You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Nick Cohen Read Free Book Online Page A

claim that their client’s feelings would be hurt and their image tarnished by the discussion of unwelcome facts. Rushdie’s critics were more concerned about the effect of his writings on the psyche of believers than whether what he had said was true. The charge they threw at him was that he had ‘offended’ the faithful by ‘insulting’ their religion. It was as if he had invaded their privacy.
    I accept that the individual needs protection from the surveillance of an over-mighty state. I accept too that the judges will have to tackle the explosion of character assassination on the Net directed at private citizens. I find the use of privacy law to restrict the media’s reporting of public figures far harder to justify. The English judiciary does not put the public interest first, as its willingness to censor on behalf of bankers who had affairs at work shows. But if a new generation of judges could be trusted with the power to prohibit, then I would accept too that people in the public eye need not be exposed to the scrutiny they receive in the United States. All of these acts of censorship, however, are protections for individuals . No honest jurisdiction can defend using censorship to protect ideological systems from the harm or offence of criticism. You must treat ideologies which mandate wars, and govern the sexual behaviour of men and women and, in their extreme forms, every aspect of life for hundreds of millions of people, with the utmost candour. For they are ideas that seek to dominate.
    Politics is as much a part of the identity of the committed leftist, green or conservative as religion is a part of the identity of the committed Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu. When the political partisan’s beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the ‘offence’ as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned. We do not, however, prohibit or restrict arguments about politics out of ‘respect’ for political ideologies, because we are a free society. We call societies that prohibit political arguments ‘dictatorships’, and know without needing to be told that the prohibiting is done to protect the ruling elite. If political or religious believers are offended to the core of their being by criticism, free countries must reply, ‘Tough. Learn to live with it. We know that we tell white lies about many things. We accept that the truth can be suppressed on some occasions. But religion and politics are too important and too dangerous to risk handling with kid gloves.’
    Respect for religion is the opposite of religious tolerance, because it allows the intolerant to impose their will on others. The Virginia Statute for Religious Tolerance, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, highlighted the distinction in flowing prose:
    Be it enacted by General Assembly that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer on account of his religious opinions or belief, but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.
     
    Salman Rushdie was not free to abandon and criticise the religion of his childhood. The Islamists said that if he – and by extension all other Muslims – changed his religion or decided that he was an atheist, he would face assassination for the ‘crime’ of apostasy. They wanted to make Rushdie ‘suffer on account of his religious opinions’; to restrain, molest and burthen his body for his blasphemy, and to do the same to anyone, Muslim or not, who echoed his ideas. In his most compelling line, Jefferson concluded that ‘all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of Religion’.
    ‘Argument’ was his key word. Religious