Here’s a book I’m looking forward to reading.  I think.  It’s a book I know will excite me, infuriate me, challenge me, provoke me, and have me scrawling an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ or a bad-tempered  ‘no!’ in the margins of practically every page.  And very often both on the same page.

It’s a book, that is, on free speech.

I can think of few people more qualified to write such a book than Timothy Garton Ash, whose dispatches and commentary on political repression appear regularly in The New York Review of Books and The Guardian.  And I love the idea of him drawing up ten free-speech commandments — or rather, per his subtitle, “his ten principles for a connected world.”

Here they are:

1. We — all human beings — must be free and able to express ourselves, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas, regardless of frontiers.

2. We neither make threats of violence nor accept violent intimidation.

3. We allow no taboos against and seize every chance for the spread of knowledge.

4. We require uncensored, diverse, trustworthy media so we can make well-informed decisions and participate fully in political life.

5. We express ourselves openly and with robust civility about all kinds of human difference.

6. We respect the believer but not necessarily the content of the belief.

7. We must be able to protect our privacy and to counter slurs on our reputations, but not prevent scrutiny that is in the public interest.

8. We must be empowered to challenge all limits to freedom of information justified on such grounds as national security.

9. We defend the Internet and other systems of communication against illegitimate encroachments by both public and private powers.

10. We decide for ourselves and face the consequences.

That all sounded great until I read it through a second time.  And realized that the one that stumps me is #6.  Really?  Respect anti-Semites and Islamophobes and racists and sexists and pry-my-gun-from-my-cold-dead-hands shmucks of all stripes?  I can understand them — that is, I can put myself in their shoes and figure out why and how they came to be such shmucks.   But understanding, at least for me, does not necessarily entail respect.

Perhaps Garton Ash will persuade me otherwise (I have the book on order, so am only working off this New York Times article), but as with most people, it takes quite a bit for me to be persuaded to change a treasured stance.

Which means that #4 is not exactly a non-stumper either.  In an ideal world, maybe.  But “trustworthy” is a matter of preexisting opinion.  There are hordes of people who consider Fox News trustworthy.  Others, like me, consider the NYT trustworthy (for the most part, and with significant exceptions such as its coverage of Palestine).  A terrifying number of people once considered Pravda and Der Sturmer to be trustworthy.  The news sources you trust are likely more a reflection of your preexisting opinions than of any objective measure of reliability or — that ever-elusive ideal — “truth.”

And then, now I think on it, #5 also stumps me somewhat.  I’m assuming that the book will define “robust civility” — I like the concept, since civility too often has an aura of mild-manneredness, and the idea needs some guts.  In fact I’d like to see Garton Ash write a manifesto just on that.

Of course his new book is already attracting detractors.  Some of them are quoted in the NYT piece , which, since flames always lead, begins with his idea that other newspapers should have united to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Muhammad.   I get the idea — solidarity in the face of intimidation and terrorism — but wouldn’t it have been a perfect example of the tail wagging the dog?  Of otherwise respectable media giving in to what Glenn Greenwald calls emotional blackmail?

Despite such caveats, I generally admire Garton Ash’s writing.  But I’m more stumped by his ten commandments than I thought I would be.  The more I look at them, the more vaguely idealistic they seem.

But then Garton Ash is no vague idealist.  And of course, I haven’t read the book yet.  And since it’s not due out until tomorrow, and is a somewhat daunting 491 pages long, I’m assuming that neither have the detractors cited in the NYT.

Could it be that criticizing a book you haven’t yet read is precisely part of the problem?

———–

[Update to come when I’ve read it!]

The cover of this week’s Charlie Hebdo leaves me speechless, in a good way.  And in tears too.  (And yes, it is indeed deeply Islamic in spirit.)

Oh what a bandwagon that noxious little anti-Islamic video has set in motion.  There seems to be no end of people eager to hop on it for personal and political gain, no matter how many lives it costs.

There’s Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, reeling from backlash against his support of Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing massacre of Syrian civilians.  What a perfect opportunity to deflect criticism by calling for more and larger protests — not against the Syrian regime, but against America, in the name of “defending the Prophet.” Except that’s not what he’s doing. To cite the headline of Nick Kristof’s NYT column today, he’s exploiting the Prophet.

There’s Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she of the soft voice and the compelling back story, who just can’t stop talking about what she calls “the Muslim mentality.” (Pop quiz:  if someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Jewish mentality” is an anti-Semite, what’s someone who generalizes about a stereotyped “Muslim mentality”?  Click here if you don’t know.)  Hirsi Ali told her story yet again in Newsweek‘s “Muslim Rage” issue (to which the best answer was the often hilarious #MuslimRage meme on Twitter).  Strange to think that the rapidly failing Newsweek was once a reputable publication.

There’s the sophomoric French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose idea of cutting-edge humor is cartoons of politicians with their pants down around the ankles.  This week they ran similar cartoons of Muhammad in order to inject some life into their plumetting circulation by creating controversy.  Oh, and as a beacon of free speech, of course.

There’s Pakistan’s Minister of Railways — the man responsible for the system’s chronic debt, constant strikes, and devastating crashes. What better way to distract people from his total failure than to make himself out to be a “defender of Islam” by offering a $100,000 bounty for the life of the director of that inane video?  There’s nothing quite like incitement to murder to cover up your own corruption.

There’s more — there’s always more of such people, including of course the miserable little bigots who made the video in the first place —  but that’ll do for now. Because none of this reflects the real Muslim rage:  the palpable outrage not only at the killing of Ambassador Stevens, but also at the blatant attempt of Islamic extremists (and their Islamophobic counterparts) to hijack Islam.

Listen, for instance, to Egyptian activist Mahmoud Salem, aka Sandmonkey, who was one of the voices of 2011’s “Arab spring” in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.  Violent protests over the video are “more damaging to Islam’s reputation than a thousand so-called ‘Islam-attacking’ films,” he writes, and calls on Egyptians to condemn Islamic fundamentalists as “a bunch of shrill, patriarchal, misogynistic, violent extremists who are using Islam as a cover” for political ambition.

Twitter is spilling over with similar protests and disgust from Muslims all over the world at the way the “defenders of Islam” are destroying it from within.  And this disgust was acted on in Benghazi on Friday when 50,000 Libyans marched to demand the disarming of the extremist militias suspected of attacking the US consular buildings, then stormed the headquarters of two of the biggest militias and forced them out of town.  Two other Islamist militias instantly disbanded.  Yes, if you unite, you can face down the thugs, even well-armed ones.  This, of course, is not something you’ll see on the cover of Newsweek.

As Libyans, Egyptians, Tunisians, Yemenis, and with especial pain, Syrians know, the “Arab spring” is not a matter of a single season.  The moniker itself is a product of Western media shorthand, of the desire to label a “story” and assign it a neat, self-contained timeline.  But this was no mere story for the people living it.  It was and still is the beginning of a long process.  But one that once begun, cannot be undone.

All over the Middle East, real voices are making themselves heard, unmediated by government control whether in the name of “security” or of an extremist travesty of Islam.

And this is surely the real manifestation of that much abused principle:  freedom of expression.