By Prof. Paul Eidelberg
A lot of sophomoric trite has been uttered in the media about freedom of speech in reaction to the terrorist attack at Muhammad Cartoon Contest in Garland, Texas, 3 May, 2015. Let’s be serious about a most serious subject.
Freedom of speech is of course a fundamental human value. This value seems to have its home in liberal democracy. In fact, liberal democracy exalts freedom of speech over all other values. Unfortunately, the exaltation of this freedom has led to its degradation. Today, freedom of speech lacks rational and ethical constraints. Divorced from truth, freedom of speech has become a license not only to lie but even to incite people to murder, as witness Harvard’s defense of Oxford poetaster Tom Paulin who urged that Jews living in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead”.
To redeem and elevate freedom of speech, let’s explore its pristine origin, the Bible of Israel.
Recall Abraham’s questioning the justice of G-d’s decision to destroy Sodom: “Peradventure there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt Thou indeed sweep away and not forgive the place for the fifty righteous that are therein? That be far from Thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked, that so the righteous should be as the wicked; that be far from Thee; shall not the Judge of all earth do justly?”
G-d permits Abraham to question Him. By so doing, the King of Kings affirms freedom of speech as a fundamental human right. But clearly this right, from a Judaic perspective, can only be derived from man’s creation in the image of G-d. Only because man is endowed with reason and free will does he have a right to freedom of speech. This right, however, must be understood in terms of the purpose or function of speech.
Speech is not an end-in-itself or mere exercise in self-expression. Rightly understood, speech is a manifestation of reason, the quintessential function of which is to communicate ideas and inquire into their truth or falsity, their justice or injustice. Hence, speech is an intellectual-moral phenomenon. To divorce speech from truth is to relegate this distinctively human faculty to a mere instrument of self-aggrandizement and to reject the biblical concept of man’s creation in the image of G-d. This is the current tendency of liberal democracy, a tendency that degrades man and makes a mockery of his right to freedom of speech.
It cannot be said too often – it is hardly said at all – that if freedom of speech is divorced from truth, democracy is no more justifiable than tyranny. More precisely, if there are no objective standards by which to distinguish right from wrong, or modesty from shamelessness – whether in speech or in behavior – then there are no rational grounds for preferring democracy to totalitarianism.
Notice, moreover, that the denial of objective moral standards does not logically justify the toleration of all lifestyles. Moral relativism undermines any objective grounds for preferring tolerance to intolerance, hence freedom of speech to censorship.
It has been said that the only rational defense of freedom of speech or of intellectual freedom is that it can facilitate the quest for truth, including the truth about how man should live. But no such quest can even begin unless we already know, in some general and authoritative way, what is right and wrong. Clearly, the claim to academic freedom can have no justification unless it is commonly understood that it is wrong to cheat or deceive, to plagiarize or steal, to defame or murder. This suggests that moral relativists, who very much dominate the academic world, take civilization for granted.
The true father of civilization is none other than Abraham who, by discovering the Creator of man, discovered the moral unity of human nature. The moral unity of human nature presupposes the rule of reason over self-regarding passions, of moral suasion over brute force and arbitrariness. It is in this light that we are to understand the destruction of Sodom. G-d tolerates Abraham’s questioning because Abraham’s speech is not a mere ventilation of emotion. To be sure, Abraham is the exemplar of compassion. But Abraham’s compassion is informed by truth, that is, by his knowing the difference between righteousness and wickedness. Apart from such knowledge, freedom of speech is noise or nonsense.
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To be continued
$4,800.00
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Thanks primarily to President Barack Obama, Iran is on a short path to becoming a nuclear power. Iran will then become the rulers of the Middle East. The Mullocracy in Tehran will then control the oil resources on which the economy of Europe depends. Since Europe is America’s greatest trading partner, a nuclear Iran would be in a position to undermine the survival of the United States.
The Mullocracy of Iran, formerly Persia, is animated by uncompromising religious and imperial objectives. When Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, brazenly screamed “Death to America,” and also vowed to wipe Israel off the map, he was not engaging in grandiloquent rhetoric to inflate Iranian pride. His maledictions simply expressed Islam’s 1,400-year ambition to rule the world, an ambition more realistic than that expressed in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
This being the case, the critics of Obama’s flimsy nuke agreement with Iran were quite right in comparing Obama to Chamberlain. However, if Obama is animated by the “Munich syndrome,” or if he harbors Islam’s desire to eradicate the “small Satan, Israel does not have to become a “one bomb state” or passively wait for dooms day.
Even if Obama is not a closet Jew-hater, he is clearly a hater of Western Civilization, symbolized by his return of a bust of Winston Churchill to London. Such was Churchill’s greatness as a scholar-statesman that he was made an honorary citizen of the United States by President John F. Kennedy. Churchill was far more American than the current occupant of the White House!
Perhaps Obama’s animus toward Churchill may be attributed to British imperialism. Alternatively, perhaps Obama was aware of Churchill’s’ contempt for Islam. Indeed, Churchill once said that Islam “paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.”
In contrast, Churchill greatly admired the Jews. “Some people like the Jews,” he said, “and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world.”
It thus appears that Obama, who speaks glowingly of the Qur’an, and who genuflected to Saudi King Abdullah, had all the more reason to abhor a bust of Churchill on the one hand, and to support the Islamic Palestinian Authority’s war against Israel on the other! Nor is this all.
Obama, a radical left-wing Democrat, may also be cultivating a personal vendetta vis-à-vis Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. As is well known, Netanyahu was invited by Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner to address a joint session of Congress, surely to warn the Americans of Obama’s appeasement of Iran regarding its nuclear weapons program.
There is good reason to liken Obama’s appeasement of that tyranny with Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler at Munich. Whereas Hitler was rearming Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty, Iran was acquiring more and more centrifuges for launching nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles in violation of an international treaty to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology.
After more than a decade of failed diplomacy exploited by Iran, there was no solid reason to believe that the U.S. could succeed in curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambition. Indeed, Iran’s obtaining nuclear weapons is consistent with Teheran’s malediction of “death to America” and its vow to wipe Israel off the map.
Since Iran is also the epicenter of international terrorism, it’s only a matter of prudence to regard Iran as the spearhead of Islam, whose world-historical mission is to eradicate Christianity and Judaism. Therefore, it should be the objective of Israel to heed the advice of John Bolton, America’s sagacious former ambassador to United Nations.
Ponder this. Just before the presidency of George Bush Jr. came to an end, hence just before Obama’s first presidential inauguration, Bolton, who was experienced in arms control, wisely advised Israel to attack Iran, hopefully with help from the United States! However, Bolton understood that with Obama in the White House, no such attack would take place, and that Iran would have a free pass to becoming a nuclear power.
Indeed, it was to prevent this eventuality that House Speaker Boehner invited Prime Minster Netanyahu to address Congress. Boehner surely knew that at stake with an Obama Presidency was nothing less than the survival of Western civilization. This is probably what prompted him to take the unprecedented step of inviting a foreign statesman to address the U.S. Congress: he wanted Netanyahu to hamstring the President of the United States!
Therefore, given this assessment of the concerns and motives set forth in the previous paragraph, I venture to say that to save Western civilization from the scourge of Islam, Israel will have to destroy, in one way or another, Iran’s command and control centers along with its ballistic missile facilities – a daunting but utterly necessary task.
By Paul Eidelberg
Is there any intelligent patriot in the United States unaware that the most important cause of America’s decline in foreign affairs is the same cause of the mayhem erupting in its domestic affairs?
Is there any intelligent person in America unaware that Barack Obama, who genuflected to Saudi King Abdulla, and who did not join other nations in Paris to protest against Islamic terrorism, is not qualified to deal with the Islamism or with domestic mayhem, that he woefully lacking in political wisdom as well as in spiritual integrity?
Is there any intelligent person in this country unaware that what facilitated the election of this “post-American” President is precisely that which will prevent his impeachment?
How long will Americans tolerate a President who brazenly scorns their foundational documents, hence its Judeo-Christian way of life, while undermining America’s economic ability to preserve our freedom against a remorseless foe?
IF this is the quality of the politicians that we elect then we deserve what we get; and it will not be a free society like what we had but one with very tight control over every aspect of our lives..
The millennials substitute one prejudice for another and the one they so dislike has stood in good stead for a long time and maybe it only needed some tweaks.
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Most of the realy smart women that I know would never vote for Hillary!
This could very well be a victory for the Republicans never seen since Reagan if she actually tries to run and doesn’t drop out..
By Jonathan Chait
The qualities of an effective presidency do not seem to transfer onto a post-presidency. Jimmy Carter was an ineffective president who became an exemplary post-president. Bill Clinton appears to be the reverse.All sorts of unproven worst-case-scenario questions float around the web of connections between Bill’s private work, Hillary Clinton’s public role as secretary of State, the Clintons’ quasi-public charity, and Hillary’s noncompliant email system. But the best-case scenario is bad enough: The Clintons have been disorganized and greedy.
The news today about the Clintons all fleshes out, in one way or another, their lack of interest in policing serious conflict-of-interest problems that arise in their overlapping roles:
The Clinton campaign is batting down the darkest and most conspiratorial interpretation of these stories, and where this all leads remains to be seen. But the most positive interpretation is not exactly good.
When you are a power couple consisting of a former president and a current secretary of State and likely presidential candidate, you have the ability to raise a lot of money for charitable purposes that can do a lot of good. But some of the potential sources of donations will be looking to get something in return for their money other than moral satisfaction or the chance to hobnob with celebrities. Some of them want preferential treatment from the State Department, and others want access to a potential future Clinton administration. To run a private operation where Bill Clinton will deliver a speech for a (huge) fee and a charity that raises money from some of the same clients is a difficult situation to navigate. To overlay that fraught situation onto Hillary’s ongoing and likely future government service makes it all much harder.
And yet the Clintons paid little to no attention to this problem.As Nicholas Confesso rereported two years ago, “a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.” Indeed, as Ryan Lizza reported in 2012, Bill Clinton seemed to see the nexus between his role and his wife’s as a positive rather than a negative:
Regardless of Bill Clinton’s personal feelings about Obama, it didn’t take him long to see the advantages of an Obama Presidency. More than anyone, he pushed Hillary to take the job of Secretary of State. “President Clinton was a big supporter of the idea,” an intimate of the Clintons told me. “He advocated very strongly for it and arguably was the tie-breaking reason she took the job.” For one thing, having his spouse in that position didn’t hurt his work at the Clinton Global Initiative. He invites foreign leaders to the initiative’s annual meeting, and her prominence in the Administration can be an asset in attracting foreign donors. “Bill Clinton’s been able to continue to be the Bill Clinton we know, in large part because of his relationship with the White House and because his wife is the Secretary of State,” the Clinton associate continued. “It worked out very well for him. That may be a very cynical way to look at it, but that’s a fact. A lot of the stuff he’s doing internationally is aided by his level of access.”
The Obama administration wanted Hillary Clinton to use official government email. She didn’t. The Obama administration also demanded that the Clinton Foundation disclose all its donors while she served as Secretary of State. It didn’t comply with that request, either.
The Clintons’ charitable initiatives were a kind of quasi-government run by themselves, which was staffed by their own loyalists and made up the rules as it went along. Their experience running the actual government, with its formal accountability and disclosure, went reasonably well. Their experience running their own privatized mini-state has been a fiasco.
I have created this site to help people have fun in the kitchen. I write about enjoying life both in and out of my kitchen. Life is short! Make the most of it and enjoy!
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