Summary: It’s been just three days since the Islamist massacre of staffers at French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. While much of the civilized world has reacted with outrage, apologists for the murders have begun to emerge. Some of them are predictable Islamist screamers. But more disturbingly, many are illiberal Western pundits and politicians, members of what Salman Rushdie calls the “But Brigade,” whose commitment to the core, Gladstonian liberal Western value of free expression is so riddled with caveats, conditions, and exceptions as to be practically nonexistent. As much as we in the West need to take a firm stand against Islamist extremism, we also need to take a firm stand against cowards and fifth columnists in our own camp who seem more afraid of being thought impolite or of “offending” Muslims than of being held in justified contempt for jettisoning Western values. Je suis toujours Charlie.
Certain Western liberal values ought to be nonnegotiable. Chief among them is freedom of expression. Right up there with freedom of expression is the right to be free from overbearing, statist intrusion into our private lives.
Sadly, there are an awful lot of people who simply aren’t willing to stand up to put forward a full throated defense of such basic, core Western liberal values. Some are thin-skinned Islamists, and their predictable pro-terrorist reactions can be discarded at once. However, some of those who cannot or will not stand up for free expression call themselves “progressive.” Certainly these so-called progressives do not share a lot of political belief structure with those who call themselves conservative. But while I would never call such tiresome pundits as Vox.com’s Ezra Klein conservative, I do find the so-called “non-ideological wonk” to be tiresomely illiberal, and equally tiresomely lacking in even the slightest courage of Western conviction.
Speaking last night on Real Time with Bill Maher, author and onetgime Khomeini fatwa target Salman Rushdie fearlessly delivered a full throated defense of free expression. Flinging the gauntlet at the feet of thin-skinned Islamists for whom the slightest offense to their amour propre is an open invitation to murder, Rushdie suggested that what the West can do is “not give a fucking inch" on free expression.
Moreover, Rushdie also indicted, in civil yet scathing terms, what he called the “But Brigade,” of Western apologists for whom freedom of expression is fine, as long as it doesn’t offend the so-called Islamic Ummah. “Free speech is fine, but....” “Freedom of expression is fine, but....” “Political cartoons are fine, but....” In gentle, measured tones, Salman Rushdie poured down a whole universe of contempt upon illiberal, finger wagging Westerners whose willingness to blame the murdered staffers at Charlie Hebdo, and to suggest that they were responsible for the terrorist outrage by which they were cut off, has more or less permanently put such once esteemed organizations as the New York Times on my more or less permanent shit list. Numerous American media outlets, including CNN, AP, and the Gray Lady, caved to fear of Islamist objections and declined to reproduce the cartoons which the terrorists had found so objectionable. The Washington Post, at least, had the balls to publish.
Thus, when I read in Vox.com a post from Matthew Yglesias denouncing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as “scabrous,” and “offensive,” works that should not have been published, I knew that I was dealing with a card-carrying, self-loathing, weak-kneed outlet of the But Brigade. I knew that I was dealing with people who do not, and will never, have the first shred of courage of basic Western conviction.
Now I know that bien pensant, politically correct, yet profoundly illiberal so-called progressives will want to read me out with bell, book, and candle. For, sadly, there are simply too many illiberal cowards on the progressive side of the aisle, for whom apologizing for the West has become second nature. These are the kind of people who, in 1982, were busy castigating Her Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom for having the effrontery to resist by force Argentina’s unlawful takeover of the Falklands.
We now know that Buenos Aries’s ultimately foolish decision to try to possess itself of the islands it called the Malvinas was based on a calculation that the mettle of the West was played out, and that Whitehall and HMG would be satisfied with a limp protest in the UN and few tame, short-term economic sanctions. When the Royal Navy and the British Army administered condign punishment to the Argentine junta, it sent shudders through Moscow and Beijing, for it had the effect of signaling to a jaded world that the long, bloody-nosed retreat of the West could no longer be taken for granted.
When Seal Team Six blew Osama bin Laden to hell in his hidey hole in Abbottabad, it was a victory for the West every bit as consequential as Britain’s Falklands victory three decades before. Yet, in both the Falklands and in Abbottabad, there were the usual legions of apologists, eager to suggest that London and Washington had “gone too far,” that two of the most consequential Western powers had somehow lost the right to defend themselves and the larger West of which both United Kingdom and United States are part.
We see the same kind of handwringing and pearl clutching over the Charlie Hebdo outrages. When the But Brigade starts emerging from its sewers to wag fingers at the dead and to find reasons to give excuses to the Islamist terrorists who committed this outrageous deed, we know that there is something still very wrong in the West. When will we in the West have the courage not only to say to the terrorists “not one fucking inch,” but also when will we in the West reclaim the courage of our own conviction that freedom of expression is a nonnegotiable Western liberal value?
At our best, we of the West are not only Burkean conservatives, but we are also Gladstonian liberals. Like the great Prime Minister William Gladstone, we of the West must dare to insist that our ways are good, that our values are noble and honorable, and that when enemies of such critical liberal values as free expression raise their hands to strike us and our values down, we will fight. Instead of crapping ourselves and insulting the memory of the victims of January 7, we should take new inspiration from an old Ulster Unionist slogan: the West will fight and the West will be right.
Not a fucking inch, not a fucking inch to the terrorists, and not a fucking inch to the cowards among us who are unprepared or unwilling to stand up for Western liberal values.
Not one fucking inch.
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