The halo of free speech

There has been an uproar online this week over a racist cartoon of Michelle Obama depicted as a monkey. The image originally appeared on an obscure Chinese blog called "Hot Girls," but catapulted to prominence when it turned out that it was also the first hit for "Michelle Obama" on Google Images.

As you might expect, there were a rush of calls for Google to remove the offensive image, but the search giant refused. (Don't run to your computer to look for it now - you won't find it there anymore; but not because Google capitulated, the Chinese blog took it off.)

Google is aware that it is on an extremely slippery slope here. Give in to one pressure group and every other one will be clamoring for the search engine to get rid of any picture or article that offends someone's sensibilities. The world's most popular site simply mirrors the information available on the Web, tabulating all of it according to a complex set of algorithms. If it was to start judging that information, it would lose all relevance. The only exception is when Google is forced to remove links for legal considerations.

The last similar Google furor took place over two years ago and not surprisingly it was over the word "Jew," when it turned out that the one of the top results on Google was (and still is) for the anti-Semitic Web site jewwatch.com, which dedicates itself to tracking members of the Chosen People - real and imagined - in every walk of public life. An online petition was launched, many thousands signed and Google, quite rightly, stood fast and refused.

The attempts to censor Google echo a long-forgotten battle; that of Manchester businessman Marcus Shloimovitz against the Oxford English Dictionary during the 1970s. Shloimovitz spent long years and a substantial fortune fighting a legal battle against the most respected dictionary in the English-speaking world in an effort to make it drop two of the definitions for the word "Jew."

The first was the noun: "person who drives hard bargains, usurer." The second the verb "to Jew": meaning to "cheat, bargain with (person) to lower his price."

After over four years of legal hearings, the high court judge ruled against Shloimovitz on a technicality, effectively accepting the Oxford University Press's position that the dictionary was there simply to record the use of words and their history, not to act as a guardian of English, keeping the language clean.

Despite winning the case and continuing to print the offensive definitions in subsequent editions, the OED did make an interesting change. In 1976, the sixth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary was published and in it, for the first time, a tag was added to each of the two definitions: "(derog.,colloq)." Thus denoting the fact that while the word might have been used in such ways in the past, and still is to this day, it is not the formal meaning and is seen as both negative and derogatory toward Jews.

That same year, the second volume of the 6,000 page-long OED Supplement was published, for the letters H-N. A lengthy entry on "Jew" chronicled a long history of the word being used in less than positive references, and added the stern warning: "These uses are now considered to be offensive." Interestingly, just as some Jews were dissatisfied with this outcome, there were linguists at the time who also criticized the OED's then chief editor Robert Burchfield for even going that far.

My favorite English writers - Rudyard Kipling, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell and Graham Greene - all wrote during the first half of the 20th Century and all occasionally showed a tendency toward anti-Semitism (yes, even the secular Saint George).

The devious Greene, who lived until 1991, actually censored his own work, removing anti-Semitic elements from some of the later editions of his early books being reprinted in a more enlightened age. I used to be dismayed every time I happened upon another example of their Judeophobia but I learnt to relish the challenge of appreciating a masterpiece despite it being littered with some of the writer's obnoxious views.

Sanitizing novels to bring them up to date with our politically correct generation is a pathetic exercise, though some have of course attempted to do so; pundits pontificating about the need to rid the Web of racist filth are equally pointless.

Google mirrors what is on the Web and the Web mirrors views that are already out there. While there may be an argument in the fact that the Internet makes it much easier to disseminate these beliefs than was previously possible in books and pamphlets, the Internet also makes it much more difficult to keep any of this poison under wraps.

Beyond that, the Web is actually the most effective tool to counter this sort of stuff. Online censorship is not only technically impossible, it will almost certainly backfire, attracting more attention to racism and gifting it with the halo of free-speech martyrdom.

(This column is partly based on a blog post I wrote in 2007)