Is Everybody Watching? (Update)

Mona Eltahawy wants everybody to watch her. So watch.



She hates the content of the sign she's defacing. Many do.  She believes her freedom of expression trumps the freedom of speech of the sign.  She believes her freedom of expression trumps the potential of spraying the woman, Pamela Hall (I believe) in the process.  She believes the police must provide her with a satisfactory explanation of why they are arresting before she has any obligation to comply.

Forget the content of the subway poster, a terrible idea by Pamela Geller regardless of whether you agree with her idea or find it facially racist.  That's a political issue best argued elsewhere.

But my free speech doesn't trump your free speech. Mona's free speech doesn't trump Pamela's free speech.  Mona can buy add space in the subway calling Pamela a racist. Mona, who styles herself a twitter journalist, can twit up a storm about it.  Mona can speak her mind, paint pictures, take videos and plaster YouTube.

What Mona cannot do is vandalize Geller's posters and absolve herself of liability be asserting that it's her right as an American to express herself freely. It's not her right to deface someone else's speech in the name of her own.

It takes little argument to explain why Mona Eltahawy is utterly wrong in her belief that she can do whatever she wants.  What makes this worthy of discussion is how her rationalization of the relative rights between her and the rest of the world works.  It begins with narcissism, the sadly pervasive force that drives so many people to believe that what they believe is more important than what anybody else believes, and they damn well have a right to make it known.

But this, while annoying, isn't wrong. Even narcissists have the right to express themselves, even if nobody cares.

It's the next step in twisted logic that gets her into trouble. Mona decided that the way in which she could best address Geller's speech, speech she hates, is to destroy it.  She wraps up this irrational reaction in her own right to free expression, because that made her feel capable of doing what she wanted to do.

By that reasoning, Pamela Hall, the photographer in the video, could have exercised her freedom of expression by lowering her camera on Mona's head with great velocity as an expression of her belief that vandalizing speech is wrong. And the police could have expressed their belief that being overly demanding is misguided by smashing Eltahaway's face into the nasty subway platform. And on it goes.

This sort of facile rationalization has become de rigueur on the internet.  Sling together a few words that have captured popular approval to form some muddy notion of right with a modicum of superficial appeal and you can do pretty much anything you want.

There is a reason why some folks engage in unpleasant scrutiny of poorly reasoned, poorly rationalized words on the internet. It's to stop people like this from wrapping themselves up in ignorance and acting upon it.  Many, particularly digital natives who use sloppy thinking to justify whatever they want to do, think it mean and "dickish" to explain why such facile mindlessness is wrong.

This is why.

Regardless of which side you take on the poster, what Mona Eltahaway did in response cannot be justified under any reasonable claim of right.  There were a million things she could have done to assert her beliefs. Defacing the posters is not one of them.  No matter who you are or how important you think you are in the universe, you do not have the right to oppose another person's speech by destroying it.

I hope everybody was watching.

Update: Per the Daily News, Mona is represented by an old friend, Stanley Cohen, no stranger to radical causes. 

“My client decided to take a stand based on principle,” Stanley Cohen said of Mona Eltahawy, who was arraigned on misdemeanor charges, including criminal mischief, in Manhattan Wednesday. The ad she defaced implies Muslims are savages.

“I wonder how New Yorkers would react to a poster with an oven that said, ‘Not enough Jews,’ ” Cohen reasoned.

While appreciating that Stanley doesn't have much to work with, and that he likely doesn't have much of a problem with measures more extreme than can be rationally justified. That could be because he's a very passionate lawyer.  Does that persuade you?

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