Quotes of the Day

Ideas can hurt. The messy storm of upset, anger, protests and murderous violence unleashed over the past two weeks by Danish newspaper cartoons that Muslims find blasphemous has proved that once again. But in Europe, whatever one may think about the intelligence or taste of portraying Muhammad with a bomb on his head, people have found a reassuring port in the storm: their belief in the political miracle of free speech. In Western democracies, the right to express an idea, no matter how offensive, always trumps the impulse of the offended to censor. No government should be able to jail a cartoonist or newspaper editor for what they publish, or block the distribution of provocative material in advance. That's what Europeans believe, and their laws allow. Right?

Well, actually, no. In general, European law favors the right to say and publish unpopular, even hateful things. But not in every case or every country. In Germany, you can go to prison for up to three years for mass-producing Hitler's picture or displaying a single likeness in a way that glorifies him, or for denying the Holocaust. In France last year, the Roman Catholic Church got a judge to ban an advertisement modeled on Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper that depicted everyone but Judas as a woman; he ruled it was a "gratuitous and aggressive intrusion on people's innermost beliefs." France also denies students the right to show their religion, meaning Muslim schoolgirls can't wear head coverings — an act, you might say, of symbolic speech. This week, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will try once again to get Parliament to ban "direct or indirect encouragement of terrorism," including its "glorification." That's a notion his critics believe could snare not only those who groom teenage suicide bombers, but also a sincere, peaceful advocate of revolution in, say, Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Kim Jong Il's North Korea. Even in liberal Denmark, at the center of the row over the cartoons of the Prophet, you can do jail time for publicly "ridiculing or insulting" any recognized community's religious beliefs.

That's the problem with free speech: the principle is fine, the application is very tricky, and never more so than in the age of cultural rage. Statutes writ in black and white transmute to a fog of grays upon contact with the passions of competing groups and the difficulties of balancing individual conscience against social cohesion. Some limits, such as libel laws, are considered legitimate to protect individuals, while other restrictions, such as those that regulate obscenity, supposedly protect social standards. Even in the ultra-tolerant U.S., with its fiercely guarded tradition of First Amendment rights, the law restricts many forms of utterance: among other things, child pornography, language that incites criminal conduct and, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously stated, "falsely shouting fire in a theater." Yet few things have ever challenged accepted notions of free expression so much as the current controversy over religious tolerance and hate speech.

Britain last week was a good example of how democracies are struggling to find a proper balance between free speech and social order — an acknowledged hard problem in Western jurisprudence since Socrates was given hemlock to relieve Athens of his irritating views. The cartoon flap suggested that at least some British Muslim citizens would like to upend the whole system. Yet there was widespread support, including among Muslims, for the conviction of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a hook-armed cleric who turned his mosque in Finsbury Park, London, into a recruiting station for al-Qaeda. He was sentenced to seven years in jail for inciting murder and racial hatred, based on hours of videotaped sermons in which he advocated the killing of nonbelievers — "for any reason, you can say it is O.K., even if there is no reason for it" — and Jews. But a week earlier, two members of the far-right British National Party, on trial for slamming Islam as "vicious" and "wicked" to whip up racial hatred, were acquitted. And police made no arrests at an anticartoon demonstration by militant Islamists, despite slogans that called for the extermination of those who mock Islam.

Such inconsistencies — which, to many, smack of double standards — are not confined to Britain. Despite the gravitational pull toward uniformity provided by the binding opinions of the European Court of Human Rights, a diverse Continent does not lend itself to a common approach. "It's like trying to nail down a jellyfish," says Vincenzo Zeno-Zencovich, a professor of comparative law at Roma Tre University. "Each country has its own taboos. What applies to Great Britain does not apply to Greece."

The old law-school adage holds that hard cases make bad law, and when a country finds certain words upsetting enough to ban them, all the cases are hard. In December, breaking a postwar statute still on the books, Italian soccer player Paolo Di Canio gave his fans at Lazio a fascist salute. He was disqualified for a game and fined €10,000 — but not prosecuted. On the other hand, a prosecutor secured a court order last year shutting a website that concocted a photomontage of Pope Benedict XVI in a Nazi SS uniform, following disclosures that he had served briefly in the Hitler Youth. Italy prohibits publicly insulting religion — but whether the law protects Islam hasn't been tested.

To many Muslims in Europe, that's a particular rub. Laws touted as evenhanded appear to tilt in favor of the home team. Dutch film director Theo van Gogh, before he was murdered by a radical Islamist in Amsterdam, was a poster boy for unconditional free speech. He said Muslims had sex with goats and that a Jewish writer with whom he disagreed had erotic dreams about Nazi death-camp doctor Josef Mengele. He was never convicted under the Netherlands' statute banning "scornful blasphemy." The Justice Minister proposed reviving the law in the wake of his death, to use against the kind of offensive speech Van Gogh was killed over, but a decision has yet to be reached. In France last week, the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo republished the 12 disputed Danish cartoons, while devoting its cover to a sketch of a red-faced Muhammad holding his head in his hands and saying "It's tough being loved by idiots." The government-sanctioned French Council of the Muslim Faith (cfcm) tried to stop publication as an instance of "racial and religious abuse," but the case was dismissed on procedural grounds. cfcm president Dalil Boubakeur, who plans to sue every French paper that published the cartoons (for what, he hasn't said yet), told Time that "France has to realize the new social fact that Muslims are an important part of the population."

Boubakeur alludes to an important point: the boundary between permissible and impermissible speech shifts in tune with changes in political power. Blair has been trying to channel the wave of disgust that followed last July's Muslim suicide attacks against London's transport system to broaden Britain's restrictions on speech that might incite terror. But he's still been finding it a tough sell. And last week, his critics pointed to al-Masri's conviction as proof that existing laws are more than sufficient to nab those who intentionally and threateningly advocate terror, without creating vague crimes that could give prosecutors a fishing license. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human-rights group Liberty, thinks a better solution is to enlist moderate Muslims in the war on terrorism through "a universal human-rights framework." That means, she says, "Salman Rushdie should be free to write books they might not like; but also that Muslim women should be free to wear the veil too. When applied evenhandedly, free speech is not the enemy of minorities, it's their protection."

So does that mean the answer to the tensions free speech can unleash is more free speech? It's not an argument that would win over those to whom some matters, like lampooning the Prophet or depicting Jesus as a woman, are literally unspeakable. But in a Continent with plenty of centuries-old minorities, as well as millions of Muslims who are now part of a volatile, Internet-speed global conversation between Islam and the West that can turn a cartoon into a casus belli, is there a better answer?

• J.F.O. McALLISTER / London
• Free speech is a fine principle. It's the application that's tricky