way to distort the messages of Islam. Sharia law varies upon interpretations of scripture—and like any religion, some interpretations are more radical than others.

While extremist governments like Iran and Saudi Arabia use the death penalty as a punishment for blasphemy, its justification isn’t found in Islam. The word “blasphemy” isn’t even mentioned in the Quran, or the stories of Mohammed and his companions that make up the hadiths, which form the basis for Islamic tradition. Prominent Islamic scholars like Pakistan’s Javed Ahmad Ghamidi have repeatedly said that “blasphemy laws have no justification in Islam.” Neither does the horrible attack that took place on Wednesday.

The Quran doesn’t explicitly ban depictions of Mohammed, and it certainly does not call for violence against those who display such images, even in a mocking or offensive way. The Hadith does ban images of Mohammed, the relatives of Mohammed, Allah, and all the major prophets. But, as Reza Aslan noted in Slate in 2006, such depictions have still existed in certain sects of the religion for years without causing mass violence:

[M]uch has been written about Islam’s prohibition against physical representations of the prophet of Islam. In fact, the Muslim world abounds with magnificent images of Mohammed. (In general, Shiites and Sufis tend to be more flexible on this point than Sunnis). In some, the prophet’s face is obscured by a pillar of fire that rises from beneath his chin in a veil of flames. In others, he is unveiled and glorious, a golden nimbus hovering over his head. While some Muslims object to these well-known and widely distributed depictions, there has never been any large-scale furor over them for the simple reason that although they depict the prophet, they do so in a positive light.

So what does Islam say about depictions that are not in a positive light? Islam’s most poignant instance of aniconism came when the Prophet Mohammed returned to the city of Mecca in 630 A.D. After years fleeing from persecution, Mohammed and his followers had marched back to Mecca to rid idol worshiping from the holy city. According to the critically acclaimed book Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, upon entering the most sacred point in Islam’s most sacred mosque, Mohammed destroyed all the pagan idols and paintings that were sacrilegious to Islam. (He specifically guarded images of the Virgin Mary and Jesus.)

Mohammed didn’t seek out the creators of the images or sentence those responsible for the idols and sacrilegious depictions to death.
The Quran does call for condemnation of speech and actions that insult Allah, his prophets, and their relatives, but it also specifically warns against violence as a form of retaliation:

Repel evil with whatever is better; there is chance that evil may bellow down, if you repel evil with evil, the conflict flares up and both sides will dig in their heels.

The Quran also specifically states that “there shall be no compulsion in the religion.” And there is a whole Quranic chapter calling for the tolerance of different faiths.

When tragedy takes place in the name of Islam and radical extremists profess that such violence is righteous, or that these atrocities “avenge” the Prophet, they only move further away from the principles of the religion.
The Quran warns Islam’s followers “do not raise your voices above the voice of the Prophet.” Radical extremists and clerics like Anjem Choudary are the ones, religiously speaking, who are committing blasphemy. In their distortion of Islam, they attempt to raise their voices above Mohammed and Allah.