Way back when, when I was an undergraduate, I took courses in first amendment law from one of the most famous theorists of the first amendment around, a former president of the ACLU. He was a first amendment absolutist, a man whose mantra was "punish the act, not the speech."
His example of that principle was the snuff film, the hardest of hard core porn, perhaps mythic films that supposedly circulated on the black market, which ended with the woman's on-film murder. His argument for why these movies should not be banned, even though they involved on-screen murders, was because the film makers and distributers had in fact been involved in a murder, or in a conspiracy surrounding a murder, and therefore could be prosecuted for the murder -- which meant there was no additional need to ban the speech, the film itself.
I was reminded of that when reading the Post's coverage of new legislation in Denmark, as the Danes, like other Europeans, discover that there are limits to "tolerance," and those limits involve those who preach the destruction of that system which makes tolerance possible, which holds it as a value to begin with.
The Danes are (finally) going after a (now) Danish citizen who advocates the killing of American soldiers in Iraq:
So, he explained in an interview last week, he had no qualms about downloading and burning CDs of Internet videos depicting beheadings in Iraq and speeches by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the terrorist mastermind behind much of the Iraqi insurgency.
They're about to get him under the new law, but look at the Post's language:
The law contains curbs on free speech that are remarkable in a country famous for tolerating all points of view. It illustrates how democracies across Europe are adopting tougher measures in an era of rising extremist violence, despite protests that civil liberties are being sacrificed in the process. (My emph.)
Why are we bound to consider either the argument that our soldiers should be killed, or the distribution of CDs showing innocent civilians being beheaded, as just another point of view in the political marketplace any more than the Danes are? This guy doesn't have a point of view, not in the normal political sense, because he isn't advocating a political program, he's advocating violence. And what he's distributing isn't political material, some kind of manifesto that the state finds repellant, and therefore should protect as political speech. He's distributing terrorist propaganda, and some of it isn't even textual -- it's terror porn.
Why should the state protect or even tolerate the private distribution of that material?
Yes, yes, it's certainly all over the Internet, but when someone lovingly burns CDs of their all time favorites, the fact that you can find that material on the Internet is irrelevant -- he has indicated his intent, and he has, through the selection and editing process, eliminated any filters that come with picking and choosing your way to that material on your own.
The Post says this reflects a Europe-wide shift in attitudes:
"The mood has shifted in Europe more toward security than it was before the London bombings," said Daniel Keohane, senior research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London. "The Europeans have always been very nervous about infringing on civil liberties. But when you experience terrorism, it changes your views."
But nothing says that the place they had the line between security and liberties before was the perfect place to draw the line, of course. It was simply the place where the line had come to rest, and there were plenty of people complaining that they were far too lax for far too long.
That isn't keeping people, of course, from complaining, as they do every time the line is moved.
"What may be seen as a glorification of terrorism by one person might be seen as an explanation of the causes of terrorism by another person," said Azzam Tamimi, a senior leader of the Muslim Association of Britain.
I don't know that Tamimi is the best person to be judging where the line should be, and it's interesting that the Post fails to mention his support for terrorist groups even though other major papers have made a point of mentioning them. It does seem information relevant to evaluating his comments on the matter.
It would, and should, be impossible to ban possession of terrorist propaganda. It can be in the singular form political speech and it is available on the Internet. But reasonable people can understand the difference between possession and what we might consider possession with intent to distribute. There is such a thing as terror porn and there is such a thing as speech intended to glorify the destruction of the very system of values that makes that speech possible.
I don't know that the Danes, or any other Europeans, have redrawn the lines in precisely the correct place. But I do know that the effort to redraw the lines, in and of itself, is not by definition a flawed impulse.
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