12 killed in shooting at French satirical magazine

[Graeme Decarie]

That's the trouble with Muslims, no sense of humour. Now, if only they would embrace the art of satire and draw, say, pictures of Jesus urinating on Muhammud, they're have all us free speech Christians chuckling.

 

[chansen]

There are plenty of Muslim cartoons about Jews and America, in particular. Those do not get the condemnation from Muslim groups that depictions of Muhammad get. Some Muslims claim special protection from any depiction, even good-natured ones. They do not have that right.

 

[Lastpointe]

Read interesting comment today

The world condemns the paris killings and we all demand freedom of speech and freedom of the press......

Who cares if feelings are hurt. Get over yourselves.........


And then we have facebook comments from Dalhousie where some women are hurt and offended. And we all demand the comments be removed and the perpetrators be punished.

The comment i read was are we for free speach or are we for protecting hurt feelings.


Interesting timing of events

 

[BetteTheRed]

Ouch, yes. Nice contrast pick-up, Lastpointe. The 'old' liberal line was "don't like your speech, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it".

Much of the idiocy that people post should be deliberately left there (frozen in time, untouchable, and un-take-downable) in order for them to be hoist on their own petard at a later date.

 

[Graeme Decarie]

Same thing in BC where a professor has been teaching in favour of racism.

 

[Ritafee]

Is terrorism not terrorism when a much more severe terrorist attack is carried out by those who are Righteous by virtue of their power?

Is there is no assault against freedom of speech when the Righteous destroy a TV channel supportive of a government that they are attacking?

ie ...Is a story of Erlanger’s on April 24 1999 (which made it only to page 6 of the New York Times) not as significant as the Charlie Hebdo attack?

• "NATO (meaning US) “missile attack on Serbian state television headquarters” that “knocked Radio Television Serbia off the air.” At least 10 people were reported at once to have died in the explosion, with 20 missing, “presumably buried in the rubble.” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon told a briefing in Washington that “Serb TV is as much a part of Milosevic’s murder machine as his military is,” hence a legitimate target of attack."

And more from Naom Chomsky ...

• "By the same token, we can readily comprehend the comment in the New York Times of civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, noted for his forceful defense of freedom of expression, that the Charlie Hebdo attack is “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” He is quite correct about “living memory,” which carefully assigns assaults on journalism and acts of terror to their proper categories: Theirs, which are horrendous; and Ours, which are virtuous and easily dismissed from living memory."

• "We might recall as well that this is only one of many assaults by the Righteous on free expression. To mention only one example that is easily erased from “living memory,” the assault on Falluja by US forces in November 2004, one of the worst crimes of the invasion of Iraq, opened with occupation of Falluja General Hospital. Military occupation of a hospital is, of course, a serious war crime in itself, even apart from the manner in which it was carried out, blandly reported in a front-page story in the New York Times, accompanied with a photograph depicting the crime. The story reported that “Patients and hospital employees were rushed out of rooms by armed soldiers and ordered to sit or lie on the floor while troops tied their hands behind their backs.” The crimes were reported as highly meritorious, and justified: “The offensive also shut down what officers said was a propaganda weapon for the militants: Falluja General Hospital, with its stream of reports of civilian casualties.”

*"Evidently such a propaganda agency cannot be permitted to spew forth its vulgar obscenities."
*Satire without offensive cartoon?

 

[Delightful Life]

Read interesting comment today

The world condemns the paris killings and we all demand freedom of speech and freedom of the press......

Who cares if feelings are hurt. Get over yourselves.........


And then we have facebook comments from Dalhousie where some women are hurt and offended. And we all demand the comments be removed and the perpetrators be punished.

The comment i read was are we for free speach or are we for protecting hurt feelings.


Interesting timing of events

Yuppers,

that's all quite normal...

re Dalhousie* -- we monkies can be all for rights, but not for certain other people or for those times that make us uncomfortable

that's another reason why freedom of speech etc is so important -- it applies to EVERYONE

we are living in interesting times, when millions can march to mock

* again, i see that as the tendency of people to not own their sense of being offended and scapegoating is a powerful, powerful behaviour -- once one's sense of fairness** and/or disgust is triggered, a whole lot of other behaviours happen; hatred, anger, lashing out, all these to get rid of these horrible, horrible feelings -- so we get witch hunts and also i think part of our justice system takes this into account -- a perpetrator/violator of social norms -- which are a glue that fix society together -- has to be punished somehow or there will be consequences for society?

** which has been observed in some nonhuman animals as well -- like the wolf seem to have a sense of fairness

 

[Delightful Life]

That's the trouble with Muslims, no sense of humour. Now, if only they would embrace the art of satire and draw, say, pictures of Jesus urinating on Muhammud, they're have all us free speech Christians chuckling.

Some do (notice the reports of muslims supporting the murdered cartoonists -- notice some cartoons done by self-identified muslims)

Of course, some don't (following Mohammad, who really didn't have a sense of humour -- he'd murder people who sang and even told his followers to murder them and convinced them it wasn't murder...)

This is aboot the some who don't

Who don't believe in freedom to mock
Of human burgeoning

and of course we humans have the ingrained habit of giving freedoms, but not for those people or situations over there

that, i hope, is something that can be and is being overcome

we're a globally-connected civilization now and we can't act like we've been doing, like little islands unto ourselves

i think we've got big problems -- the globe seems to have really long dynasties who have been really good at holding on to their power and who are trying to keep it that way

i don't know how this global world is going to shape up -- how do we deal with the fact that there are so many different competing BS, each with its own sense of offense etc etc etc? how do we make laws that are global? what will happen to the outliers?

and so it goes

 

[Ritafee]

A Message From the Dispossessed





Posted on Jan 11, 2015
By Chris Hedges

The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech. It was not about radical Islam. It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations. It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury.

We have engineered the rage of the dispossessed. The evil of predatory global capitalism and empire has spawned the evil of terrorism. And rather than understand the roots of that rage and attempt to ameliorate it, we have built sophisticated mechanisms of security and surveillance, passed laws that permit the targeted assassinations and torture of the weak, and amassed modern armies and the machines of industrial warfare to dominate the world by force. This is not about justice. It is not about the war on terror. It is not about liberty or democracy. It is not about the freedom of expression. It is about the mad scramble by the privileged to survive at the expense of the poor. And the poor know it.

It is dangerous to ignore this rage. But it is even more dangerous to refuse to examine and understand its origins. It did not arise from the Quran or Islam. It arose from mass despair, from palpable conditions of poverty, along with the West’s imperial violence, capitalist exploitation and hubris. As the resources of the world diminish, especially with the onslaught of climate change, the message we send to the unfortunate of the earth is stark and unequivocal: We have everything and if you try to take anything away from us we will kill you. The message the dispossessed send back is also stark and unequivocal. It was delivered in Paris.

 

[Graeme Decarie]

There is more truth in the above than in all the media reports I have seen and heard.

 

[chansen]

I do not disagree that the dispossessed are lashing out. But the way they lash out, and the justifications for their methods, are found in a literal understanding of their religion.

We need to give every child an education, and opportunities. We owe it to every young person, that they have the tools to rise above poverty. We just suck at it.

But the religion of Islam is used to make the situation worse. It is used to make make people paranoid about non-Muslims, and blame non-Muslims. And they are right that a Jewish state is suppressing many Muslims, and that Christian states are bombing them with drones. But they are using their religious indignation to go after the wrong people. The cartoonists are not the enemy of the dispossessed. They are mistaking their grievance with the world for a grievance with cartoonists, because their idiot prophet needs their protection. It should not be a religious struggle, but religion commandeers the victims and turns it into a religious struggle.

Remind me how religion is helping here.

 

[Ritafee]

Remind me how atheism is helping here.

 

[Delightful Life]

UnDefinitive,

so its either religion (belief in a supernatural g_d) or atheism?

How will you feel if you ever hear that any of us WCers will be hurt or killed by an ISIL-related attack?

 

[chansen]

Primarily by not being yet another dogmatic religion with scripture that can be read to condone misguided attacks.

 

[Ritafee]

Inannawhimsey,

It is neither.

I would feel the same way I would feel if any one of us WCers had been hurt by any one of us WCers.

And I feel quite certain that either is just as possible

 

[chansen]

This week's Charlie Hebdo cover:

"All is forgiven"

Quite well done. Now let's see which media outlets actually display it.

 

[Delightful Life]

chansen, i've seen that so far in slate

 

[Hermann]

Primarily by not being yet another dogmatic religion with scripture that can be read to condone misguided attacks.

Other dogmatic ideologies--i.e. nazism, fascism, bolshevism, communism, captalism, etc.--have as bad or worse of a track record as dogmatic religion with scripture that can be read to condone violence. It could be argued that any dogmatic ideology that condones violence is unacceptable.

 

[chansen]

Right, but then we're just discussing relative bad-ness.

"Religion - better than fascism!"

 

[Hermann]

Religion - better than fascism?

No! Fascism--and I am speaking from experience because my father was a Nazi--can be a pseudo religion. He sounded much like a Christian or Muslim fundamentalists, except he used different words.