The right to be wrong

We can all unite in our support for freedom of speech. We can also unite to, loudly, condemn unprovoked violent attacks on churches and embassies

Already, angry Palestinian militants have assaulted seven West Bank and Gaza churches, destroying two of them. In Somalia, gunmen shot dead an elderly Italian nun. Radical clerics from Qatar to Qom have called, variously, for a 8220;day of anger8221; or for worshippers to 8220;hunt down8221; the pope and his followers. From Turkey to Malaysia, Muslim politicians have condemned the pope and called his apology 8220;insufficient8221;. And all of this because Benedict XVI, speaking at the University of Regensburg, quoted a Byzantine emperor who, more than 600 years ago, called Islam a faith 8220;spread by the sword8221;. We8217;ve been here before, of course. Similar protests were sparked last winter by cartoon portrayals of Muhammad in the Danish press. Similar apologies resulted, though Benedict8217;s is more surprising than those of the Danish government. No one, apparently, can remember any pope, not even the media-friendly John Paul II, apologising for anything in such specific terms: not for the Inquisition, not for the persecution of Galileo and certainly not for a single comment made to an academic audience in an unimportant German city.

But western reactions to Muslim 8220;days of anger8221; have followed a familiar pattern, too. Last winter, some western newspapers defended their Danish colleagues, even going so far as to reprint the cartoons 8212; but others, including the Vatican, attacked the Danes for giving offense. Some leading Catholics have now defended the pope 8212; but others, no doubt including some Danes, have complained that his statement should have been better vetted, or never given at all. By definition, the West is not monolithic. Left-leaning journalists don8217;t identify with right-leaning colleagues and vice versa. Not all Christians, let alone all Catholics 8212; even all German Catholics 8212; identify with the pope either, and certainly they don8217;t want to defend his every scholarly quotation.

Unfortunately, these subtle distinctions are lost on the fanatics who torch embassies and churches. And they may also be preventing all of us from finding a useful response to the waves of anti-western anger and violence that periodically engulf parts of the Muslim world. Clearly, a handful of apologies and some random public debate 8212; should the pope have said X, should the Danish prime minister have done Y 8212; are ineffective and irrelevant: none of the radical clerics accepts western apologies, and none of their radical followers reads the Western press. Instead, western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologising 8212; and start uniting.

By this, I don8217;t mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyse this particular sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech 8212; surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts 8212; and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns. By 8220;we8221; I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French foreign ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News 8212; Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between. True, these principles sound pretty elementary 8212; 8220;we8217;re pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence8221; 8212; but in the days since the pope8217;s sermon, I don8217;t feel that I8217;ve heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analysing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.

All of which is simply beside the point, since nothing the pope has ever said comes even close to matching the extremism and hatred that come from radical imams and fanatical clerics every day, all across Europe and the Muslim world, almost none of which ever provokes any western response. Maybe it8217;s time that it should: when Saudi Arabia publishes textbooks commanding good Wahhabi Muslims to 8220;hate8221; Christians, Jews and non-Wahhabi Muslims, why shouldn8217;t the Vatican, the Southern Baptists, Britain8217;s chief rabbi and the Council on American-Islamic Relations all condemn them ?

Maybe it8217;s a pipe dream: the day when the White House and Greenpeace can issue a joint statement is surely distant indeed. But if stray comments by western leaders 8212; not to mention western films, books, cartoons, traditions and values 8212; are going to inspire regular violence, I don8217;t feel that it8217;s asking too much for the West to quit saying sorry and unite, occasionally, in its own defence. The fanatics attacking the pope already limit the right to free speech among their own followers. I don8217;t see why we should allow them to limit our right to free speech, too.

Anne Applebaum