January 3, 2006

West: European muzzlers

The nonpareil Diana West surveys 2006 as the Year of Speaking Dangerously:

Now that Baby New Year is taking over again from Father Time, the observant celebrant might notice something new. In addition to the traditional top hat and diaper, and besides the 2006 banner across his chest, Baby New Year has something else in his kit: a gag. That's because 2006 is shaping up to be the Year of Speaking Dangerously. This isn't to suggest that 2005 was a banner year for freedom of speech. But the reaction, tepid at best, to significantly outrageous cases of speech repression during this past year, from Bangladesh to Paris, indicates only one thing: The year 2006 will be worse.

Take our old friend (making his third appearance in this column) Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, the Afghan editor sentenced in October to two years hard labor. His crime, you may recall, was "blasphemy" — i.e., publishing articles that criticized Islamic law. The magazine he edited questioned the death penalty for converting from Islam; amputation and whippings for certain crimes; and relegating women to legal inferiority. Given that such viewpoints promised to make Islamic reform a topic of debate in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Mr. Nasab's incarceration should have created one of those international incidents you read about, or at least a journalistic cause celebre.

But no. In virtual global silence — not a healthy atmosphere for free speech — Mr. Nasab was left to the non-tender mercies of a Kabul prosecutor seeking the death penalty for those "un-Islamic" articles. And now? Here's an update from The Washington Post: "After refusing for three months to retract his statements, Nasab told an appeals court this week that he was sorry for printing stories that asserted that women should be given equal status to men in court, questioned the use of physical punishments for crimes and suggested converts from Islam should not face execution."

Read it all.