Untitled Document

26 April 2004

Fire in a Crowded Theater

The call to jihad is on the front page of the New York Times this morning. It is not coming from the likely places of struggle.

The Marines are pulling back a little from Falluja. The oil is beginning to flow again from the terminals at al-Basrah. There has been no slaughter today, not yet.

The call to Jihad comes from a novel axis. The Times quotes a Muslim cleric of Pakistani descent who lives in the blue-collar London suburb of Slough, England, as calling for the Holy War to begin in the Sceptered Isle.

I have been to Slough, though not intentionally. It is the sort of place a traveler finds by accident of route. I have changed trains there to go to the Middle East, though that is another story. It is also the place you can change trains to get to the Queen's house at Windsor, where she graciously allows visitors to walk the grounds.

My sons strayed a little in their eagerness to see everything there. They were young at the time, but gangly as young men are. The Security force at Windsor is quite serious about what they do, and barked at them. That was a few years before the comic Osama impersonator sneaked into the Castle and joined Prince William's birthday party two years ago. There was some considerable embarrassment about that, but nothing like the Muslim brothers of Slough rising up against the Queen.

A Sliugh of dispair, I suppose, and maybe that is where the expression comes from.

The Sheik of Slough says he would like to see Tony Blair hanging upside down outside Number 10 Downing street like Benito Mussolini after the Partisans got done with him.

Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad is proud of the nineteen Saudis who highjack the airplanes on 9/11, and swears his fealty to Osama bin Laden. He claims that if Europe does not accept bin Laden's offer of truce, then Muslims will have an obligation to attack the West in its soft underbelly. At home. In Europe.

I could not get much further in the morning news. I sighed and sipped my coffee.

I get my oil changed periodically at the All American Service station down the street. The place is run by a nice older man who wears a skullcap. He was originally from India, Great India, before the partition that brought independence. His family was hounded from their home by irate Hindus. He was just a child, and ther is still sadness in his eyes when we chat about it, waiting for his son with the fierce black beard to finish servicing my Chrysler.

I have not talked to the son, who by now should be as American as I am. But I wonder. Maybe that is another point the Sheik wants to make. Drive a wedge in our diversity. Invite a social responsse that with begin a great cycle of distrist and blow our tolerant comity apart. Hmmm.

In 1919, legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke for the majority in his ruling on Schenck vs the United States. The Constitutional issue of the case was whether or not a Socialist cell had the First Amendment protected right to circulate pamphlets encouraging young men called by the Selective Service to avoid the draft.

Justice Holmes carefully weighed the power of ordinary words, which normally are protected as the freedom of speech, which is the right to say any damned thing we feel like.

That is an important right, and I tend to be an absolutist on that score. Holmes walked a fine line on this one. He said that if the words are "of such a nature and used in such circumstances a to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils which Congress has a right to prevent."

That was a bit legalistic, so he clarified the point. "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

I finished my coffee and as I wandered off to get ready for the working week I parsed the sentence. It seems like "falsely" is the key word. It is entirely proper to yell "Fire!" if there really is one, is it not? Or if you truly believe there is?

I guess that is where Sheik Omar is coming from. He apparently thinks the fire is burning, and he is just being helpful in pointing it out.

I am increasingly apprehensive about the passive-aggressive nature of our fellow People of the Book. Does he really want to fire the flames that could burn as fiercely as those of the Fascists? Does he really think his Faith is so invincible that he would bring back the robust legions of Christian soldiers who subjugated the globe, and then kindly relinquished it to the vanquished?

It must have been taken as a weakness. And perhaps it is the nature of the secular humanism that replaced the fire and brimstone oratory from the pulpits of the West. Nothing, but thinking makes it so.

Shakespeare had the Melancholy Dane muse in Act Two of Hamlet. "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me it is a prison."

So the Bard and the Supreme Court seem to have arrived at an odd confluence on the issue. Let's put the Sheik in prison before he manages to convince some young men to take him seriously.

You cannot yell fire in a crowded theater. Not with so much tinder on the floor.

But I hear voices rising, and they do not appear to care about the law.