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Sheikh Abdullah Makwinja Correspondent
Islam and freedom of speech has become a contentious issue in recent times. The limit of what is, and what is not, acceptable speech is becoming a new battleground between Islam and the West. The issue came to a head in January 2015 when the French magazine Chalie Hebdo printed insulting and blasphemous cartoons of the Holy Prophet of Islam.

Yet it’s not as inconsistent as at first appears.

While the right to free speech is enshrined in the constitutional law of many countries, nowhere is the right an unfettered one.

And different countries have reached distinct conclusions on where the limits are.

Just how far can you go in saying or writing things that are offensive, outrageous or hateful? The answer depends very much on where you are.

However, the reality is that every society including the West has limits on public speech and views they don’t like.

The only difference is in who defines the limits of this speech and how restrictive these limits are.

Racism, national security, holocaust denial, incitement, glorification of terrorism, racial hatred and libel, among many others, are all limitations imposed on freedom of speech by western nations.

The Charlie Hebdo magazine could never have printed cartoons denying the holocaust in the name of free speech, without charges of anti-Semitism being brought against him.

It’s contradictions like these, on the limits of free speech where the clash of values between Islam and the West is currently taking place.

Alluding to an attack on Charlie Hebdo in reprisal for satirical depictions of Muhammad, Pope Francis condemned the violence, but also said there are limits to free speech — especially when it involves religion.

In particular, the Pope said, one should not abuse freedom of expression to “provoke” or “offend” others deliberately, and also shouldn’t be surprised when they react to such taunts.

Even in the case of a dear friend, Pope Francis said; “If he says or swears word against my mother, he’s going to get a punch in the nose. That’s normal.”

Following the reprisal attack on Charlie Hebdo global media showed, leaders such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent “extremists” committed to the “overthrow of democracy” from appearing on television, and Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s foreign minister, participating in the mass rally in Paris in support of Charlie Hebdo’s right of freedom of speech.

What a show of hypocrisy, every single one of those heads of state have waged their own wars against freedom of speech.

France was the first country in the world to ban pro-Palestinian protests.

The United States, for its part, demonstrated its devotion to press freedom by bombing Al Jazeera’s bureaus in Baghdad and Kabul, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Since the overthrow of Egypt’s first democratically elected leader in July 2013, the Egyptian government has censored any media criticism of the new regime. Among the victims of this attack are three Al Jazeera English journalists, who are currently languishing in an Egyptian jail serving sentences of 7-10 years just for doing their job.

Israel admitted that they deliberately targeted and killed 17 journalists during Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza war.

In Germany, it is a crime to deny the Holocaust.

In the US freedom of expression has limits too. Using speech to place people in imminent danger is not protected, nor is revealing information deemed vital to national security (just ask Edward Snowden).

It’s indeed stunning hypocrisy of leaders like Obama using this opportunity to tell the world that violence is never the answer while he is slaughtering civilians all over the world and routinely uses the threat of even more violence to achieve his aims (“Everything is on the table”).

I know I am not the only one who sees the hypocrisy of a president blathering on about free speech while he uses the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined to silence dissent and imprison those who risk everything to expose the crimes of the government.

Ron Paul, a former US congressman, said it was the West’s overall foreign policy which “invites retaliation.”

“And this is why we say if we had somebody do to us what we have done to so many countries in the Middle East, and how many people we’ve killed, and sending over drones, and bombing, being involved in all these wars, and supporting dictators one week, and taking away the support — and the stupidity of us sending all those weapons into Syria, ending up in the hands of ISIS — and right now we’re even sending more weapons!

“You know, because ISIS took all the American weapons. It’s that overall policy which invites retaliation, and they see us as intruders. But it’s a little bit more complex, you know, when they hit us, either here at home, and hit civilians, and what’s happening in France. But I don’t think you can divorce these instances from the overall foreign policy.”

All this of course in no way justifies the bombing of Charlie Hebdo.

However, it provides much needed perspective on the politics of provocation as well as to the deep double standards not only inherent in the biased Islamophobesphere but also in the uncritical media.

In other words, it seems you only have freedom of speech to propagate western ideas not of the Islamic ideas because Islamic ideas are an “incitement to violence”.

Freedom of speech is a western concept that completely contradicts reality.

In reality there is no such thing as absolute free speech. What exists is speech within predefined limits that differ between nations.

Nowadays freedom of speech is used as a colonial tool in the Muslim world to support the propagation of western ideas and to suppress Islamic ideas. Increasingly this is happening within western societies also as anti-terror policies are used to clampdown on what are deemed as ‘extreme’ opinions.

But if we are to speak in favour of freedoms of expression and the press, then these rights should be applied across the board.

Sadly, instead of doing this, politicians from the west have been adding fuel to the fire by spreading bigotry and fear in an already volatile Islamophobic atmosphere.

Islam will not tolerate the insulting of any of the divine Prophets from Adam to Jesus to Muhammad (May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all).