7aki Fadi

The headline might imply that there was freedom of speech in Jordan to begin with.

There never was complete freedom and you would be in denial to think that you have/had freedom of speech.

Self censorship is so ingrained in us Jordanians that we don’t even notice it anymore.

 Take the Jordanian blogspehre as an example; there is a chronic case of self censorship where bloggers are not really voicing their full opinions about the government in fear of government retaliation, a prime example is the removal of Abu Shreeks blog from the biggest Jordanian aggregator.

Instead of being able to practice freedom of speech freely on blogs or online media outlets you see Jordanians only commenting anonymously as the only way to be heard and not be hurt.

So what can we do to be heard? What can we do to stop the government from going down a slippery slope that is only going to lead to more oppression and to even less freedom of speech? Why is the government so worried about self image abroad? If you do your job like you should in the first place then you need not worry.

Who will hold the government accountable if people continue to be silenced?

I think that the more people practice freedom of speech the harder it’s going to be for the government to silence them. If one person practiced freedom of speech it is easy to silence him/her, if more people did, it will become more and more difficult for the voices to be silenced.

Shutting up one hundred voices is not like Shutting up one.

Speak up, express yourself and point a wrong if you see one. Don’t stay silent and say, I don’t care, it does not affect me. IT DOES affect you, you improve your country if not for you maybe for your children and their children.

When some people speak up their minds and criticize the government you benefit.

The bottom line is even if they choose to monitor and eventually shut up some voices, it will lead to more angry voices that are not in the reach of the hands of the government.

It is truly a sad day.

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Some qoutes In support of free speech

• “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing as S. G. Tallentyre in 1906 (commonly attributed to Voltaire, of whom Hall wrote a biography).
• “…if any opinion is compelled to silence, that opinion may, for aught we can certainly know, be true. To deny this is to assume our own infallibility.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859).
• “In a free state, tongues too should be free.” Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (1516).  
• “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” – George Orwell, Preface to Animal Farm (1946)
• “Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech.” Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992).
• “I have fought censorship all of my adult life. To me, the most precious of all rights in this marvelous country called the United States of America is the freedom to think, write and say whatever is on your mind… That freedom also extends to thoughts that are stupid, ignorant or incendiary. No one needs a First Amendment to write about how cute newborn babies are or to publish a recipe for strawberry shortcake. Nobody needs a First Amendment for innocuous or popular points of view. That’s point one. Point two is that the majority-you and I-must always protect the right of a minority-even a minority of one-to express the most outrageous and offensive ideas. Only then is total freedom of expression guaranteed.” Lyle Stuart in his introduction to The Turner Diaries
• “The price of freedom of religion, or of speech, or of the press, is that we must put up with a good deal of rubbish.” Robert H. Jackson
• “The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate.” US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in United States v. Schwimmer (1929).
• “He wrote something stupid, a bunch of words that say something we don’t agree with. It’s only words and ideas, it’s not like he beat someone up, he’s not committing violence or hurting people, he’s simply saying something offensive that we do not want to hear because we don’t like it. If we suppress ideas we don’t like, the proponents of those ideas will probably fester in secret societies and explode in double-plus ungood ways and we will like those results even less. If we allow people to see their ideas, and we ignore them, they’ve had their chance and they don’t have to feel cheated about not getting exposure. Or if we really don’t like their ideas and really need to keep them from convincing other people to believe in them, the answer is to tell people why and they’ll learn. But you can’t just beat people up because you dislike their stupid opinion. If we go that route, then anyone who is willing to use force can suppress any opinion they don’t like, and maybe support opinions we don’t like. Then what you get is a society of brutality where it isn’t the best ideas that are seen by others, it’s only the ideas that have the most vicious thugs to back them up. And it becomes very hard for people to be willing to express any opinion if someone can just pop them one because they say something someone else doesn’t like.” – Supervisor 246 in Paul Robinson’s Instrument of God.

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