Folie in France

Samuel Paty posthumously awarded French Légion d’honneur

Two teenage pupils charged with complicity in terrorist murder as slain teacher given France’s highest civilian award

Jon Henley Europe correspondent

 @jonhenley

Wed 21 Oct 2020 19.57 BSTFirst published on Wed 21 Oct 2020 15.53 BST​

The French teacher decapitated while returning home last week has been posthumously awarded the Légion d’honneur, hours after France’s anti-terrorism prosecutor said the killer had paid two pupils from the school to identify his victim.

At a private ceremony in the main amphitheatre of the Sorbonne university on Wednesday, President Emmanuel Macron bestowed the country’s highest honour on the family of Samuel Paty, 47, who was killed on Friday after showing his class two cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as part of a discussion on free speech.

An audience of about 400 people, including children, friends, relatives and former presidents, then paid tribute to the history and geography teacher in the university’s main courtyard, during an emotional public service broadcast live on television.

Paty was “a quiet hero”, a visibly moved Macron said in a 15-minute speech. “He was the victim of stupidity, of lies, of confusion, of a hatred of what, in our deepest essence, we are … On Friday, he became the face of the Republic.”

Addressing the dead teacher’s coffin, Macron said: “We will continue this fight for liberty and for reason of which you have now become the face, because we owe it to you. Because in France, sir, the lights will not go out.”.

Paty was stabbed and beheaded outside his secondary school in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, about 20 miles north-west of Paris, by Abdullakh Anzorov, 18, of Chechen origin, who was shot dead by police soon afterwards.

The murder has shocked France and prompted a crackdown on Islamic extremism. Police have raided dozens of suspected extremists and Islamist groups, with several likely to be dissolved. A mosque near Paris is to close for six months.

Earlier on Wednesday, the prosecutor, Jean-François Ricard, said that among seven people facing potential charges of association with criminal terrorists and complicity in a terrorist assassination were two pupils, aged 14 and 15, accused of accepting €300-€350 (£270-£315) to point the teacher out to his killer. On Wednesday night, AFP reported the pair had been charged with complicity in terrorist murder. 

Three of Anzorov’s friends, two of whom, aged 18 and 19, are suspected of driving him to the area and helping him buy a knife and other weapons, also face possible charges, the prosecutor said, as well as a parent at the school and an Islamist militant.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/21/samuel-paty-attack-two-pup...

LIVE: Macron Says France is 'Under Attack' After Deadly Stabbing in Nice (and vid)

https://www.france24.com/en/france/20201029-live-three-people-killed-sev...

"A man wielding a knife on Thursday killed 3 people in an attack at the Basilica of Notre Dame de Nice in southern France. A suspect has been arrested in the attack, which Nice's mayor has described as an act of terrorism. Follow our weblog below for real-time updates..."

France's Wahabi Secularists

http://normanfinkelstein.com/2020/10/29/frances-wahabi-secularists-read-...

"...All Muslims are now explicitly branded as fair game, and the public debate revolves around Charlie Hebdo's pornography and the alleged courage and wisdom it takes to publish their hateful caricatures or show them in class to 13 year-old pupils, many of them Muslims.

Our government is allies with the beheaders of Wahhabi Saudi Arabia and creates and supports terrorists everywhere, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to Libya to Syria to Yemen. In 2013 our Foreign Minister Fabius famously said that 'Al Nosra does a good job in Syria,' when he was protesting the US decision to brand them as terrorists.  And when these terrorists come back home and attack the wrong innocents, they pin the blame on the main victims of the West's plots, Islam and Muslims, before anyone can blame them...

The man shouldn't have been decapitated.  That was indefensible.

At the same time, there's no good reason for anyone to make an issue of Islam's prohibitions against depictions of the Prophet.

That particular rule is simply about making sure that Muslims don't start worshipping the Prophet instead of Allah.

Everybody should just respect that and give it a rest about trying to force Islam to change on that one.  It's just not worth it.

If Charles Hebdo had not published and republished these cartoons would these attacks have occurred? Yes you can wave a red flag in front of a bull but is it a wise thing to do?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54692802

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/10/31/orthodox-priest-injured-in-fre...

Cco
Please do not distort what I said, as I never blamed the victim.
I respect a person's right to say what they want whether it be religious or otherwise, as long as it is not inciting hatred. All I was saying, is when you are dealing with fanatics, religious or otherwise, for one's one protection, be careful about what you communicate, because you are dealing with psychologically unbalanced people. It is a tragedy all around presently in France, and Macron is facing an election next year to boot.

cco wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

The man shouldn't have been decapitated.  That was indefensible.

At the same time, there's no good reason for anyone to make an issue of Islam's prohibitions against depictions of the Prophet.

That particular rule is simply about making sure that Muslims don't start worshipping the Prophet instead of Allah.

Everybody should just respect that and give it a rest about trying to force Islam to change on that one.  It's just not worth it.

Ken, I usually like what you have to say, but this post is itself indefensible. The question is not "Can we force Islam to allow cartoons?", it's "Can people publish cartoons regardless of whether Islam permits it?" The latter is, whether or not people realize it, identical to the question "Should it be legal not to be Muslim?" The good reason for anyone to make an issue of prohibitions against blasphemy is [i]freedom of speech[/i], and yes, [i]freedom of religion[/i], which, if it has any meaning at all, must include freedom not to belong to a religion or observe its prohibitions. Who Muslims, or any other religious people, worship is up to them. It's not incumbent upon the rest of us to arrest anyone who might lead them astray by publishing the wrong thing, no matter how much violence theocrats commit to intimidate people who don't share their religion into accepting that it's just How Things Are Now. Normalizing this is a sign of abject moral cowardice on the part of the left, and a sign that we've abandoned everything [i]other[/i] than theocracy. Once there's a religious veto on speech, it's time for us all to just pack it in. If you think there's a single left-wing policy that doesn't offend anyone willing to commit religious violence even [i]without[/i] community sanction, you haven't lived in the same places I have.

If the people who were insisting on publishing cartoons of The Prophet were acting out of honorable, democratic, progressive intent, it would be one thing.  But that's never been what Charlie Hebdo and the right-wing Danish Islamophobes were about.   Everyone who insists on posting those cartoons is doing so for solely to incite hatred against all Muslims and, if possible, to provoke an all-out war between Islam and "The West"- a war that would lead to nothing but the slaughter.

Thers is nothing decent or progressive or in any way positive for the world in fighting for the right to publish cartoons of The Prophet, given that those cartoons are drawn solely to cause violence.

Why insist on a "right" that can have nothing but ugly, hateful, bigoted effects?

There simply isn't anything about wanting to post cartoons about Muhammad, a long-dead religious figure, a figure who can't fairly be held responsible for anything anyone does in his name today, that can possibly be worth causing another conflict on the scale of The Crusades-the kind of conflict that, today, would have to involve nuclear weapons-and causing something like that is the only reason anyone is pushing for the right to publish cartoons like this.  

There are free speech issues that can make a positive difference in life, that can liberate, that can change the world.

Fighting for the right to cartoons of The Profit isn't one of those.

Publishing those cartoons can't do anything but make life worse for us allm can't do anything but make reconciliation between Muslims and non-Muslims impossible.  No one fighting for that right is doing so for any reason other than hatred, malice and a wish to cause misery.  Why should anyone else be put a risk fighting to do something no one could ever have a valid, positive, transformational or liberating reason to do?  Something that can never have a positive effect on anything?

And if an allout, global war between "The West" and Islam ever did happen, nothing the Left wants could ever happen afterwards.  No form of hope and no possibility of any form of radical change could ever exist in the world after the mass carnage that would have to ensue.  Too many would have died for anyone to even think it was possible to make anything better or even good after that much loss.  The world would be soul-dead.  

cco wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

If the people who were insisting on publishing cartoons of The Prophet were acting out of honorable, democratic, progressive intent, it would be one thing.  But that's never been what Charlie Hebdo and the right-wing Danish Islamophobes were about.   Everyone who insists on posting those cartoons is doing so for solely to incite hatred against all Muslims and, if possible, to provoke an all-out war between Islam and "The West"- a war that would lead to nothing but the slaughter.

Thers is nothing decent or progressive or in any way positive for the world in fighting for the right to publish cartoons of The Prophet, given that those cartoons are drawn solely to cause violence.

Why insist on a "right" that can have nothing but ugly, hateful, bigoted effects?

There simply isn't anything about wanting to post cartoons about Muhammad, a long-dead religious figure, a figure who can't fairly be held responsible for anything anyone does in his name today, that can possibly be worth causing another conflict on the scale of The Crusades-the kind of conflict that, today, would have to involve nuclear weapons-and causing something like that is the only reason anyone is pushing for the right to publish cartoons like this.  

There are free speech issues that can make a positive difference in life, that can liberate, that can change the world.

Fighting for the right to cartoons of The Profit isn't one of those.

Publishing those cartoons can't do anything but make life worse for us allm can't do anything but make reconciliation between Muslims and non-Muslims impossible.  No one fighting for that right is doing so for any reason other than hatred, malice and a wish to cause misery.  Why should anyone else be put a risk fighting to do something no one could ever have a valid, positive, transformational or liberating reason to do?  Something that can never have a positive effect on anything?

And if an allout, global war between "The West" and Islam ever did happen, nothing the Left wants could ever happen afterwards.  No form of hope and no possibility of any form of radical change could ever exist in the world after the mass carnage that would have to ensue.  Too many would have died for anyone to even think it was possible to make anything better or even good after that much loss.  The world would be soul-dead.  

 

 

Ken, you have a tendency to make sweeping declarative statements about how [i]nothing[/i] good comes of this or that, [i]nobody[/i] wants free speech for non-racist reasons, and so forth. Sometimes, as in this case, they're not backed by evidence. The people pushing the decree that blasphemy is racism have done so with circular logic: Charlie Hebdo, they say, is racist for publishing blasphemous cartoons. We know the cartoons are racist because they're published by racists, and we know the publishers are racist because they published these blasphemous cartoons.

This, however, goes a step further: you're saying there is [i]no[/i] reason to commit blasphemy because it's [i]intended[/i] to cause violence, violence everyone should simply expect and normalize. We need to censor blasphemy because permitting it will cause a world war, and a world war can't be progressive, so let's implement censorship in the name of being "progressive".

This is not the left I recognize. This is a "left" that has agreed to become an adjunct to the regressive far right. Guess what? Women's rights anger religious conservatives too, and they're willing to commit violence over it. Should we eliminate women's rights in the name of preventing a world war? After all, they can't do anything but make reconciliation between theocrats and progressives impossible, right? Clearly there's no good reason to stand up for women's rights, since that can never have a positive effect on anything.

A world in which violence is normalized – in which Justin Trudeau makes a public speech saying the victims had it coming and we need to be careful not to "abuse" free speech to say anything that angers conservatives – is a world where the left no longer exists. And we, the left, helped usher it into being by agreeing that religion was something special, not to be questioned, not to be criticized, not to be challenged, but to be celebrated and protected as something "progressive" despite it being the world's oldest conservative institution. We've normalized misogyny, homophobia, child abuse, murder for blasphemy, and holy war, all in the name of anti-racism. And the thing is, once theocracy is entrenched, one thing it's not going to be short on is racism. Canada's religious institutions are the most segregated places in the country.

Freedom of speech cannot be equivalent to "freedom to say something that doesn't offend anyone religious". Freedom of religion cannot be equivalent to "freedom to be religiously conservative, but nothing else". [i]Saying these things does not make me a Christopher Hitchens who thinks Muslim countries can be made more progressive by invading them.[/i] The left has been hoodwinked by holy warriors who promise a free and progressive society once all the unbelievers have been exterminated. It is beyond horrifying to me. When the prime minister of Canada tells me I need to shut up or accept getting murdered, I am starting to feel a genuine existential threat.

I wasn't actually supporting the proposed law and no, I don't think nothing any religion thinks is blasphemous should ever be said.

I'm talking about a specific situation in which pushing for an insistence on this ONE particular thing- the right to post cartoons of The Prophet- when the response to that will always be violence and it can culminate in war, simply can't be worth it.

It might be raising at a point where tensions between the Islamic and Western worlds are not at a bloody fever pitch, but it can't serve any good purpose to fight for it if it leads to war-especially since the outcome of a war between "The West" and Islam can only be millions of people dead and nothing made better.

It matter why Charlie Hebdo is doing this.  It matters that Charlie Hebdo is acting solely because it wants all Muslims-even the ones who don't particularly care about this particular point- out of France and that it ultimate wants to have another go at the Crusades.

Context matters-and the contexts is a wish to cause slaughter on the part of Charlie Hebdo.

There's a difference between pushing for "free speech" and wanting to incite a war.

Thanks cco.

While I may not always agree with everything you say I appreciate your comments.

Ken Burch wrote:

 

It matter why Charlie Hebdo is doing this.  It matters that Charlie Hebdo is acting solely because it wants all Muslims-even the ones who don't particularly care about this particular point- out of France and that it ultimate wants to have another go at the Crusades.

Context matters-and the contexts is a wish to cause slaughter on the part of Charlie Hebdo.

Here's some context that does not matter your unsubstantiated statements.

Charlie Hebdo (French pronunciation: ​[ʃaʁli ɛbdo]; French for Charlie Weekly) is a French satirical weekly magazine,[4] featuring cartoons,[5] reports, polemics, and jokes. Stridently non-conformist in tone, the publication has been described as anti-racist,[6] sceptic,[7] secular, and within the tradition of left-wing radicalism,[8][9] publishing articles about the far-right (especially the French nationalist National Front party),[10] religion (Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism), politics and culture.

The magazine has been the target of three terrorist attacks: in 2011, 2015, and 2020. All of them were presumed to be in response to a number of cartoons that it published controversially depicting Muhammad. In the second of these attacks, 12 people were killed, including publishing director Charb and several other prominent cartoonists.

Charlie Hebdo first appeared in 1970 as a companion to the monthly Hara-Kiri magazine, after a previous title was banned for mocking the death of former French president Charles de Gaulle. ...

n November 1970, the former French president Charles de Gaulle died in his home village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, eight days after a disaster in a nightclub, the Club Cinq-Sept fire, which caused the death of 146 people. The magazine released a cover spoofing the popular press's coverage of this disaster, headlined "Tragic Ball at Colombey, one dead."[13] As a result, the weekly was banned.

In order to sidestep the ban, the editorial team decided to change its title, and used Charlie Hebdo.[2] The new name was derived from a monthly comics magazine called Charlie (later renamed Charlie Mensuel, meaning Charlie Monthly), which had been started by Bernier and Delfeil de Ton in 1969. The monthly Charlie took its name from the lead character of one of the comics it originally published, Peanuts's Charlie Brown. Using that title for the new weekly magazine was also an inside joke about Charles de Gaulle. ...

In 1991, Gébé, Cabu, and others were reunited to work for La Grosse Bertha, a new weekly magazine resembling Charlie Hebdo, created in reaction to the First Gulf War and edited by singer and comedian Philippe Val. However, the following year, Val clashed with the publisher, who wanted apolitical humour, and was fired. Gébé and Cabu walked out with him and decided to launch their own paper again. The three called upon Cavanna, Delfeil de Ton, and Wolinski, requesting their help and input. After much searching for a new name, the obvious idea of resurrecting Charlie Hebdo was agreed on. The new magazine was owned by Val, Gébé, Cabu, and singer Renaud. Val was editor; Gébé was publication director.

The publication of the new Charlie Hebdo began in July 1992 amidst much publicity. The first issue under the new publication sold 100,000 copies. Choron, who had fallen out with his former colleagues, tried to restart a weekly Hara-Kiri, but its publication was short-lived. Choron died in January 2005.

On 26 April 1996, François Cavanna, Charb and Philippe Val filed 173,704 signatures, obtained in eight months, with the aim of banning the political party Front National, since it would have contravened the articles 1, 2, 4, 6, and 7 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.[20]

In 2000, journalist Mona Chollet was sacked after she had protested against a Philippe Val article which called Palestinians "non-civilised".[21] In 2004, following the death of Gébé, Val succeeded him as director of publication, while still holding his position as editor.[22]

In 2008, controversy broke over a column by veteran cartoonist Siné which led to accusations of antisemitism and Siné's sacking by Val. Siné successfully sued the newspaper for unfair dismissal and Charlie Hebdo was ordered to pay him €90,000 in damages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo#:~:text=Charlie%20Hebdo%20fi....

I don't agree with much of what Charlie Hebdo does including its Muslim cartoons, but I support its right to freedom of speech until I see evidence behind your sensational "Charlie Hebdo is acting solely because it wants all Muslims-even the ones who don't particularly care about this particular point- out of France and that it ultimate wants to have another go at the Crusades." 

Provide the hard fact evidence that backs up your over-the-top statement. I am pretty sure you don't have an ounce of real evidence to back this up beyond you THINK you know what these people are thinking. Are you claiming that you are telepathic?

There was an interesting interview I heard with a French journalist based in Nice earlier today. She said that the news coverage and general attitude towards the horrific attack at the cathedral dwarfed or silenced the response to another terrorist attack in nearby Avignon. I remember on the day of the attacks both events were reported but the second one was sketchier. At the time, it sounded like some organized multi-pronged attack was at play (and some newspaper claimed that in both instances "Allah Akbar" was uttered. She reported that the Avignon gun attack was by a far-right anti-government militant and that the story was basically dropped and that his actions were not considered terrorism.

Right on, CCO, appreciate everything you are saying in this thread.    Thought the below was especially well put:  

"The good reason for anyone to make an issue of prohibitions against blasphemy is freedom of speech, and yes, freedom of religion, which, if it has any meaning at all, must include freedom not to belong to a religion or observe its prohibitions. Who Muslims, or any other religious people, worship is up to them. It's not incumbent upon the rest of us to arrest anyone who might lead them astray by publishing the wrong thing, no matter how much violence theocrats commit to intimidate people who don't share their religion into accepting that it's just How Things Are Now. Normalizing this is a sign of abject moral cowardice on the part of the left, and a sign that we've abandoned everything other than theocracy. Once there's a religious veto on speech, it's time for us all to just pack it in. "

"A world in which violence is normalized – in which Justin Trudeau makes a public speech saying the victims had it coming and we need to be careful not to "abuse" free speech to say anything that angers conservatives – is a world where the left no longer exists. And we, the left, helped usher it into being by agreeing that religion was something special, not to be questioned, not to be criticized, not to be challenged, but to be celebrated and protected as something "progressive" despite it being the world's oldest conservative institution. "

Mobo2000 wrote:

Right on, CCO, appreciate everything you are saying in this thread.    Thought the below was especially well put:  

"The good reason for anyone to make an issue of prohibitions against blasphemy is freedom of speech, and yes, freedom of religion, which, if it has any meaning at all, must include freedom not to belong to a religion or observe its prohibitions. Who Muslims, or any other religious people, worship is up to them. It's not incumbent upon the rest of us to arrest anyone who might lead them astray by publishing the wrong thing, no matter how much violence theocrats commit to intimidate people who don't share their religion into accepting that it's just How Things Are Now. Normalizing this is a sign of abject moral cowardice on the part of the left, and a sign that we've abandoned everything other than theocracy. Once there's a religious veto on speech, it's time for us all to just pack it in. "

"A world in which violence is normalized – in which Justin Trudeau makes a public speech saying the victims had it coming and we need to be careful not to "abuse" free speech to say anything that angers conservatives – is a world where the left no longer exists. And we, the left, helped usher it into being by agreeing that religion was something special, not to be questioned, not to be criticized, not to be challenged, but to be celebrated and protected as something "progressive" despite it being the world's oldest conservative institution. "

My first words in this thread were to describe what the extremists did as "indefensible".  That was as strong a condemnation of their acts as could possibly be made.

And again, I don't support an anti-blasphemy law of any sort.  

I'm just saying there are "free speech" battles that are truly "free speech" battles, and those that are not- those that are valid and worth fighting, and those that are not.  Fighting for the right to do these cartoons is not about any sort of freedom at all-it's about, at best, the right to taunt Muslims at a time when global war between Islam and "The West"- as if "The West" has any great claim to inherent moral superiority- could break out at any time, and to, at best, encourage greater hostility to Muslim communities in Europe, when everyone knows the vast majority of European Muslims have nothing to do with the small number of violent extremists who identify as Muslims and could do nothing to stop them.

Fighting for the right to make insulting depictions of The Prophet-btw, if anyone was wondering why I use that phrase, no I haven't become a Muslim, I simply use the term out of respect- is not necessary to make any possible point anyone would want to make about violent extremists who identify with Islam.  The reponsibility for the violence likes with the extremists themselves, not Muhammad- it's not as if The Prophet could have stopped them doing what they've done from beyond the grave, but refused to do so.

It's the difference between Catholic dissidents speaking out about corrupt, repressive practices within Catholicism, on the one hand, and bigoted Ulster Unionists/Loyalists doing so in Northern Ireland.  It's the difference between the kind of dissidence expressed by Matthew Fox and the Berrigan Brothers, on one hand, and "The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk" on the other.

Shailja Patel: Rape Cartoons are a Riot, Aren't They?

https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/16/rape-cartoons-are-a-riot-arent-t...

"...Cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed naked, on all fours, anus presented as target, are anti-clerical snigger fodder. Unless you and half the men and boys and boy children and baby boys you know and love are named Mohammed..."

I read it. It doesn't "prove" anything of the kind. It's an emotional argument that the invasion of Iraq, CIA torture, and children being bullies justify abolishing freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Neither of those follow, for me.

By analogy, some of Canada's religions (variants of Christianity, specifically) ran residential schools that were sites of physical and sexual abuse and part of an ongoing campaign of cultural genocide. Does that justify shutting down churches because of how deeply offended I and many others are at what they preach? Or to keep it cartoon-focused, should Jack Chick tracts, all of which are more hateful and offensive than anything Charlie Hebdo published, be banned in Canada? If a publisher were beheaded for publishing them, do you think Justin Trudeau would come out and say they had it coming?

To ask the question is to know the answer. Religious hate speech will never be limited in any way. It's only deserving of violence when it's speech that offends religious people, it seems.

I think there are 2 distinct issues here which are being implicitly conflated.

First, there is the issue of legal freedom of speech. Most of us agree that in general, law should guarantee freedom of speech. Some, like Greenwald and apparently cco, think that any infringement whatsoever on this principle is the thin edge of the authoritarian wedge. Personally, I think there are appropriate exceptions to be made, for material which is intentionally provoking violence against some minority group. Drawing the line is hard, but I think it needs to be drawn.

Second, there is the issue of what a properly socialized human being would do in various circumstances, and how we should regard these actions ethically. My ethical sense says that a well socialized human should try to be aware of the feelings of others, and avoid offending them if reasonably possible. Acting otherwise is being an asshole.

I don't think it should be against the law to be an asshole, but I also don't think that the guy who goads a sucker into a fight in a bar, beats him to a pulp, and  steals his girlfriend should be approved of by civilized people. Some cartoons are clearly the provocative work of assholes who know and intend that their actions will provoke a fight. This doesn't mean that the authors should be fair game for terrorism, but it does mean they are assholes.

I agree wholly, Michael. You contextualized it perfectly.

Well, cco, I would be pleased if you could quote anything I have ever posted, in this thread or anywhere else that indicates I support any religion. In fact, I have mentioned at least a dozen times that I am an atheist (raised Catholic, but rejected the faith at 17 years of age). My one post in this thread didn't mention religion or refer to it in any way. If you see it otherwise, you are making a mistake.

Ken Burch wrote:

cco wrote:

Y'know, every time I post in this thread, or any other thread having to do with religion, or speak out in the real world on any issue having to do with religion, there's a bit of a process I go through. In short, I ask myself whether it's really worth it. I remind myself that while I am part of a minority group (atheists) that's specifically attacked in the theocratic "supremacy of God" preamble of Canada's Charter of Rights and Freedoms, it's a minority nobody really knows I belong to unless I tell them (or refuse to attend a religious service I'm being pressured to attend). I haven't been subjected to the Canadian Inquisition the same way indigenous peoples have been. I didn't grow up as a Duplessis orphan. The religious violence and bullying I experienced in the United States, people will tell me, has nothing to do with Canada. And in a world where the Canadian left has apparently unanimously decided that blasphemy is racism, and where the only people publicly defending freedom of speech are Tories who would be doing the same kind of victim-blaming if the perpetrator were Christian and not Muslim, I am very sensitive about the company I'm keeping by having the position I do. And yet. This thread has deeply disturbed me, but it's for exactly that reason that I don't think I can leave it alone. Multiple rounds of victim-blaming (usually with the stated disclaimer that, no, that's totally not what it is) and "contextualized" justification of murder for blasphemy. To see whether I was overreacting – and I promise, that's something I ask myself on a regular basis – I went back and looked at some other threads dealing with ideological violence. For starters, I reread the entirety of the thread on the Pulse nightclub shooting. Plenty of debate over whether it was fair to blame religion, but not a single suggestion that the victims had it coming, provoked it, or even that they were just "assholes". Then I went back and reread the thread on the Quebec City mosque shooting three years ago. Another painful read, but lagatta offered an opinion I'm happy to quote: "Fuck all violent far-right thugs, whatever their ethnicity or purported religion." Again, over every page of that thread, nobody once said the victims had it coming. Nobody discussed whether their mosque had preached anything offensive. ([i]I am not saying anyone should have.[/i]) Nobody said "I'm not saying they should've been killed, but I think we can all agree the victims were assholes." I wonder why. Why is it so important to justify this? Why does this all sound so familiar to me? Then as I was writing this post and thinking of counterfactuals, it hit me: "I'm not saying he had it coming, but he was no angel." – the speech the far right makes after every police shooting of a young black or indigenous man. And no, before everyone jumps all over me, I'm [i]not[/i] equating the Charlie Hebdo employees, or this murdered teacher, with black and indigenous people in Canada in terms of societal stature or group discrimination. I'm just pointing out what victim-blaming looks like, even when it's accompanied by "I promise this isn't victim-blaming". One last quote stood out in the Pulse nightclub shooting thread. To be fair to Unionist, its author, I must point out that he used it in a way completely opposite to the way I'm about to, and I don't want to suggest he agrees with anything in this post. His meaning was that the discussion of that shooting should've been about guns, not religion. Mine is that the discussion about Paty's murder should be about the far-right assault on blaspheming infidels, not whether the victim had it coming. But I will nevertheless close with Unionist's eloquent words, as they seem to describe what I've seen in this thread:

"Unionist" wrote:

The perpetual quest to invert cause and effect, in order to whitewash the cause.

Nobody is saying that blashphemy PER SE is racism.

And to clarify my own position, I don't support any use of state power on this.

My point was, and is, that there's simply no valid reason to actually insist on doing Muhammad cartoons- at least in part because the people doing those cartoons have never been doing them strictly in the name of exercising free speech. In Denmark, the idea of doing those cartoons was started by a far-right Danish newspaper who wanted to foment anti-Muslim immigrant sentiment.  They weren't acting out of the wish to simply express themselves, they were acting to build support for xenophobia and exclusion.

Charlie Hebdo, while also having a past history of leftist irrelevance(little if any leftism survives in its current incarnation) has also been on record insisting that, while all religions should be challenged, Islam should be singled out for demonization and de-legitimization as a part of European culture, and Muslims should be made more unwelcome in Europe than any other religion or any other set of ethnicities.  

Therefore, in my view, it essentially makes the same statement to defend Charlie Hebdo's insistence on doing Muhammed cartoons now that it would to defend the cartoons Der Sturmer did about Jews and Judaism in the 1930's.  In both cases, cartoons about a religious figure and religious symbolism are a shorthand for cartoons inciting hate against a group.

Free speech is free speech...but for Charlie Hebdo and the Danish far right, this has never been about free speech.  And nothing was a greater betrayal of the socialist and democratic values Christopher Hitchens had once held than his support of the Danish bigots who started drawing those cartoons.  He should have recognized what it is really about.

Yes, you technically have a right to draw such a cartoon, but the only people who would want to draw one are those who want to incite hate. 

And given that inciting hate against Muslims can only lead, in the end, to the incitement of an allout war between "The West" and the Muslim world- a war in which, like a U.S.-Soviet nuclear encounter, virtually everyone who died would be an innocent bystander who played no meaningful role in causing the conflict- it's simply not a right anyone other than the kind of psychopath who would love to see tens of millions of people die in the name of an abstraction, in the name of making some sort of totally irrelevant intellectual point- would have any good reason to wish to exercise.

Stop associating me with Justin Trudeau. My position has nothing to do with his, and I bear no responsiblity
for his response to this.

My position is that yes, a person can be said to have the right to do what you want done here- but that there cannot possibly be
a positive or humane reason to insist on doing it. It's equally valid to say that, technically, a person has a right
to do a thing, and to assert that there's no decent reason FOR that person to do that thing.

It still goes without saying that insisting on doing this particular thing can never have progressive or liberating results, that it
cannot lead to anyone's life being made better.

Also, the insistence on posting pictures of Muhammad is to imply that he is personally responsible for everything
anybody does in the name of Islam, and to imply that what Islamic extremists do is worse than what extremists associated with all other
faith traditions.

Ken Burch wrote:

Stop associating me with Justin Trudeau. My position has nothing to do with his, and I bear no responsiblity
for his response to this.

That's true. If it were just you saying this, I'd probably roll my eyes and ignore the thread, or quit Babble. Justin Trudeau's the one with the ability to put my life at risk, and I'm not going to shut up about that.

Ken Burch wrote:

My position is that yes, a person can be said to have the right to do what you want done here- but that there cannot possibly be
a positive or humane reason to insist on doing it. It's equally valid to say that, technically, a person has a right
to do a thing, and to assert that there's no decent reason FOR that person to do that thing.

It still goes without saying that insisting on doing this particular thing can never have progressive or liberating results, that it
cannot lead to anyone's life being made better.

It most certainly does not go without saying. It's your opinion. It's my opinion that accepting violent theocracy can never have progressive or liberating results or lead to anyone's life being made better. I feel like I have much stronger empirical evidence for that than you do for your cartoons-are-oppression thesis, but I suppose if I get murdered for blasphemy, my life will not have been improved, and when Trudeau says I had it coming, Babble will agree that that proves you were right.

Ken Burch wrote:

Also, the insistence on posting pictures of Muhammad is to imply that he is personally responsible for everything
anybody does in the name of Islam, and to imply that what Islamic extremists do is worse than what extremists associated with all other
faith traditions.

I'm going to stop bothering to respond to the "I've read the minds of the cartoonists, and their motives are evil" stuff. As for the latter bit, I have never made the argument that Islamic extremism is uniquely evil. The religion that's caused the most harm and violence in my life is, without question, Christianity. Whataboutism isn't going to work on me. The difference in this case is that when a Christian murders people for blaspheming Christianity, Babble doesn't rise up to say the victim had it coming and there can never be anything progressive about offending Christians.

And I get it. Really, I do. Christians are the overwhelming majority of Canadians, and Christianity is entrenched in every legal institution. Even Quebec only took down the crucifix in its legislature last year. As hard as Christians try – and oh, do they ever try – they can't really make the case they're an oppressed minority and therefore have justification to be violent. Most progressive Canadians know to call bullshit on that. It gets more complicated when a religion's adherents are a minority in Canada, especially when they've been the victims of religious violence themselves. It being complicated, however, does not justify the rampant victim-blaming in this thread, any more than the population of Jamaica being overwhelmingly descended from black slaves justifies the murder of LGBT people in that country on the grounds that they should've known better than to provoke a historically oppressed group by being LGBT.

The moral algebra (it's not sophisticated enough to call it calculus) being done here is frankly horrifying. Wait until a right you actually care about gets withdrawn on the grounds it's likely to incite religious extremists to murder you. You won't be able to complain about it publicly, though, if you've already decided free speech and freedom of religion aren't worth fighting for.

The alliance between most of the western anglophone Left and a far-right network claiming to speak for "Islam" is quite a development. It badly harms progressive Muslims and secular movements in the Islamic world. 

Thanks for your posts and persistence on this thread, cco.

swallow wrote:

The alliance between most of the western anglophone Left and a far-right network claiming to speak for "Islam" is quite a development. It badly harms progressive Muslims and secular movements in the Islamic world. 

Thanks for your posts and persistence on this thread, cco.

Nobody on the Left is allying with reactionaries in the Muslim world.  It's just that it can only be right-wing for any non-Muslim in the West to insist on singling out Islam for gratuitous confrontational abuse, particularly since virtually every public figure who has done so since 9/11 has done so only for the reason George W. Bush, Tony Blair and socialist-turned-imperialist Christopher Hitchens has done so- to incite even more Western militarism towards Islam- and because every such war since 9/11 has had nothing but reactionary and barbaric consequences.

I have no personal issue with people drawing pictures of Muhammad- it's just that the abstraction of defending the right to disrespect a religion, an abstraction only priviliged, comfortable types who know that nobody they care about will be injured or killed in such a conflict- only innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with it.

It matters that the push to do the Muhammad cartoons is only happening in countries where Muslim immigrants are being anathemized and treated as though they have no right to be there.

It matters that nobody was even trying to fight for the right to publish such cartoons before 9/11, before the now-totally discredited "clash of civilizations" canard ended up helping get 500,000 to a million Iraqis killed in what has been proven to be an utterly pointless U.S. invasion.

I oppose Trudeau's law-which he now seems to have backed away from.

As an abstraction, people should have the right to draw such cartoons.

But what is the point on insisting on this abstraction when all pushing for it can do, at least for the forseeable future, is make life worse for everyone?

Why not do the decent thing and err on the side of not making life worse in the name of an abstraction-the right to blaspheme as an absolute- can't do anything but harm?

And why act as though enforcing this right can somehow bring down Islamic fundamentalism when we all know it never can, and when we all know that even if it did, any replacement for that imposed by the actions of "The West" could only make life worse in the Muslim world?