A group of 19 international organisations today called for the release of Zaitani, Gharir, and Darwish, and for the charges against all five to be dropped. If convicted, they face up to 15 years in prison. According to a statement released today, Syria’s Justice Minister earlier this month promised the release of SCM’s three jailed members — in addition to 69 other jailed activists.

SCM member Maha Assabalani, who was avoided being imprisoned during the raid, wrote about her colleagues for Index last year. She said that her colleagues are in prison for fighting for freedom of expression — and that they “risked their life fighting for real change.”  She also said that Darwish regularly told the organisation’s staff that “there are not enough prisons for the free word.”

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In August [2007], the 58-year-old actor and writer Chris Langham was found guilty of downloading 15 videos and pictures of child pornography (graphic and violent enough to fit the characterisation of all child pornography as child abuse). Two weeks earlier, five young British-Asian men — one was a school-leaver from London, four were students at Bradford University — were sentenced to various prison terms. They had been found guilty of possessing material for terrorist purposes (mostly downloaded from websites) that glorified Islamic terrorism, martyrdom and holy war.

Besides being suitable candidates for moral panics, these two cases have little in common. But they raised similar public issues: about the causal role and power of the mass media and especially the internet; demands for stronger regulation and control, especially through the criminal law; and, of course, serious questions about the limits of liberal tolerance and freedom of expression. Other common problems include finding viable definitions — of “pornography” (and grading its seriousness on a five-point scale, like classes of dangerous drugs) or “incitement” — and the technical obstacles to monitoring and controlling the sources of internet material.

Behind these familiar debates, there lie vital background assumptions — seldom made explicit – about the links between thinking and doing. In the holistic view, there is no clear difference between image and action. The production of a pornographic video (with its standard depiction of women as sexual objects) and the use of these images (whether in fantasy, “ordinary” sexuality or sexual abuse and rape) are part of the same social reality. We don’t find one without the other or else the one leads inexorably to the other. There is a symbiosis between the producer, source and nature of the message (whether pornography or religious fanaticism) — and the receiver, consumer or “offender”. A seamless web of values, roles and relationships binds production and consumption. In the case of porn, the image/action connection goes further: the very thing itself is made up of the reproduction of images. No representation, no pornography.

The separatist view, on the other hand, draws a clear distinction between the thought (or image) and the deed. Thus Langham had watched and downloaded images of child pornography, but he had not actively created or distributed these, nor was he guilty of sexually assaulting a child. The Bradford jihadists watched, read, discussed and agreed with poisonous incitements to mass killing; but they had not committed any acts of violence. (The 17-year-old schoolboy did get as far as leaving his parents a note that he was off to fight as a soldier of Islam and would see them next in the garden of paradise).

These opposing views run through the debate about both modes of legal control — first, to prohibit, censor or regulate supply and/or second, to criminalise demand (notably, by making possession illegal). The philosopher Mary Warnock used the Langham case to reassert the traditional liberal separatism between thought and action (Observer, 5 August 2007). Watching pornographic internet pictures of child abuse, she argues, does not necessarily entail that one is a paedophile.

Terrified as they are of paedophilia, most people do assume — as they would not for adult porn — that viewers who enjoy watching those images, will practise what is depicted. She concludes:

. . . though we feel the strongest moral repugnance both towards those who make and those who watch the images we should not use the force of law against a man’s thoughts but only against his actions.

In moral and legal terms, this is a tenable application of the traditional liberal position. But as a theory it looks a little threadbare compared with sophisticated feminist versions of holism. And it can hardly be used for an activist social policy to combat the depredations of the free market.

The whole project of protecting the individual right to self-expression must look quite anachronistic in the internet world. The sheer amount of people, money, technology and global networks that are needed to create an interface of millions of messages exchanged each minute can hardly be grasped, let alone controlled by the liberal model of civil liberties. We can almost literally “see” the rights of a government critic in Zimbabwe being violated as a radio broadcast is jammed. But where exactly in cyberspace are the free expressions of an underground website?

Some imagination is also needed about matters of motive and intent. The creators and distributors of the jihadi message obviously intended to attract, convert and recruit just the type of people they targeted — and get them primed to act (or actually plan to act) in just the ways they wanted. Producers of child pornography do not necessarily intend their viewers to be or become child abusers. They only want the audience to be stimulated enough to purchase more and more porn. They are too amoral to care about other possible outcomes and they can operate without restrictions, making profits in a largely unregulated market. In the legal sense this is a strict liability offence — neither motives nor consequences matter. There can be no defence, that is, in terms of good intentions, nor does the prosecution have to prove actual harm or increased risk.

The same logic is applied to the consumer. The jury in the Chris Langham trial rejected his motivational stories (doing research; reliving his own victimisation). They agreed with the prosecuting barrister Richard Barraclough QC:

The statement he made to the police was nothing but hypocrisy and cant. Each of his statements is a lie. He downloaded these images. They didn’t happen automatically; he chose them. That makes him guilty in law. It doesn’t matter why he did it.

It may not matter in court. But motives surely do matter in considering the likely effects of legal controls. Compare the response of ideological (convictional) offenders who proudly justify their action and reject the legitimacy of the law with those offenders who tell “sad tales”, offer excuses, feel stigmatised and profess to be ashamed of their action.

Furthermore, because the law is such a blunt instrument of social control, it cannot register the wider social effects of mass, anonymous and cheap access to the internet. Such effects — whether in the case of pornography or ideological violence — do not occur directly and immediately. Increases in rates of sexual violence, for example, cannot be proved to be caused by internet porn consumption. But only the most unimaginative separatist view, the most literal legalism or the most orthodox libertarianism can ignore the more general sexualisation of our culture. In a sense, it is too late for any empirical study of the “effects” of any medium, such as internet porn. There is no “before” from which to study an “after”. The full “pornification” thesis (Pamela Paul’s vision of the porno-sphere moving into the public sphere) is muddled and exaggerated, but there can be little doubt that as images become more accessible, affordable and anonymous, they also become more acceptable.

But how do these images influence the action of any particular individual?

Imagine the causal steps that lead to the breaking of moral and legal rules as something like religious conversion. For some converts, the new spiritual conviction seems to come from within; the role of other people (friends, counsellors, missionaries) and cultural texts (the Bible, the Koran, conversion videos) is only to confirm the initial commitment. Yet other people have not yet reached this stage; they are still standing at the “invitational edge”. For them, new friends, a prayer meeting in the local mosque, the mass rally attended out of curiosity, the website entered just about by chance, the university discussion group — any of these might tip you over the edge. There are yet other people who have the “right” backgrounds and opportunities — but have not shown even the beginnings of commitment. They indeed have to be converted or turned on by those “external” messages or sources.

In the Bradford jihadists’ case, the judge explicitly tried to remove the offences from the discourse about freedom of speech. The defendants were being punished for “being prepared” to train in Pakistan to fight British soldiers in Afghanistan.

Five men who were jailed in 2007 for being found in possession of jihadist literature. Their conviction was quashed in 2008.

Why had they broken the law?

Because in my judgment you were intoxicated by the extremist nature of the material that each of you collected, shared and discussed . . . So carried away by the material were you that each of you crossed the line. That is exactly what the people who peddle this material want to achieve and exactly what you did.

The judge was right to evoke the metaphor of crossing the line. The language and procedures of the law require this clarity. Just a step away from the legal model, however, the metaphor becomes difficult to sustain. In particular, there is little consensus about why certain lines should be drawn in criminal terms.

Is the justification primarily deterrence (preventing worse future dangers to society), justice (people should have to pay a price for this), or revulsion about the material itself?

For legal purposes, the standard liberal line between words and deeds might still be drawn. But this does not require tired and overused cliches about “thought control”. The post-modern surveillance state may indeed be invading the boundaries of privacy, but it does not concern itself too much with people’s thoughts about morality and sexuality. These thoughts are “controlled” more by global market forces, operating not in the secret underworld of internet porn, but right in the open on prime-time TV. Talk shows, reality TV, teenage drama: these are the sites where moral lines about sexuality are being redrawn.

As for ideological violence, no one can pretend that the debate is about the integrity of a private sphere (where you live as you please) and a public sphere (where you can express what you like as long as it does not libel anyone or incite hatred). The continuing legacy of last century’s ideological violence — state crimes such as genocide, torture and mass killing; massive ethnic and religious slaughter; terrorism and suicide bombing — does not easily fit the emblematic vision of earnest citizens calmly discussing the abstract right to condone the use of violence.

Debates about internet pornography and violence are landmines in the current struggle for the survival of liberalism itself.

Stan Cohen, who died on 7 January 2013, was Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the London School of Economics, and a contributor to Index on Censorship magazine

This article appeared in Index on Censorship magazine, volume 36, number 4 (2007)

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Writers in the West rarely have to confront violence, certainly not from the state. Writers with a social conscience understand that they have something important in common with writers, whom they may never know, in far away lands. We are united in a fundamental belief: that freedom of expression is irrevocable and fundamental to a free society. We see this grand tradition of literary solidarity in organizations like PEN International, advocates for writers in authoritarian regimes whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by the mere exercise of activities which we in the West take for granted. And you see it in this fine publication, Index on Censorship, which for four decades has been exhaustively documenting challenges to free expression around the world.

That’s why the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was such a clarifying moment; here was a man who had published a book in the birthplace of free speech — the United Kingdom — whose murder had been suborned by a fanatical cleric halfway around the world. As Christopher Hitchens wrote about the death warrant put out for his friend, “I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari’a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.”

Over the past decade, that civil war has intensified on the streets of Western cities; Amsterdam, (where the artist Theo van Gogh was murdered in broad daylight for a film which criticized misogynistic Koran verses), Nyhamnsläge, (the Swedish village where the home of cartoonist Lars Vilks, who drew images of Mohammed, has been repeatedly attacked), Aarhus (the Danish town where fellow prophet-image-maker Kurt Westergaard had to hide in a “panic room” after an axe-wielding Muslim broke into his home). It has thus been heartening to see this fundamental understanding among writers — that, no matter our political disagreements, we are all colleagues in a vitally important element of the free society — flower in response to a truly vile little excrescence by Bruce Crumley, the Paris correspondent for TIME magazine.

On Tuesday morning, the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were firebombed after it named the Prophet Muhammed its “editor-in-chief” for an upcoming issue. In an article entitled, “Firebombed French Paper Is No Free Speech Martyr,” Crumley taunted the paper’s editors. “Do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of ‘because we can’ was so worthwhile?” he asked. Crumley, who would make an excellent propaganda commissar in Uzbekistan or Iran, chided French politicians for “denouncing the arson as an attack on freedom of speech, liberty of expression, and other rights central to French and other Western societies,” which is exactly what it was.

The original title of Crumley’s piece, still viewable in the website URL, was “Firebombed French Paper: A Victim of Islam, Or Its Own Obnoxious Islamaphobia?” If a reader, so offended by Crumley’s excuse-making for theocratic nutcases, bombs TIME’s Paris Bureau, would that make Crumley a “victim” of his own obnoxious cowardice? If there was ever cause to deport someone from the Republic of Letters it would be Crumley’s article, for in it he committed treason against his trade by showing himself to be a man eager to rat out his fellow writers and sell them down the river in a heartbeat.

Though he fashions himself a bold truth-teller, Crumley’s justification of violent extremism isn’t new. It’s just the latest iteration of a tired excuse for terrorism, expressed by everyone from Noam Chomsky to Ron Paul, which is that the victims of terrorism have it coming. What made Crumley’s entry into the genre singularly poisonous, and what I believe elicited the widespread disgust from journalists of all political stripes, is that it was written by a working journalist, not an academic, politician, or anti-“Islamophobia” activist.

To take just two examples of people on polar opposite sides of the political spectrum: Michael Brendan Dougherty, a paleoconservative with whom I’ve sparred on more than one occasion, termed the piece “The Most offensive Thing You’ll Read Today” (my one quibble with his judgment is that this is the most offensive thing you will read all week, if not all month). Meanwhile, Spencer Ackerman, a man of the left, tweeted, “No one has the right not to be offended. No one has the right to firebomb a newspaper that offends them.”

It’s amazing, given all the struggles and sacrifices that have been made for freedom of speech over many years, that statements so simple bear repeating. But as long as we have moral cowards like Bruce Crumley around, repeat them we must.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Also read: Sara Yasin and Myriam Francois-Cerrah on France, Charlie Hebdo and the meaning of Mohammed

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Rizwaan Sabir

Three years later, the Nottingham University “terrorism” row rumbles on —- first reading was made a crime, now internal criticism. Jane Fae reports

In an effort to protect its reputation, Nottingham University is engaged in a witch hunt against any academic who questions its commitment to free speech. The ultimate irony? Or, as claimed in a devastating attack on the University by one of its own, Dr Rod Thornton, evidence of “something really rather dark” at the heart of British academia.

The story begins back in 2008, when two men — Rizwaan Sabir and Hicham Yezza, respectively an MA student and a member of staff at Nottingham University — were arrested and detained for six days under the Terrorism Act 2000. Their crime? As part of his research for his MA on militant Islam, Sabir had asked his friend, Hicham Yezza, to download and print three documents.

Unfortunately for both men, these documents, including the inflammatory-sounding “Al Qaeda Training Manual”, were later described by various players in the affair as “entirely inappropriate”, “unlawful” or “illegitimate”. Yet Thornton claims that the Al-Qaeda manual which led to the arrests is now stocked in the university’s library.

The incident itself is a textbook case of establishment paranoia. One of Yezza’s co-workers stumbled across the documents on his computer: they informed university security who in turn, either acting alone or in tandem with the university’s Registrar, brought in the police. The two men spent a unpleasant week being interviewed by police officers, who clearly suspected that they might have stumbled across a nascent terror cell.

Their suspicions, according to Dr Thornton, a lecturer in International Security and Terrorism with the university’s School of Politics and International Relations were bolstered by comments from members of the University, who considered possession of the documents in question to be questionable. In the end, the whole affair fizzled out. The suspects were released and moved on. There were student demonstrations and representations by local MP, Alan Simpson. There was predictable harassment, as Hicham’s visa ran out and he was declared an illegal immigrant.

Conservative US think-tank the Heritage Foundation picked up on the incident and added it to its tally of terror plots in the UK: the Home Office, allegedly, then quoted the Heritage Foundation report when asked about the extent of terrorist activities in the UK.

Not one of the establishment players — police, university, civil servants — emerge from this tale covered in glory: quite the reverse. Yet as stories go, it is neither unprecedented, nor especially unpredictable. As Dr Thornton comments: once a finger is pointed and the accusation of terrorism laid, a certain inevitable form of “groupthink” sets in.

The real problem lies in what came after, documented in exquisite detail in Dr Thornton’s paper and published, a week ago, on the website of the British International Studies Association. The paper is long and exceedingly detailed and, unusually, for an academic paper, written in the first person. Nonetheless, it is Dr Thornton’s case that such detail is necessary for the wider world to understand fully the culpability of the university in events both in 2008 and since.

There are two strands to his argument. First, that the university failed to support academic freedom, jumping to conclusions, not carrying out a risk assessment, and not testing allegations before handing them over to the police.

In a sense, though, that is history: far more serious is his claim that in the years since then, the university has increasingly clamped down on any and everyone who has failed to collude in its version of events. He himself, he claims, has been subject to formal reprimand by the university for questioning the university’s official view of events and for “harassment” of some of the principals involved: and latterly, for disciplinary matters such as failing to “add [his] office hours to the front page” of his reports.

His paper is unusual in another respect: it names names. Dr Thornton acknowledges that this may be viewed as unethical — but given the gravity of the allegations being made, he believes it is valid.

What is clear is that here we have a clash of cultures. Dr Thornton sees himself as a “whistleblower”, frustrated by the defensiveness of Nottingham University authorities and the fact that nowhere in the British body politic does any formal oversight function exist. The university — which refused to comment directly — is either guilty as charged, or seriously wronged by his allegations.

The story continues to unravel. Dr Thornton’s paper, originally published by the BISA has now been withdrawn. In a statement the organisation said it had “removed Dr Thornton’s paper from our website on legal advice following a number of complaints from academics at the University of Nottingham.” Dr Thornton himself was suspended last week on the grounds that his article was “highly defamatory of a number of his colleagues”.

We are nowhere near a resolution of this matter. At the end of the day, this episode goes to the heart of questions about the nature of academic freedom. Is the University really holding the ring and maintaining balance between opposing views? Or is it riding roughshod over all but its own preferred version of events, using any and every weapon in its armoury to reinforce its position? Only time will tell.

Jane Fae is a writer on issues of political and sexual liberty. Formerly known as John Ozimek, she has recently written Beyond the Circle, a book which takes a radical new view of discrimination on the grounds of sexuality

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With prayer beads wrapped tightly around his right hand, Abdul-Elah Haidar Shaye paced slowly around the white cell, smiling and shaking his head in disbelief as the judge listed the charges, stopping occasionally to pose for photographers seated on the other side of the steel mesh wall that separated him from the court.

Shaye, a Yemeni journalist, accused by the state of being the “media man” for Al-Qaeda in Yemen, attended the first hearing of his case, on Tuesday, since his arrest more than 65 days ago. Friend and co-defendant Abdul Kareem Al Sham, was accused of assisting Shaye by passing e- mails between the journalist and Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular (AQAP) members.

The 34-year-old, was taken, by force and without charge, from his home on 16 August, by Yemen’s Political Security Organization (PSO) and held for 34 days without access to a lawyer or his family. After his previous appearance in court, on 22 September, Shaye was transferred to a state security prison. His lawyer, Abderrahman Barman, claims Shaye was kept in solitary confinement, tortured and beaten during his detention.

Amongst the evidence from the prosecution Shaye was accused of working as a media advisor for Yemeni-American radical preacher Anwar Al-Awlaki — labelled as mentor to the failed Detroit bomber in December 2009 — and of holding meetings with senior leaders of AQAP, urging them to strike Yemeni and foreign interests.

Prosecutors said photographs of Yemen security bases and foreign embassies, found on his laptop, were being passed to Al-Qaeda as potential targets. In a detailed statement read out to the court prosecutors said Shaye was recruiting new members on behalf of the terrorist organisation.

Shaye, who specialised as a terrorism and Al-Qaeda expert, conducted an exclusive interview with Anwar al-Awlaki for Al-Jazeera in 2009.

He chose not to be represented by a lawyer on the grounds that the trial was illegal, and refused to recognise the legitimacy of proceedings in the Special Criminal Court for Security Affairs. In reply to the charges and prosecution evidence, which took nearly two hours to present, Shaye was given just a few minutes to respond.

“I disappeared for 35 days. Then I was kept in prison for another 30 days, on your orders, judge,” shouted Shaye through the bars of his cell. “Now the 30 days are over, I request immediate release and demand you order the arrest of the intelligence officers who kidnapped me.”

Locked in a tiled room, adjacent to the court, visible through a white metal grill, Shaye spoke confidently, appearing healthy and in good spirits.

Shaye’s case closely reflects that of Mohamed al-Maqaleh, editor of the Yemeni Socialist Party news website Aleshteraki. Taken by the PSO in September 2009, the government denied holding al-Maqaleh for the first five months of his detention. After two court hearings, including one in the newly created press court, his case was dissolved.

In May 2009 the government created a special journalists court for “press offences”. New legislation is currently being drafted to tighten the existing Press and Publications Law against defaming the state and the president. Proposed amendments to the penal code will increase prison sentences for offenders. A new bill, to regulate television, radio, and online media is also being drafted.  Details of the proposed changes remain unclear.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which last week released the 2010 Press Freedom Index ranking Yemen 170 out of 178 countries, responded to Shaye’s trial by calling on the Yemeni authorities to “immediately release the journalist’’ and “abolish the special courts.”

RSF is not optimistic about the future for press freedom in Yemen. “Since September 2009 we have been really concerned regarding press freedom and the life of journalists (in Yemen),” said RSF’s Soazig Dollet, head of the North Africa & Middle-East desk, in a phone call. “Even without the new legislation I don’t think the situation will improve.”

Three US journalists have been deported this year, most recently Ellen Knickmeyer, two weeks after writing an October article, critical of Yemen’s president, for Foreign Policy magazine. More than 56 international media organisations have been denied entry into Yemen in the last three months, according to a Hakim Almasmari, publisher and editor-in-chief of the Yemen Post. This figure has not been confirmed by Yemeni authorities. This is “a strategy by the government to limit what people should know about Yemen, to what the government wants them to know,” said Almasmari in an editorial on October 4.

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, has been in power for 32 years, initially as leader of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and then as president of the Republic of Yemen, following unification with the south in 1992. Elections, postponed since April 2009, are due to take place in May 2011.

Shaye’s next court appearance is set for 2 November.

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