PEN Succumbs to the Anti-Free Speech Mob

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing Opinion writer.

In 2015, after Islamist gunmen murdered a dozen people in an attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, I joined the American chapter of PEN International, PEN America. It is the most respected writers’ organization in the country; past presidents include Dorothy Thompson, Norman Mailer and Salman Rushdie. When PEN awarded the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo its Freedom of Expression Courage Award later that year — lauding the magazine for “its dauntlessness in the face of one of the most noxious assaults on expression in recent memory” — it acted in the best traditions of its august history which, since its founding in 1922, has meant refusing to bend to........

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