A Puzzling Response to "The Freedoms We Fight For"

By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

A reader, Peter Murray, has a truly bizarre response to "The Freedoms We Fight For" (see my article here and my blog entry about it here):

Dear Sir,

And in the same week that a whistle-blowing civil-servant was legally gagged for spilling the beans that Bush was planning to silence the free and independent TV station, Al Jazeera.

Ouch!

best regards (and keep the irony coming)

Peter Murray.

This is perhaps the most puzzling criticism yet of one of my articles (although Aryan Nations leader August Kreis provides stiff competition).  To refer to Murray's argument as a logical fallacy would give it too much credit.  Murray is actually attempting to put forward a logical fallacy, the tu quoque fallacy.  Tu quoque literally means "you're another," and refers to the argument that an advocate cannot attack another's actions because the advocate has acted in a similar fashion.  In their book Arguments and Arguing, Thomas A. Hollihan and Kevin T. Baaske provide an example of this fallacy:

We know an individual who frequently leaves newspapers scattered all over the house.  When criticized by this behavior by his wife, he responded that she too left things scattered around the house.  We could not help but notice this use of an irrelevant reason.  Maybe both individuals are messy, but accusing the accuser of similar behavior does not invalidate the initial claim.

Thus, Murray's argument aspires to be a logical fallacy, but falls short even of that.  Instead, his position seems to be that because the Bush Administration allegedly strangled speech, I cannot criticize Islamists for threatening free speech with death.  In his incoherent response, Murray typifies many Westerners' sadly tepid response to these threats from Islamists.  He is so absorbed with his hatred of the Bush administration that he cannot bring himself to acknowledge, let alone stand up to, the Islamist assault on free speech.

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