Why Tolerate Terrorist Publications?
Martin London, New York Times
WHILE most of us would agree that religious fundamentalists, foreign and domestic, sometimes do serious harm to our society, there are other kinds of fundamentalists who are also dangerous: I refer to legal fundamentalists.
More precisely, the tranche of lawyers, academicians, journalists and publishers who, over the years, have developed into First Amendment fundamentalists and have become a powerful influence on our government. Currently, they appear to have persuaded our attorney general that the amendment bars him from taking action against Inspire magazine, published on the Internet by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
The organization is a sworn enemy of the United States, and its web publication is available throughout the land. The online magazine proclaims its goals of providing inspiration and justification to inflict harm on the United States as well as Britain, France and other countries, by killing its citizens, preferably in large numbers. It encourages its readers to engage in attacks.
The magazine has given instructions for building car bombs as well as pressure-cooker bombs using material from a kitchen or a hardware store. Those instructions were followed to the letter by the Tsarnaev brothers, who murdered three and sent 264 to hospitals in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
It also — in its issue this past Christmas Eve — shared a new bomb recipe aimed at bringing down civilian airliners. According to Inspire, the new bomb would not be detected by the Transportation Security Administration metal detectors, only potentially by sniffer machines. But even if detected, the bomb probably wouldn’t be discovered, the publication says, without probing into orifices that a T.S.A. officer might be reluctant to visit.
In Britain, possession of the online magazine is a crime. Is this publication protected by our First Amendment? Not on your life!
In 1791, our forebears, anxious lest the new government adopt some of the restrictions that had been imposed by the king, adopted a basic commandment barring the government from making any law “abridging the freedom of speech.”
Does that mean what it says? Obviously not, because we have adopted many laws abridging speech, such as in cases of child porn, perjury, false representation, libel and slander, criminal conspiracy, etc. The list is substantial. When it comes to political speech, how do we distinguish the good speech from the bad? We look to bedrock principles.
