Backing anti-racism protests, renowned intellectuals lament intolerance 'on all sides'

[July 08, 2020]  By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) - More than 150 world renowned academics, writers and artists signed a letter published on Tuesday expressing support for global anti-racism protests while lamenting an "intolerant climate that has set in on all sides".

American linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, veteran women's rights campaigner Gloria Steinem, authors J.K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie, and journalist Fareed Zakaria were among the signatories.

The letter on "justice and open debate" was published by Harper's Magazine and will appear in many leading global publications.

It supported ongoing demonstrations against police brutality and racial inequality that have spread from the United States across the world, following outrage over the death of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd, after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes while detaining him in Minneapolis on May 25.

However, the letter also said that the sentiments unleashed have hardened a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments to the detriment of open debate, and allowed ideological conformity to erode tolerance of differences.

"As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second", the letter said, adding that resistance should not be allowed to "harden" into a brand of "dogma or coercion".

Free exchange of information and ideas are becoming more constricted on a daily basis, the letter warned.

It said that censoriousness was spreading widely across the culture through public shaming, a tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a "blinding moral certainty" and an intolerance of opposing views.

Noam Chomsky, a leading American intellectual highly critical of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, gestures in Amman May 17, 2010. Chomsky was denied entry to the West Bank on Sunday by Israeli immigration officials. REUTERS/Majed Jaber

"The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other", the letter added.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)

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