{"id":617,"date":"2004-11-24T06:16:41","date_gmt":"2004-11-24T06:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:53","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:53","slug":"the_cure_for_fo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=617","title":{"rendered":"The Cure For Hurtful Speech Is Not The Courts"},"content":{"rendered":"

There have been three incidents that I know of where bloggers have been threatened with libel litigation for what were essentially political speech.<\/p>\n

Luskin v Atrios<\/a><\/p>\n

Niewert vs. Wizbang<\/a> (in this case, Niewert just advocated libel suits against Wizbang)<\/p>\n

And now, we can add another – MEMRI vs Juan Cole<\/a><\/p>\n

I publicly oppose all three.Cole doesn’t make it easy on me; his post recounting the threat is headlined “Intimidation by Israeli-Linked Organization Aimed at US Academic.<\/b>” Of course the fact that it’s an Israeli-linked organization makes the crime far, far worse – in Prof. Cole’s eyes.<\/p>\n

But as far as I am from supporting Cole – and I’m really, really far from supporting him (I have a post in the blog queue about despicable Columbia professor Joseph Massad and Cole’s support of him) – I can’t remain silent when someone, even someone I admire like MEMRI, uses the heavy hand of the law to attempt to quash what is essentially political speech.<\/p>\n

I think Prof. Cole is flat wrong about virtually everything he says about MEMRI. I think that his responses to MEMRI’s challenges are laughable. Ali, of Iraq the Model has recently taken him to school<\/a> on Iraqi history.<\/p>\n

But in lawyering up and trying to intimidate Cole into silence (as opposed to shaming him with facts, which would be a good thing) MEMRI has gone too far.<\/p>\n

I’ll be emailing a copy of this post to Yigal Carmon at MEMRI, and I’d encourage my readers to let him know what you think as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MEMRI, who Armed Liberal supports, is threatening Juan Cole, who Armed Liberal thinks is a bit of a fool, with libel charges. They are wrong to do so. The cure for bad speech is better speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}