Free Speech in Spectator?

Spectator’s editorial “Free Speech in Practice” (Sept. 25, 2007) pridefully congratulated the Columbia community, University President Lee Bollinger, and its own pages for their embrace of free speech, open debate, and not fearless approach to controversy. Yet the very same day, World Can’t Wait—Drive Out the Bush Regime staff members were informed that Spectator had rejected our paid advertisement—one that brings to light facts on how the U.S. is the real nuclear threat in the world today—on the grounds that it is “too disrespectful” and could cost Spectator advertising revenues.

The ad we submitted pierces distortions about the imminence of Iran as a nuclear threat that are being trafficked by the Bush administration and parroted by a pliant media as a way of creating public opinion for a new possible war against the country (a copy of the ad and documentation of these facts can be found at worldcantwait.org).

Far from upholding open debate and free speech, Bollinger’s remarks and Spectator’s refusal of our ad amount to a strict adherence to the terms of debate and the basic assumptions being promoted by the Bush administration. In these terms, you are either with Bush and his wars, or with the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist forces in the world. Bollinger accused Iran of being a state sponsor of terrorism, of refusing to disclose its nuclear program in line with international standards, and of fighting a proxy war against the United States in Iraq: exactly the case President Bush is making to justify a possible military attack on Iran. Providing a platform only for both of these views is hardly open discourse and debate as these two poles reinforce each other even as they appear to oppose each other—and both are horrors for humanity. The Bush administration, with the complicity of the Democrats, has ripped up habeas corpus, legalized torture, waged a war in Iraq that has killed more than a million people—based on lies, and designs on remaking the whole Middle East. This aggression is fueling the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and all its nightmarish consequences for women, gays, secular forces, and others.

These are not our only choices, and it is urgent that humanity be presented with another way. But this statement doesn’t fit the reinforcing and massively destructive global polarization that Spectator deemed too “disrespectful” and silenced when it rejected our ad.

We live in a time when students who ask hard-hitting questions to politicians are tasered, when MoveOn’s paid political speech has been condemned in Congressional resolutions, and when the pressures generally to censor and self-censor are mounting. It is also a time when an administration that has been caught lying again and again—about WMD’s, links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Bush’s pledge that he would never wire-tap without a warrant, to name just a few—is working to whip up public opinion all over again.

This is a time when standing up for the truth, for real open debate, and for free speech matters most. Everyone living in this country bears responsibility for and should be losing sleep over the deaths of over a million Iraqis. As a new potential war is being prepared, don’t we all bear responsibility­—even at the risk of advertising dollars, reputations, and possibly more—to disseminate and act on truths that can save lives?

The author is on the advisory board of World Can’t Wait.