It's not a catch phrase

Editorial

Last week, the Jewish Independent published several letters to the editor, two of which dealt with the issue of censorship. In both cases, the content of the material expressed was seen as reason enough to have it silenced.

As a newspaper, the Jewish Independent is in the business of disseminating information, but this is only a small part of why talk like this concerns us.

Freedom of speech is not just a catch phrase. Free expression serves many vital purposes. At the simplest level, decisions are better made when they have taken into account a range of viewpoints, the pros and cons of which have been discussed. At the other extreme, without free speech, such things as elections lose their meaning and no resistance to injustice or oppression is possible – just look at the situation in Russia.

The one issue that seems to bring out the censor in many Independent readers is Israel. There's no point in denying it. Israel is a controversial country. It is at the centre of what is, justifiably or not, the most divisive conflict in the world today and has been for decades.

The definition of controversy is: "a debate marked by the expression of opposing views." Controversy is not a bad thing. It is arguably an integral part of our culture. It allows people with different opinions to contest each other in a reasonable fashion.

The key word here is expression. In order to conduct a debate, all sides must be allowed to make their views heard. True, we may not agree with someone's opinions. The views expressed by authors such as Noam Chomsky, Jimmy Carter, John Meirsheimer and Stephen Walt in their books – that Israel and its allies are behaving inappropriately (to put it mildly) – are offensive to many in the Jewish community, but disagreement is an insufficient reason for ending a debate; on the contrary, it is the natural starting point of one.

While one might wish that these books didn't exist, they do. Moreover, they are not works of pure fiction. Even if you love Israel and firmly believe that it is in the right, you have to open yourself to the possibility that it is imperfect. The authors mentioned above are not ignorant and their books were probably not written for the sole benefit of destroying Israel's reputation and to make a quick buck. To view them as such and reject them out of hand does an injustice to the authors, all respected academics, but, more importantly, to their subject matter which is the, alas imperfect, state of Israel.

The easiest thing in the world is to dismiss these authors' books as garbage and demand that they be taken off the shelves. But banning books or ideas is practically impossible thanks to the Internet – just as free trade has opened borders to products, the Internet has eliminated borders to ideas. What is more effective, but also much more challenging, is to examine such books closely, check the facts and, by doing so, gain a deeper understanding of the issues and prepare yourself better for debate.

While it is true that freedom of speech involves the toleration of much nonsense and even distasteful material, the alternative of placing the agenda for public discussion in the hands of a few people or lobby groups is worse. They are only people after all, as fallible as the next person, as subjective and with as many prejudices.

An irony of the sensitivity with which the topic of Israel is met here in North America, is that, in Israel, the issue of censorship wouldn't arise – not because Israel wouldn't let such books into the country, but because Israelis are more critical of Israel than even its harshest critics from outside. Indeed, one of the reasons to love Israel is that it is the sole country in the Middle East that allows such open debate. If asked why they immigrated to Israel, many say that it is because they wanted to live in a country that affords freedom of expression and even freedom to criticize the authorities – a stark contrast to the places from which they come.

To those who are so blind in their beliefs, uncritical in their judgment or insecure in their opinions that they would rather silence a disagreeable idea than face the controversy it generates, you should take an example from the country you purport to admire so much.

Free expression is a value in its own right, a foundational principle of our civilization. We do not need to look far in today's world to see the extreme manifestations caused by an absence of free expression: threats of death for the naming of a teddy bear and mass global rioting caused by cartoons, for example. Freedom of speech is not a knee-jerk comfort zone in which some of us like to live – it is an absolute necessity in a democratic society.

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