Jeffrey Toobin:

Can I ask everyone to come sit down, please? Hello. My name’s
Jeffrey Toobin, I’m the moderator and warm-up act here today,
and I just wanted to explain a few things before we got started.
The first thing I wanted to say, which I’m sure is a great shock to
you, is please turn off your cell phones. Ah, see, everybody’s…
Also, please unwrap any delicious candies you plan on eating
during the program. Now, I say this not because it is incredibly
annoying to listen to both cell phones and candy unwrapping, but
if you look above you, you will see that there are microphones.
This event is being recorded and is going to be broadcast on
WNYC and other NPR stations next Friday at 2 p.m. in an edited
form. Now, that is significant just because it’s interesting, but it
also means that you are an integral part of the broadcast. Your
questions, when it comes to that, but also your reactions. If you
want to clap, if you want to laugh, by all means feel free. This is
not a solemn occasion, you’re expected to participate in it.
Extended booing is discouraged [LAUGHTER], but please, have
fun. Now, this is very good, because I’m also supposed to, as a
radio check, ask you to give a rousing round of applause. So
since our panelists are coming out, why don’t you do that.
[APPLAUSE] Let me let Robert Rosenkranz take over from here.

Robert Rosenkranz:

Thank you, Jeffrey. Well, good evening, everyone, and thank you
for being here. I’m Robert Rosenkranz, I’m the chairman of the
Intelligence Squared U.S. Debate Forum, which is an initiative of
the Rosenkranz Foundation. I’m here with Dana Wolf, our
executive producer of this debate series. We’d like to welcome
you. This is the second debate of our fall season, and with this
season of live debates, and with our national radio audience,
we’re pursuing a lofty, ambitious goal. We’re trying to raise the
level of public discourse in American life. We see Congress mired
in partisan rancor, we see a media that’s increasingly ideological,
we see policy intellectuals in the think-tank world speaking to
their respective choirs.

Discussion of contentious policy issues everywhere seems to be
dominated by intense emotions, rather than by facts and
reasoned analysis. But IQ Squared is not about the search for
bland middle ground. Rather, we want to encourage each side of
an argument to sharpen its own thinking by listening to opposing
views, and responding to inconvenient facts. We want our
audience, who voted on tonight’s resolution, to vote again after
hearing the debate. I hope you’ll come away with the recognition
that there is an intellectually respectable position on the other
side. We’re thrilled that WNYC is recording our series of debates,
and that through National Public Radio, you’ll be able to hear this
debate in many of the major cities across the country, on local
National Public Radio-member stations.

We also value the sponsorship of the Times of London, and I
especially want to thank our moderator, Jeffrey Toobin of The
New Yorker magazine, and CNN, whom I will formally introduce
momentarily, and the extraordinary group of panelists who are
the true stars of tonight’s event. At first blush, tonight’s motion
seems like a slam-dunk for the proposers. 95 percent of the
pertinent quotations I looked at were ringing supports of free
speech. But there were a couple of more sardonic observations
that are perhaps truer to our real attitudes. Here’s Heywood
Broun: “Everyone favors free speech in the slack moments, when
no axes are being ground.” Louis B. Mayer: “I respect my
executives who disagree with me…especially when it means losing
their jobs.” [LAUGHTER] Well, it’s amusing, but we do indeed
live in a world where jobs are lost because of speech. Larry
Summers, for example, lost the presidency of Harvard because of
remarks offensive to women. Senator George Allen may well lose
his because of a highly arcane ethnic epithet. [LAUGHTER]
So given the heightened sensitivity of so many groups in
American society to demeaning speech, we should hardly be
surprised that speech offensive to Muslims elicits so strong a
reaction, as appalled as we may be by the associated violence.
I’m now going to hand the evening over to our moderator, Jeffrey
Toobin. Jeffrey is senior legal analyst for CNN Worldwide, and is
staff writer at The New Yorker, where he’s been covering legal
affairs since 1993. He and I are both alumni of the Harvard Law
School. He joined CNN from ABC News where he provided legal
analysis on such high-profile cases as the Elian Gonzales custody
saga, for which he received the Emmy Award. Jeffrey’s fifth book,
on the Supreme Court, is due out next year, and it’s called The
Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. You’re the first
to know that title because it was only decided upon today.
[LAUGHTER] I’m now very pleased to turn the evening over to
Jeffrey. Thank you, enjoy the debate.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Thank you, Bob Rosenkranz, and welcome to the second
Intelligence Squared US debate. Let me give you a brief rundown
of the evening. First, the proposer of the motion will start by
presenting their side of the argument. The opposition will follow.
Each person will get a maximum of eight minutes and we’ll go
back and forth from one side to the other. Then, when all six
speakers are finished with their opening remarks, I will open the
floor to brief questions from the audience. Third, when the Qand-A is complete, each debater will make a final statement
lasting not more than two minutes each.
Fourth, during the closing arguments, ballot boxes will be passed
around for voting. You all have your tickets, I assume, and if you
don’t have your tickets with the “For” and “Against” on it, just
raise your hand, some of the folks in the aisle have extra tickets.
Ballot stuffing is discouraged. [LAUGHTER] Also, there are
pencils and paper for people who want to jot down questions
while the debate is going on. Last, after the final closing
statement is made, I will announce the results of the audience
vote and tell you which side carried the day. For the motion, let
me introduce our panelists. Author and editor of The Paris
Review and a long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, Philip
Gourevitch. [APPLAUSE] Prolific British author, journalist,
literary critic, contrarian intellectual and subject of a New Yorker
profile just last week, Christopher Hitchens. [APPLAUSE]
Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Philadelphia
Daily News, Signe Wilkinson. [APPLAUSE] Against the motion,
British scholar of Jewish history and research professor in
history at Royal Holloway, University of London, David Cesarani.

[APPLAUSE]

Executive director of the American Society for
Muslim Advancement, Daisy Khan. [APPLAUSE] Author,
professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and activist
scholar, Mari Matsuda. [APPLAUSE] So let’s begin. Signe
Wilkinson, you’re first.

Signe Wilkinson:

Thank you, and thank you, Jeffrey. Since World War III almost
started over a bunch of cartoons, I want to thank this evening’s
organizers for including a cartoonist—two, if you include
Christopher Hitchens. [LAUGHTER] 150 years ago, the
Tammany Hall politician Boss Tweed responded to an offensive
cartoon against him with the famous line, “Stop them damn
pictures.”

The reason we’re here tonight, is that these days, everyone wants
to stop them damn pictures, if the damn pictures in question
hurt their feelings or the feelings of their tribe. When I say
everyone, I mean everyone. Early in my career, I penned this
badly-drawn cartoon, “Fundamental Sex Ed—does the stork bring
AIDS and herpes too?” [LAUGHTER] I expected calls from the
fundamentalist ministers in the area, but no, I got calls from
schoolteachers saying, “Not all teachers are fat, old and carry
rollers!”

[LAUGHTER]

Schoolteachers aren’t alone. In the course
of my 25 years as a paid professional offender, I have been
attacked for criticizing people of color, people without much color,
people of guns, people of excessive weight, people with trial
lawyers, and Armenian people. This is a partial list, and certainly
doesn’t begin to cover people of religion, who are the touchiest
people of all. Unfortunately for the pious, Americans like their
damn cartoons and they always have. In nine—in 1872, Joseph
Keppler drew this tribute to religion, which as you can see on the
lower left, offensive caricatures Jews, and on the right, offensively
caricatures Catholics.

But wait—in the middle, he offensively caricatures Episcopalians,
Mormons, Baptists, Presbyterians, and even Henry Ward Beecher,
the New Age minister and adulterer of his age. [LAUGHTER] If
we had more time, I’d show more cartoons. So, when newcomers
arrive on our shores, with their deeply held religious beliefs, they
should be prepared to get in line to have those beliefs scrutinized,
as they did in the mid-1800s when New York City, like Denmark
today, was awash with poor foreign immigrants who came with
their robed clerics and demands for separate schools. These were
of course Catholics, not Muslims, but some American cartoonists
reacted just the way the Danes did. In 1871, the father of
American cartoonists, Thomas Nast, drew this. “The American
River Ganges.” The hats of the reptilian bishops crawling ashore
have menacing crocodile teeth—certainly the precursors of a
turban as a bomb.

Usually, my colleagues don’t go out of their way to kick a
clergyman. However, when the clergy ask for special privileges,
demand special tax cuts, or are just especially misbehaving, we
take notice. This Pat Oliphant, “The Running of the Altar Boys”…
[LAUGHTER] You’re cutting into my time, stop laughing. It was
embraced by many lay Catholics, but bitterly denounced by
official Catholicism. Note to church leaders—if you don’t want
your clerics ridiculed as child abusers, make sure they don’t
abuse children. Had Americans been able to see the Danish
cartoons, they would’ve noted that they too were not just
gratuitous attacks on the faithful. One was making fun of the
idea that after blowing up innocent people, suicide bombers
would be rewarded with virgins in Heaven. If you can’t make fun
of that, what can you make fun of. [LAUGHTER]
What really enraged believers wasn’t that Mohammed was
pictured but that he was pictured negatively. To test the point, at
the height of the controversy I put Mohammed in this cartoon,
“The Big Fat Book of Offensive Religious Cartoons.” [LAUGHTER]
He’s third from the right, flanked by Jesus and God, and a few
other laughing deities. No one protested this because no one
cared about Mohammed being drawn as jolly and benign.
However, I have been picketed without putting Mohammed in a
cartoon. “Radical Islam Sponsors the Miss Muslim World
Contest—Miss Illiteracy, Miss Can’t Vote, Miss Waiting to Be
Stoned.” [LAUGHTER] When I say picketed, I mean picketed,
including… [APPLAUSE] including by one of my daughter’s high
school history teachers.

But Muslims aren’t alone in their selective outrage. My Jewish
readers were okay with the drawing with the Star of David that
was pro-Israel, but roasted me for one that criticized a local
Jewish senator who was attacking his opponent for being antiSemitic. Critics said that the Star of David was off-limits—
unless, apparently, it was used to make a point that they agreed
with. What critics of offensive cartoons forget is that every time I
exercise my free speech, my readers exercise theirs, swiftly and
loudly. For that last little sketch with the Star of David, our
paper received and printed weeks of vilifying letters. The AntiDefamation League denounced me, I was called a Nazi, and the
senator’s son helpfully suggested to my editors how they could
better use my talents.
One reader wrote that I was worthy of Hustler magazine, which at
my age I take as something of a compliment.

[LAUGHTER]

Speaking of Hustler, its publisher, Larry Flynt, is the patron saint
of cartoonists. When Hustler ran a spoof claiming that Jerry
Falwell’s first sexual encounter was with his mother in an
outhouse the right reverend Falwell did the Christian thing, and
sued, in a case that went to the Supreme Court in 1987. The
unanimous decision was written by that famed pinko degenerate,
William Rehnquist, who wrote that “Even though the spoof was
outrageous, outrageousness in the area of political and social
discourse is inherently subjective,” and that “the court has long
protected free speech, even speech that offends the audience.” So
the offended are left with the same option I use—free speech.
They can and do write, call, picket, boycott, and draw their own
cartoons, but in America, thank God and the Constitution, they
can’t claim special privileges and stop them damn pictures.
Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Next, against the proposition, Mari Matsuda.

Mari Matsuda:

Thank you, Jeffrey, and thank you, Signe, for making us laugh
and making my job so hard. It’s really not fair to put me after the
cartoonist, but I volunteered to go first. I’m sorry, I didn’t bring
cartoons, and I’m not going to make you laugh. I stand before
you a censored person. Under American law, there are several
things that I could not say. I could not attempt to sell you snake
oil as a cure for cancer. I couldn’t tell you secrets that I know
that could make you millions of dollars when the stock market
opens tomorrow. I couldn’t tell a lie that would harm the
reputation of any of the people on this stage. And I could not yell
“Fire!” in a believable way that would cause a stampede for the
exits. This point is the lawyer’s point. In a complex society, law
necessarily mediates between competing interests. Speech is one
of those interests, and it is profoundly valuable.
But when speech comes up against other interests that are also
valuable, we have no choice. We mediate, we draw lines, we
balance. This is what we do. My second point is a humanitarian
point—that words are weapons. They can assault, wound
degrade, exclude, and incite harm of stunning proportions. I am
a citizen born of the last century, one that had genocide right in
its center. That century will forever color my view of the harm
that human beings are capable of. Propaganda is not a parlor
game and rhetoric is not recreation. Words have consequences. I
take words seriously enough to make them my vocation, and I
believe that some words should remain unspoken. My third
claim is that I am a Constitutionalist and a civil libertarian. I
believe that individuals exist prior to the state and that the state
must remain accountable to its citizens. Thus I am allied with
my opponents in this debate in their healthy distrust of limits on
speech.

Indeed, if we had time to discuss the entire history of suppression
of dissent in this country, my guess is that all six of us here on
this stage would agree that the record contains many deplorable
episodes. So why do I diverge on the particular question of
assaultive speech and urge you to vote no tonight? It is precisely
because I value speech. As I see it, there are two main reasons
for the First Amendment or for our protection of speech. One is
simply that we respect individual choices. Each of us is sovereign
over ourselves and entitled to express the cry of our own heart.
The second reason is functional. We need democracy in order for
our individual selves to thrive, and we need speech in order for
democracy to thrive. Democracy requires that each and every
individual speak, think, study, know, and participate in selfgovernance.
When hate speech and propaganda instill beliefs of inherent
inferiority, the very things that the First Amendment is intended
to protect are at risk. When racist invective keeps you away from
a public hearing, as has happened, when sexual taunting keeps
you away from a job, as has happened, democracy’s prerequisites
of mutual exchange and participation are gone. My students tell

me, you’ve got to give examples, people don’t understand without
examples. So I’ll give you one from the Asian-American
community. Right after the last major San Francisco earthquake,
the big one, there was a public debate about whether to rebuild
certain sections of the freeway. One off-ramp in particular that
led into Chinatown was of concern to the residents of that
community, and they turned out for a public hearing. Well, the
white Aryan Resistance also decided to do a show of force at that
hearing, in their full Nazi stormtrooper regalia.
This is pre-Internet so instead of a Web site they had a hotline
you could call to hear racist invective and find out who had
testified at that hearing. Many of the elders and merchants in
that community would come out to testify, and it was their first
experience with participation in the democratic process. They
were frightened away, and were very unlikely to come out again
as the debate continued around this issue of political discourse.
If you think about why we disallow defamation, or impose legal
penalties for it, it’s because reputation is part of the self, and it’s
part of the self that’s needed to participate equally in the
democratic conversation. If you lose standing in the community
you lose liberty. The freedom to move about as a respected
person, to speak credibly, to join your fellow citizens in this grand
social contract that we call democracy. Your reputation is
valuable, and thus we will restrain speech when it takes your
reputation from you.

I submit that there are forms of assaultive speech that have very
much the same effect. I’ve asked for 30 years why we penalize
someone who calls a doctor a quack, but we won’t penalize
someone who says that by race, the doctor is inherently worthless
and properly subject to extermination. I haven’t received an
answer. If you believe, as I do, that unbridled freedom to wound
with words and to incite through propaganda can harm the very
freedom that we intend to protect by protecting speech, then I
suggest that you vote against the proposition. The other side will
tell you we can’t start down that path of deciding which speech is
acceptable, or we become trapped in the censorship business.
This is a rhetorical move that lawyers call the slippery slope.
What the other side will not tell you is that we are already on the
slippery slope of tolerating censorship of certain forms of speech,
including libel, fraud, copyright infringement, conversations in
restraint of trade. There is no easy and absolute way out. We do
have to decide when, where, and how we will limit speech. The
call of the question here uses the word “offensive.” But let me
make clear that none of us would be engaged in this debate if we
were just talking about table manners, or humorous insults with
political purpose, the right to offend that Signe Wilkinson is
talking about. If we say that we are closing the door, taking an
absolutist position, giving a free license to those who would use
words to assault, we’re doing much more than just allowing
political cartoons, which I think should be protected absolutely,
we can discern how to do that under our legal system.
But what I’m really getting at is words that are intended to
wound, and to stop people from equal participation in society. If I
spit on your shoe, you can sue me for that, it’s called a battery.
There are words I could use that would have the same effect on
your psyche, your personhood, or your ability to move freely. Yet
if you vote for this proposition you’re saying that that form of
assault is allowed. It happens in this city and elsewhere in our
country. Thank you, vote no.
[This section has been slightly condensed—Matsuda tried to
continue after running out of time, hence Gourevitch’s comment
below.]

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Philip Gourevitch.

Philip Gourevitch:

Extraordinary how people who want to silence public speech
won’t shut up. [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE] We’re faced tonight
with people who want to stop cartooning but who make a
caricature of the concept of free speech. They are not here to
discuss free speech, they are here to discuss their deep conviction
that speech is not free and therefore should not be free. That is
essentially what the previous speaker said, she said there is no
free speech, let’s be real, and therefore there should be no free
speech and we should simply start restricting it endlessly. Since
we are being cartooned as the monstrous side, let me begin with a
monstrous image. In Northern Uganda for the last 15 to 20
years, there has been a movement known as the Lord’s
Resistance Army. It practices its warfare in the name of God, and
what it does when it dislikes the speech that is being made is that
it cuts off the lips of the citizens who are speaking and it puts
padlocks through punctured holes in their lips and shuts them.
I’m afraid that I’m very much unable to picture these people doing
that, but it’s very clear to me that that is what they wish to do. I
will return to this image at the end, but that is the image that
clearly you must bear in mind as you, the jury tonight, vote on
the question of whether we shall be permitted to speak or
whether we shall be inclined to silence anybody in whom we find
offense.

That is what they are saying, and who are they to judge what is
offensive? Surely you have different ideas, surely we all have
different ideas, and yet somehow, the concept of offense is being
proposed by the other side as some sort of universal measure of
civilization rather than the opposite. But one point of agreement
that we have is that speech is fiercely powerful, and can be
intensely dangerous. I spent some time reporting from Rwanda in
the aftermath of the genocide there. The previous speaker
referred to genocide, and one of the most striking things in
Rwanda is that in a great deal of the genocide was incited by
public speech, radio speech, incitement through words. The
words were used as hate speech, which we will find the other side
thinks should be censored because it is dangerous. The hate
speech said, invariably, kill the minority, the Tutsis. They didn’t
always say it directly, they would use euphemisms and the
euphemisms would be phrases like “Do your work. Clear the
bush. Do not let a weed escape the blade.”
These were phrases that were well understood in the historical
context and they were clearly hate speech, there’s no ambiguity
about it. Those people have been tried and convicted for inciting
mass murder in their country. The problem there was not free
speech for haters. It was that this was the officially sanctioned
speech by people who prohibited sanity from being free speech.
Anybody who protested against the genocide was silenced as
offensive. Offensive speech, my goodness. That Hutus and Tutsis
should live side by side in comity, that they should allow each
other to exist—how offensive. Let’s silence them. Let’s murder
them. Let us have official speech. That was the position.
That is the position which—yes, ma’am. “Slippery slope.” It’s not
a slippery slope, it’s a greased precipice over which they wish to
push you. [LAUGHTER] Once you start to say that racist or
blasphemous speech is somehow or other offensive, you’re
immediately on the quick descent towards book-burning. The
books that you wish to burn are the books that include, let’s say,
Huck Finn, where racists are used in possibly the 19th century’s
noblest portrait of a black man in America. Blasphemous speech
is used by Ahab. Most people who are burning books are of
course too illiterate to notice. [LAUGHTER] But let’s focus on the
facts. They consistently elevate idiotic speech, like Holocaust
denial, to a greatly important role by saying, lets us illegalize it,
challenge it in courts, give these people a tremendous platform,
and prove that they’re wrong…when no sane person can possibly
suspect that this is serious history.

So we’re going to have to elevate them in order to silence them,
rather than to ignore them, to discuss it with them. I would like
to quote to you a short passage from David Cesarani in which he
wrote, “Celebrating Austria’s Law Criminalizing Holocaust
Denial.” This was in The Guardian. “Thanks to the Internet,” he
claims, “it is virtually impossible to stop the dissemination of laws
and propaganda these days. The classical arguments of freedom
of speech drawn from Voltaire and Mill are redundant.” So we
have an anti-enlightenment argument very strongly stated. “They
addressed small, literate elites at a time when the means of
reproduction were relatively few and easily controlled, when it
was easy to contend that in a contest between truth and
falsehood held among reasonable men, lies would be exposed and
driven from the public sphere.
But the Internet is awash with falsehood and bigotry. Good ideas
and beautiful truths coexist with trash and outright evil. Heaven
forfend that bad ideas should be out there. Amid this anarchy,”
he says, “all that decent people can do is agree to reasonable
limits on what can be said and set down legal markers in an
attempt to preserve a democratic, civilized and tolerant society.”
That’s what he says. I say, who gives him the right to set up a
chair in the antechambers of my mind and judge what I’m
allowed to say and what I’m allowed to think. Is that what you
want? Is that who you want? [APPLAUSE] How does it avail the
cause of civilization, sir, to fight brownshirts with brownshirt
tactics? I would like to know that. What I share with this pious
trinity of the opposing team is a deeply pessimistic view of human
history. I do not believe that if you let people run around loose
they’re going to have nice ideas about each other and behave
nicely towards each other, because that’s not what they do.
Their response is to cut off their lips and to clamp on a padlock.
To decide who should be in the Sanhedrin of the mind and who
should be in the Sanhedrin of the soul, sit around and tell you
what you’re allowed to say and what you’re allowed to think.
They do not understand that there is not agreement about this.
They seem to assume that somehow or other it will always
prevail. Yes, they say times change, sometimes it’s allowed to be
racist, sometimes it’s allowed to be anti-racist. Sometimes we
silence the people who are pro-Jewish, sometimes we silence the
people who are anti-Muslim, but that’s okay because we’re just
rolling with the times, and we’re always going to let the people
who we sort of think are civilized speak in the name of civility.
I think that this is extremely dangerous. I return, that while they
conclude that we must accept that because speech is limited we
must put ourselves in charge of limiting it, that we are dealing
here really with a case of lesser evils. The question before us
tonight, simply put and simply stated in the proposition that we
were given, is that freedom of speech must include a license to
offend. I would expand that license to blaspheme, and I would
not call it a license. They speak of it as a license, they think all
speech is a license and that all speech should be licensed
because most speech should be restricted before it is licensed.
Then we decide, okay, we’ll let this out, we’ll let that out, we’ll let
this out, we’ll let that out. I think that that’s a very, very, very
dangerous precipice on which they want to perch us. I do not
trust them, even though I think that they’re probably more
trustable than most.

But what is to say that they will stay in charge of that speech?
What is to say that we will not fall into the hands of somebody we
don’t trust? What is to say that the message that one day seems
somewhat sane, the next day becomes to kill, and that the people
who say let us not kill are silenced in the name of reasonable
speech and in the name of civilization to moderate that. I remind
you one last time as you go to vote, if you believe in chopping off
lips and clamping on padlocks on open mouths, there’s your
troika.

[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

That was Philip Gourevitch. Next, against the proposition, David

Cesarani.

David Cesarani:

Right. Well— [LAUGHTER] First of all I want to thank Philip for
repeating verbatim something I wrote in The Guardian. I stand by
every word, and it’s saved me a bit of time. I do think it is
possible for reasonable people, like the people in this room, to
decide what is offensive and what is dangerous. Mari, in a very
modest and less flamboyant way, tried to set out what it is that is
offensive, and what is dangerous. I don’t think it’s really
necessary to bother to respond to a very foolish idea of what this
side of the house is advocating. We are not advocating cutting off
people’s lips, we are not even advocating repealing the First
Amendment. We’re not even advocating special laws that will
have people banged up in prison for saying things that we don’t
like. We’re just asking you, and I’m asking this as someone who’s
British, to just reflect with a little humility on American society
and culture. To reflect while holding in mind the fact that, in
most other liberal democracies, there are modest constraints on
what can be said and written. For good reason, too. Most
international conventions that set out freedoms also include
constraints on the freedom of expression, most notably the
European Convention on Human Rights.

The reason is that the European Convention on Human Rights
that was passed in 1950 was framed against the background of
genocide, mass murder, persecution, and totalitarianism in
Europe. Men and women had seen the drip-drip effect there of
hate speech, words that demeaned and degraded, and resolved
that freedom of speech could no longer be considered an absolute
right. It was a right, a fundamental element of liberty. But it was
not absolutely overriding because it was open to abuse. It was
abused in Europe, it’s abused now, and I’d say it’s actually
abused here. Philip Gourevitch said rather mockingly that we
came to you to ask you to get real. I’m going to repeat that. Get
real. There was a little article in The Guardian which amused me.
Apparently, a few days ago, a meeting to be addressed by a
colleague of mine, Tony Judd, a historian who I rate enormously
highly, was canceled because of a phone call from Abe Foxman.
I don’t know if Abe Foxman is in this audience now, but he’s
obviously a very powerful man. Just with the one of his voice he
can have meetings canceled and freedom of expression curtailed.
I think that is an abuse of power. I think that it is very
dangerous that people can phone up organizations and have
meetings canceled because they don’t like, not what the speaker
is actually going to address, but other things that he has spoken
about. Tony Judd has written some things about Israel that Abe
didn’t like, so Abe phoned up the Polish consulate and said, do
you really want to have that guy speak on your premises? Now,
get real. You have constraints on freedom of expression in this
great country. What we are asking you to do is to reflect with a
little bit of humility on how you want those constraints to be
exercised by the most powerful, the most ruthless, the ones with
the biggest bank balances, the ones with the most votes.
Or do you want to have a public debate about how you protect
those who are weak, who are vulnerable, who are defenseless,
who are marginal, and who are often abused in the mass media
or in work settings, as Mari mentioned. I think the real choice is
not whether you’re in favor of absolute freedom of speech or
constraints on freedom of speech tonight. It’s whether you’re
going to be realistic, or whether you’re going to be smug and
hypocritical and walk out of this hall thinking this is the land of
the free, land of the brave, no such things as restrictions on
freedom of speech here, and we don’t want to be lectured about
that by some limey. [LAUGHTER] Whether you’re going to recite
to yourselves happily, Milton, Locke, Mill!— without actually
knowing very much about what Milton, Locke and Mill had to say
about freedom of expression. For none of these men was freedom
of expression a good in itself. It was always a means to an end.
For Milton, who didn’t like Catholics, it was to expose the fallacies
of Catholicism prior to crushing and eradicating them. For
Locke, it was simply a means to good governments. For Mill, it
was to advance education and truth. As soon as Mill considered
the possibility of uneducated mass audiences, he panicked and
resiled. He went back on everything that he’d said about
unlimited freedom of speech. I’m going to read out what John
Stuart Mill had to say. “Acts of whatever kind, which without
justifiable cause do harm to others, may be—and, in the more
important cases, absolutely require to be—controlled by the
unfavorable sentiments and when needful by the active
interference of mankind.”

He included speech acts, and the notorious, wonderful example
he gave is the folly of allowing a man in a time of famine to
inveigh against grain dealers outside the home of a grain dealer
before a public that is hungry, ill-educated, and not terribly
reasonable. That unfortunately is the state of our society today.
There are a lot of people who are unreasonable, who are illeducated, who are angry about this and that, and there are
plenty of people who want to stir the pot and who want to incite
them. John Stuart Mill, who understood the perils of mass
society, also understood that we are no longer conducting this
discussion amongst a nice, homogeneous elite, but we are having
to deal with huge numbers of people in divided, conflicted
societies. I think—and I’m an optimist, unlike Philip
Gourevitch—that we have it within our power, thinking and
working together, to agree on what can and cannot be said,
should and should not be said, to avoid conflict, to avoid people
standing outside the homes of grain merchants, and inveighing
against their business.

This is what Timothy Garton Ashe wrote recently in The Guardian.
“We need to wake up to the seriousness of the danger”—the
danger to freedom of speech, freedom of expression. “I repeat,
this is one of the greatest challenges to freedom in our time. We
need a debate about what the law should and should not allow to
be said or written. Even Mill did not suggest that everyone
should be allowed to say anything anytime anywhere. We also
need a debate about what it’s prudent and wise to say in a
globalized world where people of different cultures live so close
together, like roommates separated only by a thin curtain. There
is a frontier of prudence and wisdom which lies beyond the one
that should be enforced by law.” We are, on this side of the
house, advocating that you think about where that boundary of
prudence and wisdom should lie. We’re not repealing the laws,
we’re not passing them, we want you to reflect. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

That was David Cesarani against the proposition. Now for the
proposition, Christopher Hitchens.

[APPLAUSE]

Christopher Hitchens:

Well now, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and
sisters…if I may say, comrades and friends. [LAUGHTER] Okay,
then, “Fire!” [LAUGHTER] It’s not that crowded a theater, but
“Fire!” again. You see? If you remember the appalling judgment
actually rendered by Mr. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in that
case, he was comparing the action that I’ve just imitated and
parodied to the action of a group of Yiddish-speaking socialists
who gave out a leaflet, in Yiddish only, opposing Mr. Wilson’s war
and actually calling attention as they were to a major
conflagration raging in Europe in which they did not think the
United States should become involved.

Be very, very, very careful when people give you arguments from
authority or tradition that suggest that free speech can be limited
by higher authorities like the sainted Holmes, because that’s
what you’ll get. The end of it is a group of Yiddish-speaking
radicals told they can’t hand out a leaflet in Yiddish on a major
question of the day. That’s always how it will end, no matter how
high-mindedly or creepily or sinisterly it’s presented to you. My
favorite crowded-theater story is actually about the terrible
Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Some people
may remember this, it’s a production famous for its longueurs.
[LAUGHTER] In the third act as the German soldiers came
pounding on the door and stamping into the parlor, someone in
the front row shouted, “She’s in the attic!” [LAUGHTER] Call me
old-fashioned if you will, ladies and gentlemen, but as you will
see I don’t think a joke is really a joke unless it’s at somebody’s
expense.

Now if you’re thick-skinned and broad-backed enough to take
that, I might have a bit more for you. The real question, utterly,
utterly dodged by David in his shady remarks, is this. Who’s
going to decide. We’ve already found that Oliver Wendell Holmes
isn’t competent on the point. Who will you appoint. Who will be
the one who says, I know exactly where the limits should be, I
know how far you can go and I know when you’ve gone too far,
and I’ll decide that. Who do you think—who do you know—who
have you heard of, who have you read about in history to whom
you’d give that job? I always say, just for this evening, I wouldn’t
give it to anyone who’s spoken so far on the other side.
[LAUGHTER] Now, I sure do know a bit about Milton and quite a
lot about Thomas Paine as well. Mr. Paine actually updated and I
think improved John Milton’s Areopagitica which is the classic
case for free expression.

Those of you who know Areopagitica and Paine’s commentary on
it will know that it recommends free speech in this way—not for
you, but for the people you are listening to and the people whose
comments you hope to hear in return, for your own education, for
your own enlightenment and for your own elucidation. As Mr.
Paine says, commenting on Milton, one of the vices of those who
would repress the opinions of others is they make themselves
prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny themselves
the rights and the means of changing them. Should this not be
as plain as could be? The free interplay of ideas is not something
that those of us who wish to speak or unload our opinions insist
upon for that sake, it’s because we want to hear what is said in
response, however unwelcome it may be to us.
Thus the defense of any one opinion or form of expression is a
defense of all of them. The classic statement in modern times of
this, in my view, would be Aryeh Neier’s book Defending My
Enemy where he describes the decision of the American Civil
Liberties Union, of which I am a supporter, to take the case of the
American Nazi Party and its right to parade swastikas through
the town of Skokie, Illinois, a favorite retirement community for
those who’d survived the final solution. The ACLU lost a lot of
members on that proposition but we did the right thing by the
First Amendment. In the book he has a wonderful extract from
Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons which some of you will
have seen at least in celluloid form, where if you recall, Sir
Thomas More is talking to one of the witch-hunters and
prosecutors.

He says, “So you’d cut a road through the laws, would you, to get
after the Devil?” The witch-hunter and prosecutor says, “I’d cut
down every law in England to do that.” Thomas More says,
“That’s worth knowing. And when the Devil turned round to meet
you and had you at bay, where would you look for shelter, Mr.
Prosecutor, the laws all being flat and cut down? Where would
you turn then?” It’s impossible ever to think of infringing the
right of anyone else to free speech without arranging, in a sense
calling in advance for this to happen to you too. It’s quite
different, obviously different, from any question of information.
Information may be classified and information may be
copyrighted. Every word said on that score by the first speaker
on the other side was a complete waste of her breath, because it’s
not what we’re meant to talk about. We’re meant to talk about
the expression of opinion and conviction, not breach of copyright
or leaking of classified information. If we’d wanted to talk about
that, we would’ve phrased the motion differently.

There’ve been some bad signs lately, a lot of slippage in what I
would have thought was the pedantic obviousness of the points
I’ve just made. The imprisonment of David Irving in Austria for a
thought crime, for the possibility that he might while in Austria
have given a speech saying that he doubts some of the verdicts of
history on what I call the final solution. There’s no victim to this
crime. The Austrian consul called me up weeping with self-pity
when I pointed this out in The Wall Street Journal and said, “But
we thought finally Austria would be popular. [LAUGHTER] We
had something that you would all like! So gut muttlich.” That the
land that survives on the myth that Hitler was German and
Beethoven was Viennese, that had Waldheim as its chancellor
and has Jorg Heider as a member of its government, can revenge
itself on a defenseless British academic and jail him is a standing
disgrace.

There are attempts to extend similar thought-crime laws to other
topics of historical importance, the most depressing of which
recently is the provisional decision of the French parliament to
criminalize discussion of the Armenian massacre, considered by
me and most others to have been a planned genocide in the early
part of the 20th century. Now you couldn’t take the contrary view.
You couldn’t for example argue, as you can, that actually in the

provinces of Turkey where Russian forces were not engaged,
Armenians were not massacred. In other words, it could be that
it was partly an act of war as well as an act of ethnocide.
Speculations of this kind would now be actually in peril. The law
on which it’s modeled, the Loi Gayssot, which criminalizes in
France discussion of the Holocaust as well, is named for the
French Stalinist, Monsieur Gayssot, who sponsored it and whose
spirit, and the spirit of whose hero is present in all of these and
other such discussions.
I stipulate that all of these things, when they happen, offend me
very much. I’m offended by them, I want you to understand. It
goes to the core of what I do and what I am. The First
Amendment doesn’t just provide me with a living, the First
Amendment is my life. When it’s infringed, I am offended, I have
claimed the right to be offended. I do not claim the right to go
burn down someone else’s place of worship, to threaten their
religion with violent reprisal, to picket their home, to publish their
name in threatening terms on the Internet—I won’t do any of
that. It doesn’t mean I can’t be offended but it does mean that
I’m even more offended by those who claim the right, not just to
be offended, but to seek violent reprisal, as is so vividly and
currently being done by the votaries of the prophet Mohammed,
in recent instances which I have no time at all to inform you but
about which you already know and to which I hope I will be asked
to return. Thanks very much.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

That was Christopher Hitchens for the proposition. Against the
proposition now, Daisy Khan.

[APPLAUSE]

Daisy Khan:

Distinguished guests, Philip, Signe, and Christopher. First of all,
I think it was divine intervention that Christopher was not
allowed to continue. [LAUGHTER] I think Christopher should
nominate me to decide who will decide, because really,
Christopher, I’m quite fair. I definitely do not believe in cutting
off lips, and I hate padlocks. So I want to begin by saying that
the motion of today, where the freedom of expression must
include the license to offend, is in a sense really a moot point and
a moot question. I hope that all of you here today will consider
rejecting and throwing it out.

The freedom we have to express ourselves does in fact enable us
to offend. Christopher is doing it all the time, in his own sweet
way. In fact, one can even say that sometimes it is necessary to
offend, and for good cause. The appropriate question to ask
today is whether freedom of expression is absolute and limitless,
or should it come with some social responsibility. In the US we
do have a value system that undergirds our free speech. Salient
within the system is the value of fighting the suppression of truth.
Let’s face it. The reason why we’re having this debate today, is
because a number of recent events, such as the Danish cartoon
and Pope Benedict’s remarks on Islam, have brought this issue to
the forefront.

I’m mentioning these examples to frame the current affairs
context for our discussion here today. There is no doubt in my
mind that there are many issues, many suppressed truths,
particularly within the Muslim world, that very badly need to be
brought to light. I do not need to go through the litany of
problems faced, for instance, by women in various parts of the
Muslim world and the rest of the global South, all of which need
to be discussed. There’s also no doubt in my mind that when it
comes to religion, Muslims need to engage in a very honest and
open discussion about many of the values that they espouse.
Whether they are in accordance with the teachings of Islam is
another matter entirely. There are, however, certain kinds of
speech that undermine the very values that liberty of expression
is meant to advance. Take for example the infamous Danish
cartoon protest.

To put it into context, we live in an environment—and this is
especially true of Europe—where Muslims constantly face
xenophobia. While the overwhelming majority of the world’s 1.2
billion Muslims do not partake in any violent actions in response
to these political cartoons, a tiny, minuscule minority has
grabbed the world’s attention and apparently now has absolute
command of how Muslims are to be perceived. This is coupled
with a time when a new generation of European-born Muslims
have emerged that routinely face discrimination, alienation, and
are often perceived as threats in their own countries. And all this
while the violence in Iraq continues to surpass its already
shocking levels. Clearly, we’re living in a very tense time. In
such a situation, for a right-of-center Danish newspaper to come
out with cartoons that show the prophet of Islam with a bomb in
his turban, with a sword in his hand, and with a menacing look
on his face does nothing, absolutely nothing, to advance
desperately needed dialogue, or enlighten people in any positive
way.

If it does anything at all, it serves to suppress constructive
dialogue by fueling extremist sentiments. It is important to note
that this example has little to do with religion, though I think
Philip and Christopher would probably tell you that’s the case.
This isn’t about drawing the prophet, for which there are many
historical precedents in traditional Muslim art. To see the
situation clearly, we must all understand nuance. That’s what
intellectuals are here for—for nuance, for teaching us the nuance.
My Jewish rabbi friend called me right after the cartoon crisis and
said, “What are you doing about the cartoons?” I said, “What are
we going to do? It’s just a cartoon.” He said, “No. Don’t ever
accept it. This is what they did to us in Germany. They started
with the cartoons”—

Christopher Hitchens:

Excuse me—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Wait, wait. Come on, come on.

Christopher Hitchens:

No, that’s offensive.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Well— [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE] That—

Christopher Hitchens:

That’s stupid.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Well—no, come on, Christopher, no, no, Christopher, come on.

Christopher Hitchens:

Stupid, nasty—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Christopher, come on. Daisy, this will not be deducted from your
time.

Daisy Khan:

So when you publish cartoons which of course are a form of
entertainment and hence immensely popular—and Signe, I loved
that cartoon of the radical Islam contest—as a medium for
conveying a particular message, or a speech is given by a person
of immense power like the Pope, which further drives people apart
and cements stereotypes, you’re using public discourse to malign
the way an already marginalized community is perceived. This,
my friends, is not in accordance with our foundational values of
free speech. This is un-American. The point is not whether such
things can or cannot be published. But of course, they are
published. Who’s preventing them? The issue is whether there’s
any wisdom in showing the prophet of Islam with a bomb in his
turban no less. This is the sort of thing that furthers that
familiar, yet dangerous and unsound argument, some Muslim
men are terrorists, therefore, all or even most Muslim men are
terrorists. Now this last statement is certainly something we can
say, something that is enshrined in free speech. But is it true?
Is it responsible? Does it elevate the public discourse? Or is it
simply racist, xenophobic drivel, that isn’t half as clever as it
purports to be?

There are a few additional things to say. While modern
technology has allowed us to improve our communication, it also
means that ideas, news and statements can be disseminated at a
global level very rapidly. The upshot is that the global distance is
of little relevance in assessing how close we are to each other. So
the notion of space, of sharing space with our neighbors, needs to
be negotiated and reexamined. What is needed now is a
heightened sense of awareness that enables us to distinguish
between useful and useless affronts. Truly, few things are more
useless than statements that exasperate [sic] bigotry and racism.
Finally, in keeping with my previous point, I want to make a point
about individual psychology in various societies. We’re always
shocked at how people in the global South react vociferously,
especially my people, Muslims, and at times violently, to what we
see as simple free speech which may or may not undermine their
value system.

What we do not realize in our dismay is that in societies where
the basics are not guaranteed, where one life, liberty, property,
and family are not protected, individuals deal with disparities by
developing a greater collective consciousness, where one identifies
strongly with a larger community, in our case the Uma, and the
collective values it represents. Something that is perceived to
threaten or undermine those values are resolved not an individual
level, but are resolved in a group dynamic which can sometimes
result in chaotic mob reaction, which you’re all familiar with. In
an environment defined by major uncertainties, heightened
inequities, depictions like the Danish cartoons are perceived as
yet another attack on what for some people sadly remain the final
salvation—their dignity and their faith. And Signe’s right,
religious people are the touchiest. It should come as no surprise,
then, to see that—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Daisy, that’s time.

Daisy Khan:

I want to just finish one last—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Well, finish the sentence, finish the sentence.

Christopher Hitchens:

Finish by naming the rabbi.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Stop—

Christopher Hitchens:

I want to know who that rabbi was—

Jeffrey Toobin:

[LAUGHS] Sorry, we’ll get to that. We’ll get to that—

Christopher Hitchens:

Name that rabbi—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Christopher— [LAUGHS]

Christopher Hitchens:

Name that rabbi—

Daisy Khan:

The rabbi is my secret weapon and I told him I would never do
this. Ultimately, the question to ask is do we use our free speech
to insult an already marginalized people? Or do we use it to
advance and enhance a desperately needed discourse between
people living in an increasingly interconnected world. I hope
you’ll throw out the other motion. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Okay. Thank you, Daisy Khan. All right, before we get to the
questions, I’m now ready to present the results of the pre-debate
vote. Before the debate, 177 of you voted for the proposition, 25
against, and 24 don’t know. So we’ll see if that changes. We’re
now ready to begin the Q-and-A portion of the program. I will call
on the questioners, and someone on each side of the auditorium
will come to you with a microphone. Please stand when you ask
your question, and I ask that you please make your questions
short and to the point. Members of the press should identify
themselves as such. Members of the audience who are not of the
press can identify themselves or not as they see fit. Why don’t
you, sir, ask the first question.

Audience Member:

My name is Barry Fredericks. I have a question. Have you all
forgotten about Gallileo? I mean this conversation about religious
problems and insulting people, I mean, we’ve tried that case in
the third century. Do we want to go back? I notice there are
groups in the Islamic world that’d like to go back to the 13th
century. But do we really want to make that argument.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Okay, that’s a good question. Who would like to respond.

[LAUGHTER]

Signe Wilkinson:

I’m for going back to the 13th century, personally.

Philip Gourevitch:

Yeah.

Signe Wilkinson:

Is that the question?

Philip Gourevitch:

He was much on my mind as I came here tonight. [LAUGHTER]
But I thought, here I am, facing the anti-Gallilean forces once
again… [LAUGHTER] And I expected them to be very, very old,
so this…very strange. Very strange arrangement.

David Cesarani:

If I can—

Jeffrey Toobin:

David?

David Cesarani:

Yes, the gentleman has repeated a hoary old myth about Gallileo.
He actually was not persecuted—

Philip Gourevitch:

I find the word “hoary” offensive.

David Cesarani:

—for his astrological discoveries. He was persecuted for various
other things. He was patronized by the Pope, and he didn’t get
into trouble with the Pope until he crossed swords with the
papacy on completely different issues.

Audience Member:

That’s not true. He was [INAUDIBLE]—

Jeffrey Toobin:

The next debate is about Gallileo, so—

David Cesarani:

Read some history books that have been written within the last
30 years.

Audience Member:

I have.

Jeffrey Toobin:

All right, why don’t we have another question? [LAUGHTER] Yes,
ma’am.

Audience Member:

I just want to make the point, and I think this is directed at
Daisy, who talked about racism and bigotry, and then just talked
about her Jewish friend. You are against the motion to offend,
and yet I think you offended most of the people in this room. If
anybody has a comment on that, I’d like to hear it—

David Cesarani:

Yes, I have a comment, I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t offended and
I’m Jewish—

Daisy Khan:

My Jewish friend came to my aid and came to the aid of my
community—

Christopher Hitchens:

Nor was I, actually, I was only pretending to be.

[LAUGHTER]

Philip Gourevitch:

I was just fascinated that she only had one.

[LAUGHTER]

Christopher Hitchens:

I don’t believe she has one. I want to know that rabbi’s name.

Philip Gourevitch:

It ought to be traceable. Could I suggest that she speak to some
others, because really, it’s not a majority view amongst Jews, and
to try and invoke her one Jewish friend to paint this majority view
is quite preposterous.

David Cesarani:

Now what you’re saying, Philip, is preposterous. Throughout
Europe, the Jewish communities were very divided over the
Danish cartoon issue.

Philip Gourevitch:

The European Jewish communities have—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Well, let him finish—

David Cesarani:

Hello—

Philip Gourevitch:

—been virtually eradicated—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Let him finish, let him finish.

David Cesarani:

Just a minute.

Jeffrey Toobin:

David, go ahead.

[APPLAUSE]

Philip Gourevitch:

They live here, buddy. They live here now.

Jeffrey Toobin:

No. David.

David Cesarani:

A lot of the Jewish communities in Europe, including the Jewish
community in Britain, and these views are articulated by the
chief rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, who felt that the cartoons were not
only offensive but were dangerous for the reasons that Daisy
gave. Yes, because to many Jewish people that kind of
demonization of a religion and a religious-ethnic group brought
back some very sick and bad memories. That is why in Europe—

Philip Gourevitch:

Yes, of people burning books in the street—

David Cesarani:

—there is a much greater tolerance of what this side of the house
is advocating than on that side, which is displaying an
extraordinary degree not only of disrespect but also of arrogance
and an astonishing unwillingness to face a real past.

Philip Gourevitch:

I’m highly interested in facing a real past and that’s particularly
why I feel that if your belief is that by muzzling Nazis you’re
making us safe, I hope you’re not watching my back when they
come back at us. I’m telling you the truth. [APPLAUSE] If you
think that there’s a mute button, and that by saying, oh, Nazis
can’t speak in public, Nazis must be put in jail. We’re going to
eradicate Nazism, rather than by having Nazis in a country where
you can actually speak to them and argue with them, and not
dignify them by putting them on trial every time they say
something completely idiotic. You’re elevating Nazis and putting
them down and then inciting a couple of politicians in Europe.

David Cesarani:

It doesn’t dignify them. David Irving’s battle against Deborah
Lipstadt exposed him for what he was, it was very effective. He
had faced—

Philip Gourevitch:

He exposed himself for what was, he said the Holocaust didn’t
exist and it did. If you were to eradicate all false history you’d
have to stop all newspapers, it’s ridiculous.

[LAUGHTER]

Signe Wilkinson:

I beg your pardon.

[LAUGHS]

David Cesarani:

Faced by a prison sentence, David Irving courageously renounced
all that he’s previously said about denying the Holocaust. The
trial was very effective, and I don’t actually agree with putting
people in prison for advocating Nazi propaganda and a version of
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion because that’s what David
Irving does. It’s not a kind of genteel rewriting of history which
Christopher seems to think. It is the most poisonous kind of
conspiracy theory—

Christopher Hitchens:

Why do I seem to think that?

David Cesarani:

Well, it’s what you said in your article—

Christopher Hitchens:

To the contrary. Very much to the contrary—

David Cesarani:

—and what you said just earlier, that he is engaged in the
revision of history. He’s not, he’s a neo-Nazi propagandist, and
this is what Justice Gray said in the verdict in his battle with
Deborah Lipstadt. He is a neo-Nazi political activist, and he is
using distorted history to propagandize for his cause.

Philip Gourevitch:

And nobody had much heard of him until you put him on trial.

David Cesarani:

Well, you can fill it, you’re a journalist, you’re supposed to know
these facts. He’s a best-selling author. He’s very important guy,
he gets into people’s living room. Not for a while though, because
he’s in a prison cell.

Philip Gourevitch:

Nazis always get in the living room, but—

Christopher Hitchens:

His book, his edition of The Goebbels Diary is a very useful and
interesting book that everyone who wants to know more about the
period should read.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Let’s get some more—

Christopher Hitchens:

For example, it’s only in that book that it’s proved that the British
Union of Fascists took money from the Nazi party, a claim they’d
always denied. The question is, do you think you’re big enough to
read a book by David Irving and make up your own mind about
it, or do you think that someone else should do that for me.
Right?

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Yes, next question.

Christopher Hitchens:

A very simple question.

Audience Member:

Alan Miller, New York Salon. I do take issue particularly with
David Cesarani’s view, when he talks about how vulnerable
everyone is. It’s almost like an egalitarian-speak, this notion that
humans are not robust and cannot discuss ideas and make
decisions and be autonomous. So my question to the panel
tonight is, when it comes to the really tricky, sticky issues, like
we see around children and pedophilia, or as we see on the
campuses, where we see speech etiquette, or when we see in the
workplaces speeches of code, would they agree with the prospect
that you should have the right to be offensive, and free speech at
all times. That’s my question to them.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Mari, can you address that?

Mari Matsuda:

The line that I draw is between the right to dissent, to express
your opinion, if you’re Gallileo, to oppose the powers that be and
say that the sun is the center of the universe, that’s free speech.
That’s what we need for democracy to thrive. The speech that I
think is of lower value and that I’m asking us to consider
restricting is speech that assaults, wounds, degrades and
excludes. Let me give you a specific example since you raised the
workplace. It’s a frequent pattern that the first woman to show
up in a traditionally male job, in the coalmine, on the oil rig, is
relentlessly harassed—with words.
Men describing her body, and saying they would like to rape her,
and describing what that would be like. She goes to work every
day and tries to do her job, up on a construction site. I think
that goes beyond offense. I think that is an effort to exclude.
People use these words because they’re tied to a history of
violence, because they do terrorize people, and that is their
intent. Now the other side is trying to say that we’re for opening
the door of censorship. I certainly don’t stand for that. I think
that this audience voted in the vast majority for the proposition
precisely because they distrust censorship, and that’s good, that’s
important. Any effort to limit speech has to be done carefully,
through the rule of law, with discernment. But we can do it.
We’ve done that with defamation.
We allow people to insult each other, but we don’t allow them to
destroy character and reputation in ways that the law calls actual
malice. It’s very close to requiring intent. That’s a limit, that
means that a lot of very nasty speech is still allowed. But we’re
trying to create that breaching space so that women can go to
work, so that that family that’s the wrong race can move into that
neighborhood, where we can have conversations like this one that
are very hard. If it degenerates into name-calling the
conversation shuts down, and what I’m trying to do is prevent the
conversation-ending move in a world in which we need to talk.

Jeffrey Toobin:

That’s Mari Matsuda, Signe Wilkinson?

[APPLAUSE]

Signe Wilkinson:

One little example of how this works in the real world was in the
mid-‘90s at the University of Pennsylvania. There were some kids
making noise outside of a dorm room. Some guy leaned out the
window and told the water buffaloes to shut up. The water
buffaloes took it to the speech code people at the university. Had
they not, the guy who had said “water buffaloes” would’ve been
the jerk that he was, but as it turned out, then the girls who got
all upset about it made a federal case out of it. They ended up
looking stupid, as did the administration of the University of
Pennsylvania. Water buffaloes, I mean where are you going to
draw the line? It’s an animal, it’s not like saying—

Christopher Hitchens:

A very nice animal—

Signe Wilkinson:

—I’m going to kill you. So to me it’s like…if you let someone say
something stupid, they’re the ones who look idiotic. If then you
start—like David Irving, I might add—but when you start taking
him on and like Christopher said giving him the platform, then
it’s you who are starting to look like you can’t quite join the
debate.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Let’s take another question. Can you hand that woman the
microphone? I’m sorry. We’ll get to you next.

Audience Member:

Okay, my question is the following. There was a cartoon in the
New York Times a couple of weeks ago which was never talked
about, and it was from Ohio. They always do a synopsis of
cartoons that they think are particularly relevant—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Yes, we know.

Audience Member:

So it was the Pope saying, “I’m sorry that my remarks about
Islamic violence provoked Islamic violence.” Now, nobody made a
big scene about that, but who made the big scene about the
Danish cartoon, who fired up the world about the Danish
cartoon. Who got it started was an Islamic cleric, who got
everybody in an uproar—

Jeffrey Toobin:

So what’s your question?

Audience Member:

So my question is, why does this happen only in this situation
when it was outside of the United States, and why did it not
happen here.

Christopher Hitchens:

Okay.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Daisy, do you have a response? I think that was mostly
addressed to you.

Daisy Khan:

Yes. Well, I think what happened with the Danish cartoon was
that when the cartoon was published there was a small
demonstration by certain Muslim groups. The newspaper decided
they were not going to pay any attention to that because they had
a license to free speech and expression which was fine. Then
they took it up to some of the ambassadors of Muslim countries
and they were hoping that their intervention might have helped
with the situation. The ambassadors called for a meeting with
the prime minister, and that meeting was refused. As you know,
the ambassadors were ambassadors from various Muslim
countries, and they wanted to have a meeting with him. He
basically said I have nothing to do with this because this is not
within my realm. They called for a lawsuit, and that lawsuit was
not pursued. Basically the community felt their hurts and their
concerns were not being addressed. They went overseas and
sought support from overseas and then the whole situation went
out of control—

Philip Gourevitch:

They started a pogrom.

Jeffrey Toobin:

So wait, wait, no— [OVERLAPPING VOICES] Christopher’s turn
to—let Christopher respond—

Diasy Khan:

No, I just want to finish the point. What I’m saying is that had it
been addressed at the local level it would have never become the
international phenomenon that it became. It should be
addressed at the local level, like Signe did. When the
Philadelphia Inquirer decided to publish that same carton, they
called the Muslim community and said we want to do something
about this and we want to create dialogue. Now that was
responsible, that was socially responsible.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Christopher, go ahead.

Christopher Hitchens:

When Dr. Samuel Johnson had finished his great lexicography,
the first real English dictionary, he was visited by various
delegations of people to congratulate him, including a delegation
of London’s respectable womanhood who came to his parlor in
Fleet Street and said Doctor, we congratulate you on your
decision to exclude all indecent words from your dictionary. He
said, “Ladies, I congratulate you on your persistence in looking
them up.” [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE] I think anyone who
understands that story, which I’m pleased to see everybody
obviously does, will see through the sinister piffle we were treated
to just now. If people are determined to be offended, if they will
climb up on the ladder, balancing it precariously on their own
toilet system, to be upset by what they see through the neighbor’s
bathroom window, there’s nothing you can do about that.
[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE] The Imams in Denmark did the
following. First, they invited the intervention of 22 foreign
ambassadors in Denmark’s internal affairs, itself a disgrace, and
the Danish prime minister quite rightly repudiated it. Then they
added two cartoons of their own, drawn by them, one of them
showing the prophet Mohammed in the shape of a pig, then they
shopped those round the Muslim world until they could get
kindling going under the embassies of a small democracy in the
capitol cities of countries where demonstrations are normally not
allowed.

They violated Danish diplomatic immunity, they tried to sabotage
the Danish economy, there were random pogroms and attacks on
individual Scandinavians. And, David Cesarani says he doesn’t
like the reminiscence of the 1930s that is inscribed in the
cartoon. I don’t like the reminiscence of the 1930s that is
involved in a Kristallnacht against Denmark, put up by religious
demagogues and thugs, and that’s what needs to be put down.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

David Cesarani.

David Cesarani:

I actually agree with much of what Christopher has just said. I
think the response in the Muslim communities and in Muslim
countries, and in countries of large Muslim populations was
abysmal. But I will absolutely defend the right of Muslims to
protest in peaceful ways against those cartoons and to lobby.

Christopher Hitchens:

So would I.

Philip Gourevitch:

So would all of us.

David Cesarani:

Gooooood, okay, there’s a measure of agreement.

Philip Gourevitch:

We all agree—

David Cesarani:

Now, let’s see if we can push it a bit further—

Philip Gourevitch:

Wow, you—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Wait, wait, wait, let him finish—

David Cesarani:

Just stop interrupting—

Jeffrey Toobin:

—we had a beautiful moment of agreement. [LAUGHTER] So
let’s, let’s, let’s let David go ahead.

David Cesarani:

You’re an angry man. Let’s think about this town. New York,
New York. The gentleman there asked the question about who
are these marginal, vulnerable groups. It’s kind of interesting
that a lot of people, certainly on that side, have decided, well,
Muslim, they’re not vulnerable or marginal, they don’t need
protection. If you exclude them, who’s left. Gay men…women,
probably not, Jews, definitely not. But how do we get to that
position where gays or Jews in this town, are so strong, so
powerful, so invulnerable. So much so that when Jesse Jackson
had the temerity and the misfortune to refer to this great city as
Hymietown, it was the end of his political career. I don’t know
how Christopher Hitchens or Philip or Signe want to talk about
gay men and women, but I guess there are quite a few epithets
and words they would not use—

Philip Gourevitch:

I have no idea—

David Cesarani:

—to describe their lifestyle or sexual preferences. Then there’s
the N word. The N word. Do you want it back? Christopher? Do
you want it on prime-time TV, front page of newspapers?

Philip Gourevitch:

I don’t want you jailing people for using it—

David Cesarani:

Do you want it back, do you want cartoons of lynchings?

Philip Gourevitch:

Well, allow me to answer—

David Cesarani:

Is that what you want?

Christopher Hitchens:

What kind of foolishness is this—

David Cesarani:

Is it all right to inflict that on Muslims but not on gay men, not
on Jews—

Christopher Hitchens:

Don’t be silly—

Philip Gourevitch:

You’re being completely preposterous. All right, no, wait—you’re
getting yourself all— you’re getting your knickers all in a twist
here—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Okay, Philip, go ahead, answer—he asked a question, answer his
question—

Philip Gourevitch:

Allow me to say that you’re just creating a lot of fantasies for
yourself that are quite ridiculous.

David Cesarani:

It’s not a—

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, wait, let, let Philip—Christopher, let Philip—

Christopher Hitchens:

I take it as—

Philip Gourevitch:

First of all—

Christopher Hitchens:

I take it—

Philip Gourevitch:

Go ahead. [LAUGHTER] It’s my turn—

[OVERLAPPING VOICES]

Christopher Hitchens:

I am going to take it as a tribute to the superior cogency of our
side that there’s this repeated change of subject from the other
side. For example.

David Cesarani:

No, it’s not the—

Christopher Hitchens:

Nobody says it would be a good thing if the word “nigger”
appeared all the time in the press. What we say is that those who
want to be offended don’t have the right to close down the
newspapers that offend them.

Philip Gourevitch:

Nor by the way is the reason that word “nigger” doesn’t appear in
the press because you would jail people who put it there.

Christopher HItchens:

I appeal to anyone in this audience—

Philip Gourevitch:

The advertisers wouldn’t show or—

Jeffrey Toobin:

One at a time—

Christopher Hitchens:

I appeal to any—

David Cesarani:

Ah, the power of capital! That’s a good defense.

Christopher Hitchens:

I appeal to any male—

Philip Gourevitch:

It is.

Christopher Hitchens:

I appeal to any male in this audience—

Philip Gourevitch:

Quite proud of it.

Christopher Hitchens:

—who might see a woman being insulted at work or perhaps on
the subway or on a bus or on the street or in a bar or in a
restaurant, by an obscene, loudmouthed man. There isn’t a man
in this room I’m sure whose sword wouldn’t flash in his scabbard,
to defend the rights of womanhood in such a case. [LAUGHTER]
If that wasn’t the case, there’s going to be no law that will protect
women from men with Tourette’s syndrome, I’m awfully sorry to
say.

[LAUGHTER]

Philip Gourevitch:

May I have my turn?

Christopher Hitchens:

It’s just an attempt to change—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Let’s get another question here—

Philip Gourevitch:

I actually want to respond though to what was said—

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, you can’t respond to him, he’s on your side!

Philip Gourevitch:

No, you asked me— [LAUGHTER] You asked me to respond to
David Cesarani.

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, hold it, let’s let the audience—

Philip Gourevitch:

You wanted me to respond to David Cesarani—

Jeffrey Toobin:

—get involved here—

Philip Gourevitch:

—who specifically was saying that he agreed with us on a point
which he previously disagreed with us on which is the idea that
he thought it was appropriate that there should be peaceful
protests. However, he objected—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Philip, really—

Philip Gourevitch:

—to the idea that any Jewish leaders in America should
peacefully protest what was being said by Tony Judd by saying
that they should not be allowed to put pressure on an
organization—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Next—

Philip Gourevitch:

—where he spoke.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Stop.

Philip Gourevitch:

That’s absurd.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Philip— Paul, go ahead, wait, Paul has a question, hold on, hold
on—

Audience Member:

I’d love to ask a question quickly, my name is Paul Holdengraber,
I’m the Director of Public Programs at the New York Public
Library. I feel for this side which is opposed because they’ve been
so terribly weak and I would be surprised that after this debate
there are more than two or three people on your side.

[LAUGHTER]

But be that as it may, I would like—

Daisy Khan:

What makes you think that?

Audience Member:

Well, I would like to—

Jeffrey Toobin:

No campaign speeches, ask a question, Paul.

Audience Member:

—simply ask this question of David Cesarani. I don’t understand
why on earth you brought up the example of Tony Judd. You
mentioned it, you didn’t explain it, you said nothing about it.
Could you say something cogent about that at least.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Okay. [LAUGHTER] David Cesarani.

David Cesarani:

I’ll try and be cogent. It comes back to the question that
Christopher Hitchens quite correctly raised. Who decides on
these speech issues, on hate speech. Now, I think that American
campuses are actually exemplary in this respect, and I think the
American government has found a way of demarcating what it is
permissible to say and what is offensive and dangerous, without
going to law. I think that sets a precedent of how you can decide.
I don’t think it is terribly good when powerful individuals phone
up institutions, and by the tone of their voice have meetings
canceled. I think there may be very good grounds for objecting
and protesting, I think it is permissible to lobby. But I think that
kind of intervention is not a good idea. I certainly don’t think
that we should leave the defense of the weak and the marginal up
to the advertisers, which seems to be what Philip believes is the
way to defend our interests.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Philip Gourevitch?

Philip Gourevitch:

All I said, that he’s trying to refer to in that bizarre quip, is that
the reason that you don’t have the word “nigger” or that you don’t
have a lot of the derogatory images that he was sort of proposing
in a heated moment that—would you like to see these things
returned to the public airwaves, ohhhh, was that they’re not on
the public airwaves not because we’ve actually outlawed them
and thrown everybody in jail in Austria as you advocate, but
actually because—

David Cesarani:

No, I said—

Philip Gourevitch:

—they’re not on the public airwaves. Because one would not get
an audience for them because people would protest those stations
because people would make firm phone calls exercising their
freedom of speech to say, you know what? We don’t want
anything to do with you. You have no basis, I bet, you’ve never
made a phone call, you’ve never asked a question, and you’ve
done no reporting to find out whether Abe Foxman made that
call, which has never been proven. I sit on the board of Penn and
we raised the Tony Judd question. Absolutely nobody could
ascertain whether or not Abe Foxman made that call. He may
have made it, or he may not. Somebody made the call. But
you’re—

Christopher Hitchens:

But he does have Tourette’s syndrome—

Philip Gourevitch:

—very, very, very confident— [LAUGHTER] You’re very, very
confident in accusing of somebody in public of something that
you know nothing about—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Let’s have another question—

Philip Gourevitch:

—which is gross ignorance, but no, I would like to finish
something for a minute, Jeffrey. I’m not done. A gentleman with
a British accent asked a question earlier of David Cesarani which
he ducked very carefully. He raised the question, why is it that
you’re so nervous about the broad public in his criticism of
Enlightenment thinking and of Mill and of this one and that one.
He sort of yearns for a clubby time, when you could count on a
few select elites having a kind of common agreement. And that
now what’s dangerous to him is the proliferation of voices, the
idea that there are many ideas out there on the Internet, oh my
goodness, and we can’t regulate them, and they might get in the
hands of the wrong people and we can’t even agree who they are.
For goodness sakes, those clubby people, as they put it, you
know, even the Jews can have an opinion. I mean, why are you
so concerned that there might actually be some unregulated
voices out there?

Jeffrey Toobin:

You know what, let’s just go to a question.

Audience Member:

I think that it’s sometimes a lot harder to defend very hateful,
personal speech, like when hate groups leaflet the lawn of a
neighborhood where a black family has just moved into a white
neighborhood.

Jeffrey Toobin:

We’re running low on time, so get to a question, please.

Audience Member:

But Daisy, do you really think that it’s a problem that we had
cartoons that were… unfortunately distasteful to Muslim people,
but cartoons in a newspaper that were quite humorous really,
and I think they were talking about quite a legitimate political
issue. Do you really want to ban that kind of free speech? You
don’t want to allow editorial cartoons?

Jeffrey Toobin:

That’s a fair question, but we’ve sort of done this question, we’ve
done the Danish cartoons—

Philip Gourevitch:

We’ve done this question, yes, yes, it’s a waste of a question—

Jeffrey Toobin:

I think that’s a good point. Up there at the top.

Audience Member:

I would just like to know, and I’ll be the first to admit that I was
not aware of this whole discussion about the cancellation of this
meeting. But when Mr. Foxman, or if anyone who called and got
it canceled did so, were death threats part of the reason—

Philip Gourevitch:

Of course not—

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, they were not, you know, let’s—

Audience Member:

Okay, thank you—

Jeffrey Toobin:

I mean, let’s put Abe Foxman and Gallileo aside and—

[LAUGHTER]

Christopher Hitchens:

I do have a jot point that I would like to make.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Oh—

Christopher Hitchens:

I’ll make it quickly.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Okay, quickly, Christopher.

Christopher Hitchens:

After my punch-up with George Galloway recently I was asked by
the Republican Jewish Committee in Washington to come and
speak to their ‘do down at the Old Temple and talk about the oilfor-food program and other things like that. They put my name
on the bill, and then a gentleman named Mort Klein who some of
you will know… He’s a madman who runs the Zionist
Organization of America. He kicked up a terrific fuss because of
some remarks I’d once made about Theodore Herzl, among other
things, and got the meeting canceled.

Now, I don’t particularly complain about that as a matter of fact,
and I don’t share in the tremendous steambath of self-pity that
Mr. Judd has managed to generate. [LAUGHTER] You have a
right to your opinion. You don’t have necessarily have a right to
the audience of the Republican Jewish Committee. They can
decide not to have you. That’s okay. [APPLAUSE] I’m just trying
to say, just for once if we could stop people intruding things that
don’t belong in this discussion, it’d save such a lot of time.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Two more questions, this gentleman right here.

Audience Member:

Where do you draw the line between free speech and political
correctness.

Christopher Hitchens:

Another—

Jeffrey Toobin:

You know, that’s sort of—

Philip Gourevitch:

Waste of a question—

Jeffrey Toobin:

We’ve been dealing with that issue generally, why don’t we get to
this gentleman over here.

Man:

Back here?

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, this gentleman in the white shirt, get a microphone.

Christopher Hitchens:

Stupid, boring questions should be disallowed.

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, but we need the microphone for radio purposes though. You
can’t speak loud enough so that all of WNYC can hear you.

[LAUGHTER]

Audience Member:

Thank you, just a quick question. One of the things I noticed on
the panel is that no one talked about the civil rights movement
and how that’s affected the topic here. Also, just quite frankly,
how come there’s no African-American people on the panel? I’d
just like to get your thoughts on that.

Christopher Hitchens:

Next. [LAUGHTER]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Well, I mean I think that’s a point that everyone can take for what
it’s worth. At the end?

Philip Gourevitch:

That was useful for the radio audience—

Jeffrey Toobin:

At the top, at the very top, underneath the light. That’s you, go
ahead.

Audience Member:

Okay, this is a question for Mari. You talked about women in the
workforce. I don’t work on an oil rig, but I do work on a trading
floor. I’m just wondering if you think that by limiting what people
can say to me, if that’s actually protecting me from what people
are thinking about me, and whether when I come into the office, I
need to take care of myself.

Christopher Hitchens:

Good.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Mari? [APPLAUSE]

Mari Matsuda:

I trust that you can. But there are circumstances in which
women have left jobs because they could not handle the relentless
and brutal assaults on their personhood. This is why in civil
rights law, to—

Christopher Hitchens:

Not free expression.

Mari Matsuda:

—respond to the earlier question—

Christopher Hitchens:

Not a free expression—

Jeffrey Toobin:

Wait, wait.

Mari Matsuda:

The reason in civil rights and anti-discrimination law we do limit
speech in the workplace, is that ideas about your inferiority,
about your inherent lack of worth as a human being and your
lack of entitlement to equality in the workplace, if they’re
expressed regularly to you, create an environment in which it’s
impossible for you to do your job on an equal basis with everyone
else.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Does someone on this side want to address the point Mari’s
made, which is that there is kind of speech, harassment. Is that
speech you seek to protect?

Signe Wilkinson:

I get that kind of speech all the time. One of my favorites was
being called a liberal cocksucker. [LAUGHTER] Now, I don’t
know whether that means I like to cock-suck liberally
[LAUGHTER] or I only suck liberal cock or I just am not quite
sure. But I didn’t call the police on it. Furthermore, half the
people who write me horrible, horrible things, no one has seen my
mail, they all start it, “Dear Mr. Wilkinson.” [LAUGHTER] So it’s
not me as a woman, it’s the ideas I put in the paper, and if we
can’t discuss those ideas, even when they talk to me in
loathsome, funny ways, we can’t talk.

The one thing I would like to say about the whole Danish
cartoonist thing is this. Having had that confrontation has
changed minds on both sides. The BBC reported that about two
weeks ago there was another minor dust-up about it. But the
reason you didn’t hear about it is because the Muslim side
realized that it really wasn’t great PR to kill people in Pakistan to
protest cartoons in Denmark. So it’s a much different protest, it’s
been handled differently on both sides, including the Danish side.
This is how we learn. [LAUGHS] We learn by conflict, we learn
by calling each other things that, ehh, well, maybe weren’t a great
idea at the time, but we can do it differently next time.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Forgive me for interrupting, but it’s now time to vote. If you want
to vote for the motion— everybody’s got their cards—you want to
tear off the greenish-blue, kind of aqua side. If you want to vote
against, you tear off the red side. If you don’t know where you
stand, you just put the entire ticket in the box. Now, can I ask
everyone to please vote quietly. The boxes will be passed around.

Christopher Hitchens:

How long does this take.

Jeffrey Toobin:

No, it’s going to go on while you—you’re going to talk while they’re
doing it. You can start right away.

Christopher Hitchens:

All right.

Philip Gourevitch:

Wait. Who stars?

Jeffrey Toobin:

While you’re voting we’re going to go to final statements. The
order is, please begin against the proposition, Mari Matsuda. You
can stay where you are.

Philip Gourevitch:

We docked some of her time, remember. We docked some of her
time.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Yes, we did dock some of her time.

Mari Matsuda:

The “N” word is hollered out from a passing car to let a black man
know that he is not walking in a neighborhood where he is
welcome or safe. The speaker knows the effect of that word, and
uses it precisely because it terrorizes. I asked earlier: why is it
that we recognize in American law that if someone spits on your
shoe, that’s an attack on your person, but we won’t recognize
words that we know, socially, historically, from the reality of the
human lives that we live, have exactly the same effect on your
personhood and your ability to move freely? I am talking about
liberty and it’s fascinating that we are all coming from the
Enlightenment tradition. As much as we disagree, I feel affinity
with people on the opposing side because we are all concerned
with losing our democracy and losing our freedom.
I think there are forms of speech that make us less free because
we stop talking to each other and we don’t have the conversations
we need to survive. Allowing this kind of invective perpetuated…
Daisy has been out on a limb by herself defending the Muslim
community and I have to speak up. There is hatred of Islam in
this country and it’s not a healthy thing. There’s also ignorance.
We need to open a space where we can talk to each other,
disagree, criticize, and learn, and that space closes when people
are allowed to assault. [APPLAUSE] I’m not asking for
censorship, I’m asking that if you support the proposition, you’re
making a choice for a license to assault.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Daisy, that—

Mari Matsuda:

If you oppose it—

Jeffrey Toobin:

That’s it—

Mari Matsuda:

—you open the door for a conversation about limits.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Okay, next. Thank you. that was Mari Matsuda. Now for the
proposition, Signe Wilkinson.

Signe Wilkinson:

Well, I basically said earlier pretty much what I think here. I’ll
just go back to what Christopher said. This is a conversation. If
you forbid someone to say what’s truly on their mind, you won’t
know what is on their mind. It’s better almost every time, it
seems to me, to find out what it is, and then be able to deal with
it. I think that some of the questions get back to what is truly
hateful speech and our history is filled with, for example, horrible
images of black Americans who were made fun of simply because
they were black, and these images occurred everywhere, in
Courier and Ives and all of the major publications in the United
States.

But the way that changed was not by someone saying, you may
not ever, ever do a bad caricature of a black person. It was
changed because the civil rights movement and black Americans
showed through their own incredible endurance and persistence
in going for equal rights in this country, that that movement
made those images look awful. You can’t look at them today
without wincing. It says more about the people who drew the
cartoons than about who they were drawn by [sic]. I feel sorry for
you in New York because you don’t have very many really bitter
cartoons published here, the New York Times protects you from
that. [LAUGHTER] But I really urge you to go on the Web, find
out what people are thinking, and you’ll find out through
cartoons among other pieces of free speech.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Thank you. [APPLAUSE] Thank you, Signe Wilkinson. Against,
David Cesarani.

David Cesarani:

I think what Signe said then about the struggle of black
Americans to eradicate racist images from public media was very
interesting and very important. It was about equal rights. There
was a loss. There were some cartoonists who made a living from,
you know, making fun of black people and depicting them in
ghastly ways who probably went out of business, or just migrated
to certain parts of America where that sort of thing is still
tolerated. Elsewhere, however, the dignity and equality of black
Americans—as is true of women, gays, and other groups who
used to suffer demeaning and degrading images and speech
acts—and the need to create and preserve a civilized, civil society,
in which civility and respect of one for another is absolutely vital,
triumphed. Dignity, equality and civility are values. They are
goods. Our freedom of expression is a value, and it is a good. On
this side we’ve simply been asking you to weigh up those values,
those goods. We think that human dignity, equal treatment, and
having a truly civil society is worth a modest, preferable voluntary
degree of constraint, restraint, a kind of humility. Knowing where
to draw the line. Thank you.

Jefrrey Toobin:

Thank you. [APPLAUSE] David Cesarani. Now, for the
proposition, Philip Gourevitch.

Philip Gourevitch:

The proposition is, freedom of expression must include the license
to offend. I would return to the idea that this is fundamentally
the lesser of various not-ideal prospects. The other prospect is
that one licenses someone to determine what offends, and that
one is always at the prey of that question. Who is to judge, who
is to decide, how are we to restrict their ability to license our
ability to offend. In other words how are we to restrict their
ability to restrict us. At what point does this admittedly slippery
slope immediately become this greased precipice, and we fall off
into a very dangerous situation.

The other side says, speech is dangerous, speech can be hateful,
there’s hatred and ignorance out there, and therefore they want,
in some way, to muzzle the people they fear are dangerous. I
agree with them that speech can be dangerous and that there is a
great deal of hatred and ignorance out there. We’ve heard a good
deal of ignorance even tonight. I feel that that is why I urge you
strongly to listen to the dangerous speech you’re hearing from the
other side, and recognize exactly how it can impinge upon your
ability not only to speak but to think. The fact that they keep
using this strangely castrated phrase, “the ‘N’ word.” Which is
supposed to be inoffensive, but is actually doubly offensive
because it restricts you from the ability to hear the full offense of
the word “nigger.” They’re at every time trying to double back and
triple around and make you use words and trip over your own
mind and not think and not speak what actually might occur to
you in your effort to observe reality and contend with it. I think
that’s a very dangerous predicament, I think that they’re
presumptuous and wild in their notion that we can do that
reasonably, and I think that we are at less risk taking the great
risk of freedom.

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Thank you, Philip Gourevitch. Against the proposition, Daisy
Khan.

Daisy Khan:

If all of us here wanted to offend each other, I’m sure we can. But
would it be beneficial to building trust, and building long-term
relationships? I was stunned at the response I got about my
rabbi friend. It is because I had been dialoguing with the Jewish
community—

Christopher Hitchens:

What Jewish friend.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Stop. [LAUGHTER] Enough.

Christopher Hitchens:

What rabbi friend.

Jeffrey Toobin:

[LAUGHS] Yes, your question has been registered. Daisy, please
continue.

Daisy Khan:

It is the deep dialogue that has been going on between me and
the Jewish community that has resulted in that concern for our
community. It is out of that concern that the rabbi friend
reached out to me and said, do not let this happen to you. So I
was a little shell-shocked at the reaction we got from people here.
As I mentioned, we’re living in a tense global environment, where
misunderstanding is increased by peddlers of fear, and
overpowered by intolerance. Today what is needed is civility,
tolerance, patience, and sincerity. We need to get rid of negative
words like “offend”—it’s a neighbor word—and replace them with
positive words like “befriend.”
Only once you make the effort to understand the perspective of
the other person can you begin to understand the rationale
behind their actions and thoughts. Furthermore, you’ll be in a
better position to influence them, and only then can you even
begin to be critical. We humans have a nasty habit of judging the
book by its cover. If you’re offensive, it is difficult to make a
difference because you’re seen as hostile, and your views are
unwelcomed [sic] and outright rejected. This is human nature.
No doubt it is essential to be critical. But do so at the right time,
in the right environment, and with the right choice of words.
Sticks and stones are not the only things that break bones, ladies
and gentlemen, words do too. On a personal note, the reason I’m
here today and I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to furthering
understanding between peoples has to do with my powerful
memories of my childhood in Kashmir. I went to Catholic school,
was taught by Irish nuns, learned math from Hindu professors,
played with Sikhs and Buddhists and was told the tale of how
Kashmiris were from the lost 10th tribe of Israel. I was exposed to
this broad perspective of unity and diversity, where celebrating
and honoring each other’s traditions and beliefs was a way of life,
but alas, this heaven turned into hell too.

Jeffrey Toobin:

Thank you, Daisy Khan, against the proposition. [APPLAUSE]
Finally, for the proposition, Christopher Hitchens.

Christopher Hitchens:

The real question, or if you like, subtext question before us is
this—is nothing sacred. What we’ve really been discussing is the
old question of whether or not there is such an offense as
blasphemy or profanity. Now if I don’t tell you exactly what I
think about the simpering speeches that we heard from the other
side, I’m not censoring myself, I’m just being polite and civil and
saving some of your time. What I will not prevent myself from
saying, and will not let anyone else prevent me from saying, is the
following. It is wrong and always has been for churches,
powerful, secular, human institutions, to claim exemption from
criticism, which is what’s really being asked here. If there’s going
to be respect, it has to be mutual. Does Islam respect my right to
un-belief? Of course it does not. Does it respect the right of a
Muslim to apostasize and change belief? Of course it does not. I
can name now four or five friends—six or eight, maybe, if I had
time—five or six you would certainly have heard of—who have to
live their lives under police protection for commenting on Islam.
For having an opinion on it. This is getting steadily worse all the
time, and it’s grotesque. Here is an enormous religion with
gigantic power that claims that an archangel spoke to an illiterate
peasant, and brought him a final revelation that supercedes all
others.
It’s a plagiarism by an epileptic of the worst bits of Judaism and
Christianity. That’s obvious, it seems to me. [APPLAUSE] How
long do you think I’m going to be able to say that anywhere I like?
It would already be quite a risky thing to say in quite a lot of
places. I did not come to the United States of America 25 years to
learn how to keep my mouth shut. I’m going to reject all offers
that I change that policy, however simperingly they are put, okay?

[APPLAUSE]

Jeffrey Toobin:

Please join me in thanking the debaters for a terrific work.
[APPLAUSE] Now it’s time for me to announce the results. As
you recall, just to refresh your memory, before the debate was
177 for the proposition, 25 against, and 24 don’t know. Now, the
result is 201 for the proposition, 39 against, 1 doesn’t know.
[LAUGHTER] So please congratulate the “for” team for winning
the debate. [APPLAUSE] I’d like to invite everyone to return next
month for the third Intelligence Squared debate, Wednesday,
November 29th here at the Asia Society. The motion to be debated
there has nothing to do with Abe Foxman or Gallileo.
[LAUGHTER] The subject is “A democratically elected Hamas is
still a terrorist organization,” and it will be moderated by Judy
Woodruff. An edited version of tonight’s Intelligence Squared
debate can be heard locally on WNYC-AM 820, on Friday, October
27th, at 2 p.m. Check your other NPR listings for other
broadcasts outside of New York City. Please be sure to pick up a
copy of media sponsor Thursday edition the Times of London and
a Times Literary Supplement on your way out. Thank you all for
coming.

[APPLAUSE]