Lamar Soutter Newsletter

On September 30, 2005, a Danish newspaper contained in it a cartoon depicting Muhammad, the Prophet of the Muslim Faith. This is forbidden under Muslim law, and Muslims across the world rioted, resulting in over 100 deaths, damage to Danish embassies, $170 million lost in boycotts, and a reward of $11 million for anyone beheading the cartoonist behind the sketch (who is still in hiding).

On April 12, 2006, creators and executive producers of the animated sitcom “South Park”, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, produced an episode of their cartoon featuring the prophet Muhammad. Fearing terrorist retaliation, Comedy Central, the network which airs South Park, censored it.

Two weeks ago they tried again.

The episode began with the South Park boys finding Tom Cruise in a candy factory packing fudge. Incensed when he is called a “Fudge Packer”, he gathers together all of the celebrities ever mocked by South Park into a class action lawsuit against the town.

The South Park residents ask Tom what they can do to get him to drop the suit. Since he only wanted the gay jokes to stop, and since there is only one person in the entire world (above Gandhi, the President of the United States, even Jesus himself) who can not ever be mocked, Tom asks the town to deliver him the Prophet Muhammad, so that he may learn Muhammad’s secret of being above ridicule.

In order to deliver him, however, South Park residents would have to show him. So they struggle with how to do it. Do they put him inside a U-Haul with no windows, is that okay? What about covered with a sheet, or in a bear suit? If he talks, is that okay?

As thy try to figure out how to deliver Muhammad, a group of “Gingers” – red head kids tired of being made fun of, plant bombs throughout South Park and demand the prophet for themselves, or they’ll blow up the town.

Since the threat of getting blown up is scarier than a lawsuit, the town decides to give in to the Gingers. Seeing that the threat of violence works better than legal action, the celebrities decide to attack the town until Muhammad is delivered to them.

The episode was a cliffhanger. By acquiesced to the terrorist demands of the Gingers, South Park has encouraged more demands. If they do not deliver Muhammad to either side, both will destroy them. If they do deliver Muhammad to one side, the other will destroy them (as will Muslim extremists, since in order to deliver him the town must “show” him to prove it’s really him, and doing so is forbidden by Muslims). As the town succumbs to fear, the boys try to protect Muhammad while also argue why the town must not submit to threats of violence.

In a single, genius stroke (common to the Emmy Award winning show), Matt and Trey scripted real life into the show and the show into real life, putting Comedy Central in the very spot the characters of South Park found themselves in, and with the first episode itself an argument for the uncensored airing of the second.

While the FCC does have decency standards of what can and can not air on television, those standards do not apply as strictly to cable channels like Comedy Central, and the airing of Muhammad is not in fact prohibited by either the laws or customs of the United states. None the less, the question became, would they air the second episode completely uncensored.

After airing the first, an extremist Muslim organization in New York published veiled threats against the lives of Trey and Matt, as well as their home addresses and those of the Comedy Central offices in New York and California.

Threats began pouring in, as well as photographs of the assassination of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker murdered for a documentary he made about Muslim women (the writer of the documentary remains in hiding). Hours before the airing of the second episode, the police reported what they called a “credible bomb threat” against the network.

The episode ran, with vast swaths of it censored, not just the images of Muhammad, but even the mentioning of his name (which had previously been uncensored) and even the final “moral of the story” scene (common to south park episodes) where the characters discuss what they’ve learned about the cost of free speech and the tactics of terrorism.

Should the episode have been censored? I don’t know, I’m not even sure there is a “right” answer. Both showing and not showing the image carries significant potential consequences and any choice they make probably can’t be defined in terms of right or wrong, but rather as a choice of character. What does the president of the network tell a single mother working as a receptionist at the front desk, who loves free speech as much as anyone, but is just trying to raise her children, to feed them, and whose office is now under threat of suicide bombing (and Comedy Central doesn’t offer hazard pay, I checked)?

So what do we do?

In the final scenes in “Spartacus”, the Romans have captured the slave army, and offer to let them go free if the leader Spartacus will identify himself so they may torture and kill him. Each of the slaves in turn stands up and shouts “I am Spartacus.”

This is an issue of free speech, and nobody benefits from free speech more than American television networks. Shows like Dateline, 60 Minutes, and Frontline all survive because of free speech. Where are they? Bill O’Reilly, Anderson Cooper, and Keith Olberman consider themselves patriots, standing up for the constitution and for American rights and liberties. They have reported on this very incident, but have not shown (or attempted to show) Muhammad themselves. If every network in the country airs his image (respectfully, in the context of reporting on this story) – it defuses the responsibility, makes all networks – all of whom profit from free speech, equally culpable. Yes, terrorists might then want to bomb all of these networks, but last I checked they already want to do that.

The idea that any one religion, person, or prophet is or should be above critique or scrutiny should always be challenged, and the purpose of the very first amendment to the constitution of these united states is to guarantee that freedom. And in the face of threats to that freedom, it is the responsibility of those who most profit from it to stand up and say “I am Spartacus!”

“I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down”
Bill Bennett (09/28/05)
“We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”
Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect (09/26/01)

A few years ago I met a psychic. Skeptical at first, I was amazed by the overwhelming proof of her ability to predict the future. She had even predicted the assassination of JFK and called the White House days before his trip to Texas, warning him not to go. If only they had listened to her….

She keeps with her a clipping from a newspaper, where her ominous warning to the president was published, as were her credentials as a psychic.

Unfortunately, as impressive as her abilities are, there are a few things she fails to mention to prospective clients. First of all, the White House receives 600 calls a year from “psychics” warning the president of his impending assassination. At nearly two calls a day, a far more surprising event would be if the president was assassinated and someone hadn’t predicted it.

Secondly, she failed to mention that that particular call was the fourth she had made predicting an assassination. The previous three had all been wrong (as were the next 12 she made for future presidents). Further, as impressive as predicting the assassination was, she has not made any other successful predictions in the last 40 years.

It is true, that she accurately predicted, and even attempted to warn of, the Kennedy assassination. But that fact, without a larger context, is extremely misleading.

When Bill Bennett said that one could lower the crime rate by aborting black babies, the media went wild. How could he advocate such a position?

The truth is he didn’t. He stated a fact.

It is far easier (and more self satisfying) to adopt a position of anger and moral outrage, than it is to look at his statement in context, and see if the apparently obvious implication of the statement is in fact what he intended to say. It is a case of Attribution Error, assuming that his motives must have been racist.

A listener had called into Mr. Bennett’s show and argued that the “lost revenue from the people who have been aborted in the last 30 years” would have been enough to save Social Security.

Mr. Bennett was immediately skeptical of that statistic, and argued he did not believe it to be accurate, that it painted an incomplete picture of the economic impact of abortion. The caller claimed the statistic to be completely accurate, to which Mr. Bennett replied that it was also true “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose — you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”

His point? That statistics can often only paint half the picture, that such “far-reaching, extensive extrapolations” (as he put it) were meaningless, and that to argue that abortion should be illegal as a means of saving Social Security was as ludicrous as to argue that abortion should be legal as a means of reducing crime, no matter what the statistics said. His called his own statements “ridiculous, and morally reprehensible”, which is of course why he made them.

For his comment about the 9/11 hijackers, Bill Maher was fired from ABC for being to insensitive (despite the fact that he had held an empty seat on his show for a month for conservative commentator Barbara Olson, who died when her plane hit the pentagon while she was on her way to be on his show). What was Bill Maher’s point? That it’s easy to be dismissive of the terrorists, to call them cowards and say that there is no reason that they hate us, but it isn’t the truth, and it greatly underestimates them.

I once announced to a college class that women generally have smaller brains than men, suffering a politically correct backlash that followed me for four years. Somehow I was sexist. Somehow people thought that I must mean that women aren’t as smart as men. The fact that my statement was scientifically accurate had no bearing on the fact that I was obviously sexist, that I obviously meant to say that women weren’t as smart as men. I was in fact attempting to discuss the differences between men and women, in how the hemispheres of the brain communicate through the corpus callosum.

Women do have smaller brains (if you find that offensive, talk to God, I had nothing to do with it). Why anyone thinks this implies a lower intelligence is beyond me. A five foot person has smaller organs (including the brain) than I do, but can easily be smarter. A blue whale has a significantly larger brain than I do, but it can’t calculate a 15% tip. Intelligence is measured, not by the size of the brain, but by the ratio of brain mass to body mass. This fact, which I had assumed would be obvious given the wide range of human body sizes, was not considered by the people who judged my statement, leading to the erroneous conclusion that I necessarily implied that which I hadn’t.

I have never heard of Bill Bennett. He may be a racist – I have made arguments neither for nor against that claim. His declaration was a stupid thing to say, and I can imagine a hundred better ways to prove the point he was trying to make. But this country has (likely out of boredom) concluded that he stated or implied that blacks are the cause of crime, or that they should be aborted, or that blacks are less important than whites. He implied none of those things. What he said was that statistics can, when extrapolated properly, be used to justify positions which are clearly incorrect. And he’s right.

Effective communication is the basis of civilization. It can not exist without an understanding of what one is trying to say. That understanding comes in part through the sharing of a common vocabulary, but language alone is often ineffective at conveying thoughts. As important as language is, of equal importance is learning how to listen. One can attempt to understand offensive speech without condoning it, but one can never truly object to offensive speech unless they know what was said.

Having just defended him, I do hope he’s not a racist.