On Line Opinion publishes a lot of material that is nonsense- respectable, but nonsense. That’s our function. We’re a Socratic space. Our role is not to tell you what to think but to provide space where advocates of different views can attempt to persuade you for themselves.
It’s not always a comfortable task, and not all material on the site is necessarily respectable. Take the forum. When, for example, war erupts in the Middle East we always get more than our fair share of anti-semitic posters. After a while others complain and demand moderation. Making the moderation decisions is not easy. If anything I err on the side of accommodation to the offender’s right to freedom of expression. I do this not just because of a belief in free speech, but because an idiotic view expressed openly generally exposes its true nature in a way that it doesn’t when it is locked away.
I don’t think these minority views taint the space. While the comments in isolation may be offensive, generally in the context of the debate there are a number of counter views that overpower it. Every community has its nutters.
Mel Gibson is a nutter who is in the news, and one who has done Jews everywhere a favour with his anti-semitism. The ugly face and the ugly words don’t sustain his world view, they undermine it.
Mel would be reasonably free to post these types of comments on the OLO forum, as long as he didn’t break any laws, but if he sent me an article based on them it wouldn’t see the inside of our back-end. What is allowed in conversational discussion doesn’t necessarily merit publication. Even a publisher with as wide an ambit as ours has to draw the line somewhere or it loses all its authority.
But it seems that official Presbyterian publisher John Knox Press doesn’t understand that there are boundaries. It is putting itself in the Mel Gibson category, not for publishing an anti-semitic treatise, but something not entirely unrelated. As reported in Christianity Today it has published a book Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11 by process theologian David Ray Griffin which claims that the “September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were orchestrated by the US government.” This is not too far from the alternate theory that persists in the Arab world that it was orchestrated by Jews.
Some critics describe the decision as “kooky”. I’d say more likely suicidal, at least for a publisher with pretensions to respectability. In any event, if Griffin is planning any op-eds to publicise the book or its sequel 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speaking Out it would be a waste of electrons to send it to my intray. But if he wants to join one of the debates on our forum, he’s welcome. He might even want to bring Mel with him.