Censorship in the name of free speech

Source: Costs of War.

In response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks, France has ordered prosecutors to crack down in hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorification of terrorism.

A French comedian has been arrested for a Facebook post that allegedly condones the Charlie Hebdo attack.   France is said to be considering its own version of the USA Patriot Act.

Vandals are throwing dead pigs into mosques and firebombing mosques in Paris.

And here in the USA, the debate over the Senate torture report has vanished from the headlines.  That is very convenient.

There are hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan who had as much right to live their lives in peace as the Charlie Hebdo editors.  It is hard to keep more than a couple of important questions in mind at the same time.

I don’t like the humor in Charlie Hebdo, any more than I liked the humor in Hustler magazine in the USA.  That doesn’t make the Hebdo murders any less a crime, any more than the 1978 of Hustler publisher Larry Flynt, which left him in a wheelchair for life, was any less a crime.

I’ll give the writers and editors of Charlie Hebdo, and also Larry Flynt, credit for one thing.  They have the courage of their scurrilous convictions, and they are intellectually consistent.

That’s more than can be said for politicians and journalists who, in the name of defending the rights of Charlie Hebdo, violate the rights of everyone else.

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Are All Terrorists Muslims?  It’s Not Even Close by Dean Obeidallah for The Daily Beast.

Only a tiny proportion of terrorist attacks in the USA and Europe are committed by Muslims.  Most are by radical nationalists, radical right-wingers and radical left-wingers.  And, yes, there are Buddhist, Jewish and Christian terrorists.

France Arrests a Comedian for His Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the West’s “Free Speech” Celebration by Glenn Greenwald for The Intercept.

Charlie Hebdo attacks raise fears of a European Patriot Act by Amar Toor for The Verge.

I Might Be Charlie by Ta-Nehisi Coates for The Atlantic.

French colonists in Algeria adopted a dehumanizing racism toward the Algerian Arabs greatly resembling the racism that justified slavery and Jim Crow in the United States.  About five-sixths of the Arab immigrants to France are from Algeria, a parallel to the Great Migration of African-Americans to the cities of the North.   And the things that ethnic French people say about Arabs are much like what white Americans say about blacks.

Buts Everywhere (plus a foot in a mouth) by B Psycho on Psychopolitik.

Jim’s Rule of Buts by Jim Henley on Unqualified Offerings.

 

Tags: Charlie Hebdo, France