Heather, I keep tying things back to the Iraq invasion, because 1) that is clearly the antecedent to what is going on in Iraq and Syria now, and still has repercussions throughout the middle east, and 2) because the same cast of characters is now pushing a militaristic policy towards Iran, DAESH, and other Muslim states, including Palestine. We rehash the past so we can learn from our mistakes. I feel no guilt, because I personally opposed the invasion. But I feel my country should atone for its mistakes, rather than compounding the damage we have created. You don’t have the direct responsibility that I have as a citizen of the offending country, but you do as a public intellectual in the western world.

We can denounce Daesh, Iran, Assad, Hamas, Hezbollah, J-e-I, etc. all we want, but to oppose one, we advance another. And most Americans make no distinction among them. They are Muslims, who if they are not evil are at least crazy. But how much do you hear about the death penalty for the only democratically elected President in Egyptian history, who was overthrown by another in a long line military dictators supported by the US, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The dictator, al-Sisi was himself responsible for the Rabaa massacre in which a thousand people were murdered. But this wasn’t Islamic radicals killing atheists or Christians, or Jews. It was a thug being paid by atheists, Christians Jews, and fellow thuggish Muslims, to murder the “Islamist radicals” of the muslim brotherhood. Perhaps, some influential people found it inconvenient for this event to get too much press?

I’m afraid you do not have much understanding of the destructive power of modern weaponry. Israel has not come out best in its “wars” with the Palestinians “because they used concrete to build bomb shelters instead of tunnels for suicide bombers”. Besides the fact that the tunnels were primarily used to evade the Israeli blockade, there is no protection the Palestinians could conceivably develop against power of Israel’s weapons. I know you would never support slaughter of innocents, but you have to understand then when such disparity of firepower is utilized, it is not war, it is slaughter. A little bit like the Europeans and the Indians, or the Maoris.

Sorry Paxton, but I’m not going to put up with this continuing conflation of principles and mischaracterization of my position. You feel guilt for what your country did in Iraq. That’s laudable. My country wasn’t there and we didn’t buy into the rhetoric. In fact, if a NZ politician had tried to use God as a reason we should be there, it would have been the end of them. (There were politicians who thought we should be there, but none of them went down the God route.) And it should be quite clear to anyone who reads anything I write that I don’t think liberty etc are God-given – we have them because of the Enlightenment.

There are people calling for an invasion of Iran. I haven’t seen any of them use Charlie Hebdo as a justification. And yes they’re free to call for it. I think they’re wrong, you think they’re wrong, and more importantly, Obama thinks they’re wrong. It’s highly unlikely America will bomb Iran, especially with a Democratic government. So even if you have to hold your nose at the candidate that gets nominated, the best thing you can do is work for that to happen in 2016.

I’m not failing to recognize the discrepancy in suffering. I’m saying all suffering is wrong.

And you’re the one who imagines any mention of Islamist extremism is some kind of attack on all Muslims. That is not what I think or how I think. It seems to me you’re the with the problem here – you can’t see the difference between criticizing an idea and the people who hold it. When I rail against right-wing Christians in America, you don’t attack me because most Christians in America have no time for them either. You have a blind-spot.

The biggest atrocities are actually Muslim vs Muslim. Sunni vs Shi’a usually. What DAESH is doing to their fellow countrymen is appalling. I’m sick of people who call themselves liberals, then stand up for regimes that consider women worth half that of men, require them to be constantly covered, imprison them when they’ve been raped because it was their fault for being out alone, legally allow them to be beaten, allow the men in their families to decide who they marry, allow men to have up to four wives, throw gay men off buildings, execute people for leaving the religion, execute people for (what amounts to) thought crimes like blasphemy, stone people to death for adultery, and you know this list could go on for ages. Extremist Islamists want those things. I am not going to say, “OK, go ahead. You can do whatever you want without me protesting because some Westerners instituted bad policies that resulted in a whole lot of Muslims dying.” I have free speech and I think Sharia is disgusting and I’m not going to stop criticizing it. If you can’t see the difference between that and criticizing actual people, you’re the one with the problem.

Bullying someone into submission is war. Active incitement to commit murder is a battle.

Yes, Netanyahu is trying to bully the Gazans into submission. And Hamas and Hezbollah and others are trying to bully the Israelis into submission with missiles and suicide bombs too. You can’t criticize one in that situation without the other. Yes, Israel has come off best in those encounters. That’s not their “fault”, it’s because they used concrete to build bomb shelters instead of tunnels for suicide bombers. There needs to be a two-state solution – both sides have stopped that happening over the years.

And I do not support any kind of slaughter, and if you say that one more time, you’re out.

I say again, you cannot keep tying every incident to do with violence by Islamist extremists back to the Iraq War. What was done to the citizens of Iraq then does not give Islamist extremists the world over a free pass to commit any act of violence they want. You are not doing Muslims a favour by supporting the extremists – they want their actions stopped too.

You say I’m justifying Charlie Hebdo etc because of Iraq, but you have it backwards. Iraq was justified by 9/11. Neocons and war profiteers are even now justifying an invasion of Iran because of Charlie Hebdo and similar acts. Failing to recognize the enormous discrepancy in human lives and suffering between the two types of action is what is disingenuous about the comparison.

I accept that you are/were opposed to the Iraq invasion (though you still seem to consider the Gaza slaughter justified). I’m not defending the actions of Jamaat-e-Islami or any other terrorist organization. I’m saying that in the present political environment, to focus on Islamic atrocities without acknowledging the far greater western atrocities against Muslims is to encourage further retribution by the west, whether that is your intention or not. The failure of the Bangladesh government to protect atheists’ free speech there is worthy of criticism and I applauded you for it. But to make this a part of a continuing focus on the misdeeds of Muslims {“Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas”), while never balancing that criticism by pointing out the misdeeds of the ‘secular’ west against Muslims, is to miss the forest for the trees, if not to deliberately distort the situation. I liken it to all the stories in America from the 17th through the 20th centuries about the atrocities of the ‘savage’ Indians against the white settlers, while little was ever mentioned, and is not still, of the atrocities of both the white settlers and the US government against the indigenous inhabitants.

That’s not what I said. I purposely used the phrase “active incitement to commit murder”. I’m not sure which “former head of a major defense contractor” etc you’re talking about – there’s more than one – but yes the speech is protected. We can’t limit free speech to speech we like. “Testosterone-crazed war lovers” are allowed free speech too. When a f**wit like Oliver North gets on Fox News (and I’ve heard him do it) to advocate bombing Iran, he can do it. When Jamaat-e-Islami calls for laws to establish the death penalty for atheists, they can do it. When Jamaat-e-Islami directly calls for their supporters to kill atheists, that shouldn’t be protected.

You’re conflating governance issues and free speech a bit too. There’s a helluva difference between a threat to a state and a threat to a belief system, and to conflate the two is disingenuous. No-one has the right to force their belief system on another person, which is what Jamaat-e-Islami is trying to do, via murdering atheists to bully them into submission. Netanyahu has a responsibility to protect millions of citizens and his nation from attack. (And I don’t want to get into the rights and wrongs of how he does that – we’ve been there before. Suffice to say, some of the ways he does that are good and some are bad imo.) That is not about free speech – it’s a whole different issue.

The purpose of free speech is that all ideas get out into the marketplace, for citizens of a democracy to decide upon.

I agree completely. And there is a problem with how that’s presented to the public. Some countries are better than others. New Zealand is one of the better ones. (We’re 2/175, USA is 17/175.) See here. However, if extremist Islamists had their way, we’d be a lot worse off. All the worst countries in the index have Sharia, and that is what Jamaat-e-Islami, Al-Qaeda and the other extremist organisations want.

As I’ve said before, I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq, but you can’t mix that up with the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Yes, innocent victims were killed in both, and in Iraq they numbered in the millions, but that’s no justification. If we think like that we’ll be locked in tit for tat murders forever. Besides, that has nothing to do with freedom of speech. You’re basically framing it as if because innocent Muslims were unjustly killed or otherwise suffered in Iraq, it’s OK for Jamaat-e-Islami to go around killing atheists in Bangladesh.

The point is that fundamentalist Islamists in Bangladesh are trying to stop atheists using their constitutional right to freedom of speech by murdering them, and the government there is doing little to stop them.

The purpose of free speech is that all ideas get out into the marketplace, for citizens of a democracy to decide upon. The biggest threats to that goal today, are not laws prohibiting the expression of one view or another, but a much more subtle filtering of what and how information is presented to the public. The news media frame the conversation, and the news media, like the government, is the tool of the corporate elite. They, far more than al Qaeda, or Jamaat-e-Islami are the ones who decide whose speech gets heard and whose doesn’t.

It depends on the way she expresses herself. If she tells people to kill atheist bloggers, and they are people who listen to her, they become her weapons, so that is not protected – It’s active incitement to commit murder. If it’s a general comment that she hates atheists and wishes they were dead, that’s protected.

Yes it is, because it’s not directed, it’s just opinion (assuming you’re not talking about a presidential advisor or similar). Those who say it have no power to make it happen, and have no valid expectation of being listened to. Those who disagree have an equal opportunity to say why they disagree with taking that option. There can be public debate on the issue, which is good.

How about speech in the US, advocating that our military bomb Iran, or Syria, where thousands of innocent people are sure to get killed? Is that ok?

Thanks Paxton. When you’re directly inciting someone to commit a crime, particularly a violent crime, I think that crosses a line. Jamaat-e-Islami is banned. It has been associated with criminal activity, but I think the banning is political. As well as advocating for Sharia , they also want Bangladesh to be reunited with Pakistan. I don’t think the group should be banned, but I think openly calling for the murder of atheists should be prosecuted. It’s the only limit I would place on freedom of speech i.e. directly advocating violence or murder. I’d like to say directly advocating for any criminal activity, but I suspect people could come up with hypotheticals where I wouldn’t agree with myself.