Posts Tagged ‘free speech’
Free speech and mental Perdition: The self-censoring mind of a fanatic
Howard Jacobson writes in the Independent on ignorance, self censorship and the vanity of knowing your view and no other is right:
This is the terrifying paradox of zealotry: no one hates humanity more than those who believe they know what’s best for it…
Another way of putting this is to say that the fanatic is someone who has only ever read one book. It is right, therefore, to ask not only what the appeal of the story he goes on reading is, but where he heard it, who read it to him first, and where and why it goes on being told. Religions, like cultures, understand themselves through narrative. How we came into the world, what we were created for, what are our triumphs and our losses. These narratives enjoy a fearful pertinacity. They have the capacity to console but also to inflame. There are still people fighting over territory declared holy by their national stories a millennium ago.
So it was heartening to see the French – offenders and offendees, or at least some of them – putting aside their individual stories for an hour. But the anti-immigration demonstrations in Germany were reminders that masses on the move are frightening as well as stirring. A group that has only ever read one book is a fanatic group.
For all the day-long defiance of terror, fear continues to stalk the conversation. Fear for Muslims, for example, and fear of them. May I make a plea, in the name of varied reading – because it’s better to read even two books than one – for the right to hold both positions. I don’t want to see anti-Muslim demonstrations on the streets. I no more want to see Muslims homogenised and traduced than Jews. But must that mean I cannot ask where the single story beloved of the fanatic is engendered, and if it should turn out that the most moderate Muslim unthinkingly propounds a narrative that fuels the fanatic mind – an anti-Western, anti-Semitic, victim-driven narrative – can I not plead with him to shade it a little, to remember that the best stories liberate us from our pains and grievances into understanding other people’s.
In 1987, Bernard Levin wrote in The Times of the play Perdition:
In 1987 a debate occurred in public sphere on a play written Jim Allen, someone who had previously been associated with Gerry Healy’s organisation the Socialist Labour League, a forerunner to the WRP. The play was called Perdition and was in the genre of faction, a fictional play with historical facts brought in. The historical facts in this case was that of the Zionist leaders in Hungary during the Holocaust and of Zionism in general during the 1930s and 1940s. The play was loosely based on the Kasztner trial that occurred in Israel in the 1950s.
Allen was quoted in Time Out, (January 21-28, 1987) declaring the play:
…the most lethal attack on Zionism ever written, because it touches on the heart of the most abiding myth of modern history, the Holocaust. Because it says quite plainly that privileged Jewish leaders collaborated in the extermination of their own kind in order to bring about a Zionist state, Israel…
Levin responded:
…free speech is for swine and liars as well as upright and honest men. I have insisted that any legally permissable view, however repugnant, is less dangerous promulgated than banned, and I would defend its promulgation even if the opposite were true. I have glorified in the central paradox of democracy, which is that it tolerates, and must continue to tolerate, the activities of those who wish to destroy it.
In all the beliefs I have lived, and I am minded to die in them; how then can I defend the suppression of this play? I cannot, which is not to say that if it had never been written it now should be. But it exists, and ‘He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.’ With a heavy heart, I yet must say it: Let them have their play.
Free speech. No buts…
It is a shame he is no longer with us.
The Islamophobia generating honour brigades: turning Muslims into a race
Demonstrators holding a banner which reads, ‘unity against Islamophobia’, to protest against the conference on the Islamization of France and Europe, in Paris, Saturday, Dec. 18, 2010.(AP Photo/Michel Euler)
There has been lots of talk of Islamophobia. But how real is it? Are the mob about to race riot? Is every outrage by Islamist nuters – and many crimes in France involve jihadis hunting Jews – followed by a bout of anti-Muslim violence? The Press would have us think so.
The prime minister of France, Manuel Valls has an opinion:
“It is very important to make clear to people that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS,” Valls told me. “There is a prejudice in society about this, but on the other hand, I refuse to use this term ‘Islamophobia,’ because those who use this word are trying to invalidate any criticism at all of Islamist ideology. The charge of ‘Islamophobia’ is used to silence people. ”
Valls was not denying the existence of anti-Muslim sentiment, which is strong across much of France. In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack, miscreants have shot at Muslim community buildings, and various repulsive threats against individual Muslims have been cataloged. President Francois Hollande, who said Thursday that Muslims are the “first victims of fanaticism, fundamentalism, intolerance,” might be overstating the primacy of anti-Muslim prejudice in the current hierarchy of French bigotries—after all, Hollande just found it necessary to deploy his army to defend Jewish schools from Muslim terrorists, not Muslim schools from Jewish terrorists—but anti-Muslim bigotry is a salient and seemingly permanent feature of life in France. Or to contextualize it differently: Anti-Muslim feeling appears to be more widespread than anti-Jewish feeling across much of France, but anti-Jewish feeling has been expressed recently (and not-so-recently) with far more lethality, and mainly by Muslims.
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Posted: 17th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Free Speech: Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, Liam Stacey and Charlie Hebdo are all victims of thought censors
What percentage of terrorists attack in Europe are perpetuated by Islamists?
So here are some statistics for those interested. Let’s start with Europe. Want to guess what percent of the terrorist attacks there were committed by Muslims over the past five years? Wrong. That is, unless you said less than 2 percent.
As Europol, the European Union’s law-enforcement agency, noted in its report released last year, the vast majority of terror attacks in Europe were perpetrated by separatist groups. For example, in 2013, there were 152 terror attacks in Europe. Only two of them were “religiously motivated,” while 84 were predicated upon ethno-nationalist or separatist beliefs.
But what of the fear of Islamists?
Can fear be linked to the arrest of Dieudonné M’bala M’bala? He was pinched for posting on Facebook “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly” — a portmanteau of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the racist who murdered four Jews in a Paris kosher store.
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Pope Francis V Jesus Hebdo: The ‘other cheek’ is a clenched fist
Pope Francis has a few words on free speech and the murder of journalists, police and Jews in Paris:
“If my good friend Dr. Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch. It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.” …
“There are so many people who speak badly about religions or other religions, who make fun of them, who make a game out of the religions of others. They are provocateurs. And what happens to them is what would happen to Dr. Gasparri if he says a curse word against my mother. There is a limit.”
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Free Speech: The Sun finds a ‘dark-skinned’ capitalist sellling Charlie Hebdo magazines in Gloucestershire
The Sun is cheering for free speech. It is cheering for Ila Aghera, the “defiant” shopkeeper selling copies of Charlie Hebdo magazine to the many French speaskers and peopls who can say “Jew Suis Charlie” in her area. The Sun loves her:
A VILLAGE shopkeeper is defiantly selling the “survivors’ issue” of Charlie Hebdo despite fears she could be targeted by extremists. Ila Aghera, 54, made her brave stand as all three million copies of the satirical magazine sold out in France.
Does she charge more for carriage?
It was published as al-Qaeda chiefs behind last week’s massacre in Paris vowed further atrocities. And a London cafe owner refused to take down his Je Suis Charlie sign despite a death threat from a “raving” Islamist fanatic.
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Posted: 15th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Free Speech: Sky News recoils in face of Charlie Hebdo cover
Live on Sky News we have free speech campaigner Caroline Fourest. She’s astounded that Sky won’t show the subject of their story: the cover of Charlie Hebdo.
So. She holds up the copy. And the camera recoils:
Even the BBC weren’t that cowardly…
PS – if you squint you make out copies of the Anarchist’s Cookbook, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and all of these songs on the shelves.
Posted: 15th, January 2015 | In: TV & Radio | Comment
Free speech means defending the racist: Dieudonné must be innocent
Dieudonné fans
Oh, the irony: the racist French entertainer Dieudonné is the subject of a criminal investigation into something he wrote on Facebook. The anti-Semitic Dieudonné – whose taps into the anti-Semitism now rife in France – was arrested and charged with “defending terrorism.”
What did he write? Well:
“Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly.”
Coulibaly is the racist who stormed the kosher store and murdered some Jews.
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Posted: 15th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Bristol University Student Union bans Charlie Hebdo for being ‘unsafe’
You can have Paris. But you free speech fundamentalists can never have Bristol University campus. The local Student Union’s “Safe Space” policy forbids free speech lest it fuddle a student’s minds and makes them confront ideas they don’t like.
Bristol University SU officer Alex Bradbook is here to protect the fragile:
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Free Speech: New York Times Charlie Hebdo cowardice shames its fight to expose a secret history of the Vietnam War
Attorneys for The New York Times leave the Supreme Court in Washington on June 26, 1971 after presenting arguments against the government suit to prevent The New York Times and The Washington Post from publishing articles on the secret history of the Vietnam War. They are, from left: Lawrence McKay; Floyd Abrams; Alexander Bickel, who presented the Times case before the court; James Goodale, Times Vice President and William Heggerty. (AP Photo/Charles Harrity)
The New York Times did not publish the latest Charlie Hebdo cover:
Larry Buchanan spots this letter in the NYT:
This gem, buried on the letters page of Fridays paper, by the man who defended the nyt in the pentagon papers case.
@larrybuch
Posted: 14th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Drop your #JeSuisCharlie sign: the free speech fundamentalists demand it
Writing in the Huffington Post, Mehdi Hasan says he is ‘fed up with Free Speech Fundamentalists”.
You and I didn’t like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubya’s slogan: either you are with free speech… or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo… or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.
Well, that’s what the mainstream media are telling us. The march for free speech in Paris soon mutated into a march for unity. (Marching right next to Francois Hollande: Ali Bongo of Gabon, who recently who recently “suspended” 3 newspapers. 1 for SATIRE).
The people who slammed Charlie Hebdo when its offices were firebombed were keen to be seen to declare “Jew suits Charlie”, the phrase being a shorthand for ‘look how good I am’. The West’s war on free speech was not over when racist Islamist goons raided the Charlie Hebdo offices and slaughtered the staff. Free speech remains a fragile right.
If you support campus speech codes, ban debate, participated in a campaign to get a TV or radio show off the air, then as Iowahawk says, “drop your #JeSuisCharlie sign”.
Charlie Hebdo understands the fashionable with their Hebdo-branded sandwich-boards.
Fran Lebowitz go to right:
“If people don’t want to listen to you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?’ When I see someone wearing clothing with words on my first reaction is usually, ‘Ooo, I bet you’re really boring!’”
The magazine’s new cover sticks with Mohammed (as if they could choose another subject) and lampoons the weeping and righteous who use the magazine to advertise their sound morals. Others use the cover to show that they are sensitive to Muslims.
They all love Charlie Hebdo, but none are brave enough to be him.
@mlcalderone
NYT runs big news on homepage — “Mohammed Is on Cover of Charlie Hebdo” — yet doesn’t show that newsworthy cover:
Hasan goes on:
…In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.
Radicalised by images of US torture they murdered Jews? We can add “being Jewish” to the list of “provocations” then. And the killers shouted: “The prophet has been avenged.”
Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech.
None of us? Charlie Hebdo does. All of the people carrying “Jew Suis Charlie” signs do. Well, no of course they don’t. That’s just fashion, like wearing a Katherine Hamnett Me-shirt. Carrying a “Je suis Charlie” sign declaring #Illridewithyou or #bringbackourgirls (and pity fashion victim Michelle Obama for that display of indulgence) is vanity; wearing your beliefs as something you can pull on and off as the mood takes.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher greets fashion designer Katharine Hamnett, wearing at-shirt with a nuclear missile protest message, at 10 Downing Street, where she hosted a reception for British Fashion Week designers.
Ref #: PA.16297039
And irony of ironies:
French comedian Dieudonne has been arrested for allegedly defending terrorism in a Facebook comment referencing last week’s attacks in Paris.
Free speech no buts.. He should not be arrested.
Playing on the slogan “Je suis Charlie”, the comedian wrote: “Tonight, as far as I’m concerned, I feel like Coulibaly.” Amedy Coulibaly is accused of murdering a policewoman and then storming a kosher supermarket, shooting dead four shoppers.
Hasan:
We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.
And yes. How we decide those lines is by testing them and with open debate. So. We are all for free speech.
As ever the mood turns to – yep – the Jews, who really were targetted victims of the slaughter (unless you watch CNN and know that if you want to murder Muslims you find them in the kosher store):
Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No?
The Holocaust was industrial mass murder. Well, to those who believe it happened; to those who believe the Jews are worthy of it (they never learn); to those who put on the anti-Semitic Holocaust cartoon show:
More than 200 Holocaust cartoons from around the world are on display at a museum in the Iranian capital, Tehran. Organisers of the exhibition say they are testing the West’s commitment to freedom of speech. A competition to choose the drawings was announced in February, in response to caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad published by European newspapers. Israel’s Holocaust authority, Yad Vashem, criticised the exhibition, calling it a “flashing red light”.
The drawings were chosen from nearly 1,200 entries received from various countries including the United States, Indonesia and Turkey. One of the cartoons shows the Statue of Liberty holding a book on the Holocaust in one hand and giving a Nazi salute with the other.
No Jews murdered the cartoonists who mocked the victims of the atrocity that was the Holocaust. The Holocaust it not a religious figure. Unless Hasan says it is. Unless the Holocaust now defines the Jews more than their Covenant with God. If Jews can be portrayed as barbaric murderers and child abusers who never learned the ‘lesson’ of the Holocaust, maybe they can be rendered less. Rather than being the victims of industrial mass murder, they can be sub-humans who, you know, were asking for it.
Holocaust denial is rife in the Middle East. So too is anti-Semitism. There are so many parallels between the imagery used by classic anti-semitism and anti-Zionist propaganda:
Cartoonist Kirshen notes:
After the Holocaust proved the victimhood of the Jewish people, Antisemitism and the Antisemitic memes of the image-codes needed to evolve into a holocaustresistant form which would deny Jewish victimhood. Moral Inversion Codes invert the horrors by depict the victims as the perpetrators. Thus the Jew becomes the Nazi or the terrorist suicide bomber, rather than their victim.
When you’re a Jew you look for codes.
Echoes:
The blood libel form twelfth century in Norwich. The story went that Jews had killed a twelve year old Christian boy named William for Passover. ed.
Michael Howard – then Tory leader
The Guardian
The Sydney Morning Herald – not an Israeli but a Jew
Norway’s Dagbladet showed this:
JPOST: ln Schindler’s List, one of Norway’s largest newspapers recently published a political cartoon comparing Prime Minster Ehud Olmert to the infamous commander of a Nazi death camp who indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them at random from his balcony. The caricature by political cartoonist Finn Graff appeared on July 10 in the Oslo daily Dagbladet. It has prompted outrage among the country’s small Jewish community and led the Simon Weisenthal Center to submit a protest to the Norwegian government. In the cartoon, Olmert is likened to SS Major Amon Goeth, the infamous commandant of the Plaszow death camp outside of Krakow, Poland, who was convicted of mass murder in 1946 and hanged for his crimes. While in charge of Plaszow, Goeth would go out to the balcony on his villa, and engage in target practice by aiming his telescopic rifle and firing at random at Jews imprisoned there, often killing them. The scene was famously depicted by director Steven Spielberg in his 1993 film, Schindler’s List..
The same paper came up with this. The demon at the head (and like that fork) and the woman at the feet are both blood-soaked Jews.
‘Mistreatment? No, this is a tradition, an important part of our belief.’
The accusation is that Jews are barbaric. But the same goes for Muslims, who also cricumcise boys. One glance at their genitals indicate that they are subhumans, unworthy of mercy. Jews should abandon their ‘barbaric’ customs and adopt a civilised way of life. Deprive Jews of the empathy normally felt for human beings.
A decree by the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV commanded Jews to leave their sons uncircumcised or face death. This decree against the ‘barbaric’ behaviour of an ‘uneducated’ people, issued by an imperial civilisation, was part of a comprehensive campaign to destroy the Jewish way of life. The revolt against the decree, led by Judah Maccabee, is still considered one of the defining moments of Judaism.
It is difficult to make sense of the strong views held by campaigners and policymakers who seek to criminalise and pathologise the circumcision of Jewish and Muslim boys. Last Tuesday, a resolution passed by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe condemned male circumcision as a ‘violation of the physical integrity of children’. Unlike Antiochus IV, these parliamentarians did not use the narrative of a civilisational mission against barbarism to justify their assault on people’s way of life; instead they used the apparently neutral language of health and child protection to legitimise their crusade. The Council’s resolution called on governments to ‘clearly define the medical, sanitary and other conditions to be ensured for practices such as the non-medically justified circumcision of young boys’.
The Council’s attempt to stigmatise circumcision coincides with a growing campaign against circumcision in Scandinavia and Germany. In recent weeks there has been a veritable culture war against this age-old practice. Most of the time, the crusade is conducted in a very politically correct language which avoids any explicitly culturally loaded terminology. In this vein, the German Social Democratic parliamentarian Marle Rupprecht argued that the Council’s resolution, which she supports, ‘does not intend to stigmatise any religious community or its practices’. As far as she is concerned, it’s all about the child – and if the campaign against circumcision inflames anti-Semitism, well, that is a price worth paying for this holy cause, apparently
Having picked out the Jews – always the Jews – as the West’s scared cow (attack them and attck all the West holds dear; the Jewish State a scapegoat for globalization and modernity), Hasan concludes:
Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists.
That a pretty low bar: murder is wrong.
I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.
A duty to challenge is what makes us free.
When you say “Je suis Charlie“, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo‘s depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?
Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic….
It’s for these reasons that I can’t “be”, don’t want to “be”, Charlie – if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine’s right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, “It is possible to defend the right to obscene… speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”
Ahmed was an innocent victim. Was he shot because he was a Muslim? The Jews were shot dead because of their religion. The Charlie Hebdo staff were shot dead for their beliefs. Hasan makes no mention of that. Instead anti-Semitism – which is murderous and very real – is again used as a weapon to show that those Jews get special treatment:
And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark?
Always the Jews.
…Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren.
If only the Jews has rhino hides it might have stopped the Islamists’ bullets.
You could see Jews and Muslims and blacks and browns as the Others, who fight for a place in Europe. But easier to compare and copntrast. Easier to show your own side as the bigger victims.
And then – for the third time – Hasan shows how Jews get preferential treament:
Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent “extremists” committed to the “overthrow of democracy” from appearing on television.
You could pick any number of World leader whose committment to free speech and freedom credentials would wilt under scrutiny. But he picks the one Jew. You could pick on Turkey, a nation leading the world in journalist imprisonment.
But he picks the Jew. He picks the Holocaust.
Pick. Pick. Pick. Until it bleeds…
But it was all about free speech. And free speech with no buts. Voltaire proclaimed: “I disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.”
So. Say it. We’ll exhange views. No-one will get hurt. It’s good to talk…
Posted: 14th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Charlie Hebdo: The BBC and New York Times reject Jew Suis Charlie and Muhammad’s tears
The Charlie Hebdo cover is all over the web. For those of you have not yet seen it, it’s here below. Charlie Hebdo manages to reproduce the character at the centre of the controversy (no choice there) whilst mocking the people who before the massacre slammed the magazine for causing offence and now brandish the legend ‘I am Charlie’ as a advert to their own good morals. Who needs a cross on a necklace when you have a Charlie Hebdo magazine tucked under your arm?
Three million copies of the so-called “survivors’ edition” are being printed. The usual print run is 60,000. So. Buy a copy and show off your commitment to free speech. But, better still, exercise it.
The cover shows Muhammad shedding a single tear under the headline: “All is forgiven”. He holds the message: “Je suis Charlie.”
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Free speech is now compulsory: here are the rules
Free speech is compulsory in England:
A council spokesman said:
“Everyone verbally exercising their freedom of speech at the same time not only contravenes a noise pollution bylaw, but also makes it difficult for our many council stenographers who are trying to illicitly record what everyone is saying”.
By Richard Littler (and here), who soemtimes writers for Flashbak.com
Barack Obama backs San Antonio Spurs over free speech and Paris
So. Barack Obama wasn’t at the Paris unity rally (formerly the rally for free speech):
The White House erred in not sending a higher-profile representative to this weekend’s solidarity march in France following a terrorist attack on a satirical newspaper, press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday.
“It’s fair to say we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,” Earnest told reporters at the White House.
“Had the circumstances been a little bit different, I think the president himself would have liked to be there,” Earnest added. . . .
What was Obama doing?
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This week’s Charlie Hebdo, featuring Muhammad: ‘All is forgiven’
This week’s Charlie Hebdo, featuring Muhammad: “All is forgiven.”
It’s brilliant!
Hipster hotel The Hoxton uses Charlie Hebdo murders to advertise its new Paris branch
Hipster hotel The Hoxton stands accsued of using the murders of Charlie Hebdo staff to advertise its business:
But who the hell is ‘charile’?
File under: it’s what they would have wanted.
Posted: 12th, January 2015 | In: The Consumer | Comment
Free Speech: But not for Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Matthew Continetti nails the free speech phonies:
…the outpouring of support for free speech in the aftermath of the Paris attack coincides with, and partially obscures, the degradation of speech rights in the West. Commencement last year was marked by universities’ revoking of appearances by speakers Condoleezza Rice and Ayaan Hirsi Ali for no other reason than that mobs disagreed with the speakers’ points of view. I do not recall liberals rallying behind Condi and Hirsi Ali then.
Free speech is under the cosh on campus. The students demand complaince.
What no Muslim anti-semitism? The media focus on Islamophobia ignores attacks on Jews
The Charlie Hebdo massacre and murders at a kosher supermarket in Paris got everyone talking about free speech.
(Their love of free speech ‘no buts…’ won’t last. The Paris free speech rally has morphed into a “unity” rally led by people with no interest in free speech. Gabon’s state-run media regulatory agency, the National Communications Council, suspended three newspapers in 2013, one of them a satirical work. That’s Gabon’s President Ali Bongo on the Paris march. Also marching was US campus censor Eric Holder and:
Let’s hope someone holds up a Charlie Hebdo cartoon and vomits on them all. If this is who you allow to lead a march to support free speech, you’re doing it wrong.)
But what about the racism?
Why-oh-why was the kosher store targetted? Anyone got the foggiest? Want to guess? The gunman and four hostages died at the Hypercasher supermarket near Porte de Vincennes. Yohan Cohen was murdered when he went for jihadi Amedy Coulibaly’s gun. Yoav Hattab died trying to grabbing one of two weapons held by the racist killer.
In all, Islamists murdered 17 people. Since then the BBC has written the following stories on Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. There have been attacks on Muslim places of worship and stores. Blessedly, the nutters have not hurt anyone.
BBC reports on the Anti-Semitic nature of the assaults:
January 10: “Charlie Hebdo hunt: Bloody end to sieges”
French President Francois Hollande not the BBC used the term:
“We must be implacable towards racism,” he added, saying that the supermarket attack was an “appalling anti-Semitic act”.
Well, if he says attacking a kosher supermarket was based on anti-Semitism, then we won’t argue.
That’s ONE story on anti-semitism.
BBC reports on Islamophbia since the assaults:
Total: 6 stories.
Does that seem odd to you? The real murders of Jews is less racially motivated than the largely perceived violent backlash against Muslims?
Jews are under threat in France. Only Jews – and this is true for the UK – pray behind guards and fences. Do men with walkie-talkies patrol your church or mosque at prayer time? Is your local Jewish school behind barbed wire? It is in the UK and it is in France.
Teacher Isaac Berg was in the kosher supermarket at the Porte de Vincennes 15 minutes before Friday’s hostage-taking.
“We’re afraid, but what more could the government do to protect us?” he said. “Our schools and places of worship have already been guarded for the last two years. People wouldn’t want a police escort to go shopping.”
In Toulouse in 2012, Mohammad Merah murdered a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school, pulling an eight-year-old girl by her hair to shoot her in the head.
In 2014:
French President Francois Hollande has spoken out against an “unbearable” assault on a young couple near Paris which ministers say was anti-Semitic. The two victims, a woman aged 19 and her boyfriend, 21, were tied up in his family’s flat and the woman was raped.
Their lawyer said three men had burst into the flat, telling the boyfriend: “You Jews, you have money.”
In 2014, a French jihadist was accused of murdering four people in a gun attack on the Jewish museum in the Belgian capital, Brussels.
Since the Paris attacks, the Guardian has written 25 stories in Islamophbia, including:
Charlie Hebdo: Norway didn’t give in to Islamophobia, nor should France. The Charlie Hebdo killers want to provoke anti-Islam sentiment among the public, just as Anders Breivik did. But France must resist
Muslims fear backlash after Charlie Hebdo deaths as Islamic sites attacked
Muslims in Europe fear anti-Islamic mood will intensify after Paris attacks
And two on anti-semitism:
Paris’s Jewish community retreats in shock after deadly end to siege – Residents of neighbourhood where policewoman was shot dead say gunman Amedy Coulibaya intended to target Jewish school
Charlie Hebdo: first they came for the cartoonists, then they came for the Jews
What about the right-wing Press?
Well, the Sun has produced one stopry on Anti-Semitism, which is just that quote again:
But the girlfriend of Islamic extremist gunman Amedy Coulibaly is believed to still be on the loose after the attack which French President Francois Hollande described as a “dreadful anti-Semitic act”. Police have said Hayat Boumeddiene, 26, is “armed and dangerous”.
And two menions of Islamphobia:
Shereen Nanjarani notes in her column: “Wednesday’s attack will only stir up more Islamophobia. And that’s what the terrorists want.”
Well, that and to kill Jews.
NY Daily News blurs cartoon of Mohammed, leaves hooked-nosed Jew
The other mention in the Sun is this:
THE partner of murdered Charlie Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier has described him as “a real hero”.
Jeanette Bougrab was with vehement left-winger Charbonnier – known as Charb – despite having been a minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative government.
She said: “Stephane was an exceptional person, a real hero, a hero I loved in spite of our very different political views.
“A war has been declared in France. If you have a pencil, someone will kill you. He knew he was under threat, but he still declined government protection for Charlie Hebdo. He was accused of every sin and nobody defended him. Securalism is the fight against fundamentalist, he was ready to die for his ideas. But today those who defend secularism are accused of Islamophobia.”
Such are the facts…
Posted: 11th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (2)
Germany’s Hamburg Morgenpost attacked after reprinting Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons
First they came for Charlie Hebdo. Then they came for the Jews. Then people threw stones at the headquarters of Germany’s Hamburg Morgenpost, which had reprinted Charlie Hebdo’s Mohammed cartoons.
The paper says an incendiary device was thrown into the cellar. Some files were burnt. No-one was hurt.
Posted: 11th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Charlie Hebdo to The Pope, Obama, Putin and Prince Harry: ‘We vomit on all these people’
You looking for a hero for the Charlie Hebdo story? Look no futher than Dutch cartoonist . When yold that Prince Harry, the Queen, The Pope, Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin are now ‘Je Suis Charlie Hebdo’, responded:
“We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”
Brilliant.
“It really makes me laugh. A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn’t know what it was. Now it’s the opposite. But if people are protesting to defend freedom of speech, naturally that’s a good thing.”
Let’s see how long this love of free speech lasts…
Spotter: Dutch daily Volkskrant.
Photo: Prince Harry signs a book of condolence at the French Embassy in Knightsbridge, London for the victims of the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, with photos of the 12 victims above.
Free Speech – Charlie Hebdo: leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry
Kenan Malik is writing on Charlie Hebdo and free speech:
The irony is that those who most suffer from a culture of censorship are minority communities themselves. Any kind of social change or social progress necessarily means offending some deeply held sensibilities. ‘You can’t say that!’ is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. To accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged. The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society. Once we give up such a right in the name of ‘tolerance’ or ‘respect’, we constrain our ability to confront those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.
Yet, hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a ‘racist institution’ and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam. What is really racist is the idea only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.
What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities. There are hudreds of thousands, within Muslim communities in the West, and within Muslim-majority countries across the world, challenging religious-based reactionary ideas and policies and institutions; writers, cartoonists, political activists, daily putting their lives on the line in facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for democratic freedoms; people like Pakistani cartoonist Sabir Nazar, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, exiled to India after death threats, or the Iranian blogger Soheil Arabi, sentenced to death last year for ‘insulting the Prophet’. What happened in the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris was viscerally shocking; but in the non-Western world, those who stand up for their rights face such threats every day.
What nurtures the reactionaries, both within Muslim communities and outside it, is the pusillanimity of many so-called liberals, their unwillingness to stand up for basic liberal principles, their readiness to betray the progressives within minority communities.
Barnaby Raine responds:
No. You don’t have to be a theocrat to worry about a magazine that caricatures and denigrates Muslims and their religious symbolism in a period when that othering is a prominent mechanism by which imperial violence is justified, you just have to be vaguely progressive. Some Muslims may not mind the cartoons. I do mind, not as a “nice white liberal” desperate to appease some alien community, but as a left-winger who opposes the politics implicit in and fuelled by mocking the marginalised.
On a more general note, the above article seems to mirror the French left’s racially charged language of secularism in drawing political dividing lines at an ideal rather than a material level. To be on the left is not a purely ideal position based on identifying the ‘best ideas’ and siding with them, it is above all a material position, it entails siding with the oppressed in any given power relation. The right takes the other side. Marching alongside the representatives of a state that bans Muslim women from dressing as they choose, bans pro-Palestine demonstrations and has banned Muslims from protesting against Charlie Hebdo in the past, and mobilising the idea of “free speech” in the defence of that state and in the defence of a magazine that mocks Muslims while the ‘War on Terror’ stigmatises them should all be considered fairly simply right-wing. This article even berates Charlie Hebdo for firing a cartoonist responsible for anti-Semitic caricatures. That is either naive in imagining that speech-acts occur in a vacuum rather than potentially involving material consequences, or it is reactionary for being aware of those consequences — steps towards the legitimisation of anti-Semitism, in that case — and not caring. Similar CH cartoons about Muslims have been much more common and have not resulted in firings, unsurprisingly given the surrounding political context. So express outrage at the murder of 12 journalists, of course. But is it really necessary to paint them as progressive heroes, when their social function was anything but that?We’d add one thing: Free speech not buts..
Je Suis Charlie Hebdo: but Obama, Clinton and all the free speech loving cowards don’t want to be him
“Je Suis Charlkie Hebdo”. Everyone’s saying it. Free speech rules! The British politians who want to regulate journalists; the Twitter narks; the police; and the newly Enlightened all just love Charlie Hebdo and that free speech.
This Buzzfeed writer’s catharsis is not untypical of the collective epiphany.
When in 2011 the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed following the trailing of a special edition mocked up to look like it was guest-edited by Muhammad (editor Stéphane Charbonnier had to live under police protection) Time magazine’s Paris Bureau Chief didn’t side with free speech. He went with this:
Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?
The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. The Wednesday morning arson attack destroyed the Paris editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo after the paper published an issue certain to enrage hard-core Islamists (and offend average Muslims) with articles and “funny” cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed—depictions forbidden in Islam to boot…. do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of “because we can” was so worthwhile? If so, good luck with those charcoal drawings your pages will now be featuring.
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Posted: 9th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Free Speech: The Sun says the cornerstone of our democracy is ‘nonsense’
Free Speech: The Sun champions the rights to think aand say what we like.
Following the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine, the Sun says “free speech is a cornerstone of our democracy”. We are in a “freedom fight”.
But how does that sit with the Sun’s featuring on Rochester Man Dan Ware’s “No Nonsense” manifesto.
Apparently, the Sun thinks it’s “nonsense” that anyone who burns a Remembrance Day poppy is not jailed.
When did a poppy – one you’ve bought with your own money or made with your own hands – become a sacred object?
Free speech: it’s the right to cause offence.
Spotter: hrtbps
Posted: 9th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comments (2)
Piss Christ! Associated Press censors library lest it provoke murderous Christianists
Piss Christ! Can we all say that in unison? Piss Christ!
Anyone shoot you in the face? Anyone threaten to murder you? Go on. Say it again. Louder. PISS CHRIST!
The Associated Press thinks nutters and victims of Christianophobia might be listening and driven to murder by hearing or seeing Piss Christ. To spare its clients the death threats and being murdered by Christianists, this bastion of free speech has removed Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) from its image library.
Piss Christ (no exclamation mark) is a photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. It is not to be mistaken for Christ Piss, which is used to describe the wine served at my niece’s Holy Communion.
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Charlie Hebdo were asking for it: it’s reverse ecumenicism, dummy
Supporters of Pakistan’s Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, or United Action Forum, hold a rally in Islamabad, Pakistan to condemn publication of cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in Denmark and France, after Friday prayers Feb 3, 2006. Pakistan’s parliament passed unanimously a resolution condemning cartoons of Islam’s prophet in European newspapers, and small protests were held in major cities as anger grew in this Islamic nation. (AP Photo/B.K.Bangash)
In 2006, Christopher Hitchens spoke about the Kurt Westergaard, the Danish caricaturist came under attack from Islamists after he had drawn a 2005 caricature of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb hidden in his Turban. The cartoon was one of 12 similar cartoons on Mohamed published Jyllands-Posten newspapers.
Westergaard was forced into an life on the run. Hardline Muslims wanted him dead.
One day, a 28-year-old man broke into Westergaard’s home. He was armed with an axe and a knife. Westergaard was home looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. Westergaard ran into his “panic room”. Stephanie was outside in the living room.
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Posted: 8th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
