There’s a few things to be said about this. Firstly, the tone of “Fitna” is reportedly so over the top and hysterical that no sensible person would be swayed by whatever arguments it tries to make. Therefore, having it out in the public domain isn’t doing anyone any harm. You shouldn’t ban things just because some people, or even most people, don’t like them. As John Stuart Mill explained in On Liberty, it’s better to have incorrect views aired publicly, where they can be evaluated and rejected by society at large, rather than try to stifle their expression, and in the process create a kind of cult following around them.

Of course the problem here is not that “Fitna” was banned by a government, which would be an outrage, but that it was pulled by a website because of security concerns. Thus, yet again, intimidation has carried the day, as it did back 2005/2006 when newspaper editors across Europe caved into fear and refused to publish offensive-yet-newsworthy cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. It is of course understandable that LiveLeak would remove the video after its staff receiving death threats and so on, but their decision is still disappointing.

However, the real villains of this piece are obviously not the LiveLeak management but the people behind the campaign of intimidation itself. Although their thuggery is remarkable, the most outstanding feature of these clowns is their stupidity. Through their crazed threats of violence they’ve managed to spin the news cycle 180º and have turned a minor news item about a scaremongering Dutch film into another major free speech issue in which the entire media establishment will be arrayed against them and not Geert Wilders. In fact, Wilders and his juvenile film are now likely morph from a minor and derided curiosity into a cause célèbre for the media, in which almost all of the political right and a good deal of the left will end up backing Wilders by default.

By strangling the release of “Fitna”, these enemies of free expression are only going to encourage more people to believe that maybe Geert Wilders has a point when he claims that Islam and Liberalism are incompatible. They’re making Wilders’ argument better than he could ever have, had he been allowed to speak.

It’s looking like a better question with each passing day.

Lest we lose sight of the real issue, this is what Sarkozy is considering boycotting.

From The Economist. It seems to be uglier that I at first thought:

Within a couple of hours, fires were blazing in the streets across much of the city. Some buildings caught fire too. A pall of smoke blanketed Lhasa, obscuring the ancient Potala—the city’s most famous monument, which covers a hillside overlooking the city. It is the traditional winter palace of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who fled into exile in India after an abortive uprising in 1959. Some of the demonstrators shouted slogans like “long live Tibet” and “long live the Dalai Lama”. One group trampled on a Chinese flag in the middle of a main road.

The rioting seemed primarily an eruption of ethnic hatred. Immigrants have been flocking into Lhasa in recent years from the rest of China and now run many of its shops, small businesses and tourist facilities. Tourism is the mainstay of Lhasa’s economy and has been booming in recent years, not least thanks to Tibet’s first railway link with the rest of China, opened two years ago. The visitors are mainly Chinese.

While this behaviour is understandable to some degree, coming as it is on the back of 50 years of oppression by another ethnic group, I’d like to take this opportunity to back away from my gung-ho ‘let ‘em have it!’ attitude of few posts back. Yes, China is very much the brute of this story, but that doesn’t excuse Tibetans taking out their frustrations on Han Chinese living in Tibet.