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View Full Version : Je ne suis pas Charlie. Je n'aime pas l'hypocrisie.




Lucille
01-12-2015, 10:21 AM
"You shake a slogan at an American and it's just like showing a hungry dog a bone."
--Will Rogers

http://www.backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe/2015/01/11/i-am-not-charlie-hebdo-part-ii/


I am not Charlie Hebdo, because I know that free speech is a lie. The Constitution is a dead letter, and I am a coward.

Charlie Hebdo published offensive speech that was found by a court of law to be worthy of protection. The speakers were killed.

Anwar al-Awlaki published offensive speech, and was killed. He was denied a day in court, and simply murdered.

I don’t want to be killed. I want to work for peace, but I’m not going to stick my head up and invite extremely well-armed people to shoot at me, no matter what costume they wear.
[...]
But the American government, at federal, state, and local levels, will never put away its gun. If they don’t like what you say, they will kill you. Whether it’s fiery sermons that scare the bejesus out of CIA spooks, a Facebook post that anyone dislikes enough to report, or some kid sassing a cop, death is too often the result.

Police around the world, including American and European governments, openly monitor social media for “offensive” speech.

There is no free speech, and defending the right is a fool’s game. Speech has consequences, as it should, but the gloves are off, the chains have been broken, and the U.S. government will kill me, if anything I do or say annoys them. The consequence for them will be zero. I will be dead.
[...]
The men who murdered the artists and editors of Charlie Hebdo are criminals. Madmen. Nothing can excuse what they did. Nothing justifies this slaughter.

But it doesn’t take a lot of thought to understand the reasons, the causes, for this atrocity. Not all causes; we will never know the full tapestry of the lives that resulted in the creation of 3 (or more) madmen determined to slaughter cartoonists. But we can know some of their reasons.
[...]
Claire and others make the point that the Islamic community must ultimately deal with the culture of death and destruction that produces and enables these criminals. But why does that culture exist?

The truth is that the American government, supported and elected by the American people, has been slaughtering Muslims for over 60 years. Greenwald quoted al-Awlaki’s core message:


For decades, the U.S. Government has been engaging in violence and otherwise interfering in the Muslim world. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Muslim men, women and children have died as a result. There is no end in sight to this American assault on the Muslim world and those of its client states. Therefore, it is not only the right, but the duty, of Muslims to engage in violence against Americans as a means of self-defense and to deter further violence against Muslims. That is the only available means for fighting back against the world’s greatest military superpower. The only alternative is continuing passive submission to this onslaught of violence aimed at Muslims.

In the past 15 years one would be hard pressed to identify a single week where there were not multiple innocent men, women, and children maimed and killed by American bombs, American fighters and gunships, American drones. Many, in fact most of the dead where just as innocent as the cartoonists. Few had expressed opinions that were so offensive as to give them any reason to fear for their lives. But they are just as dead.

When you target and attack an entire populace for decades, it changes that culture. It creates an environment where hatred and madness can fester and grow. Again, that does not excuse the madness, but it does help to explain it.

Ron Paul made this point in the presidential “debates” when he countered Rudy G’s simplistic nonsense that “they hate us for our freedoms.” The 9/11 attackers were created and motivated by hatred fed from decades of murder and oppression by the American government. Even the 9/11 Commission understood this point, and included it in their report. Yet Ron Paul was reviled and mocked for “blaming America.”

There are many peacekeepers in the billion-strong practitioners of the Muslim faith. But their job is made immeasurably more difficult, probably impossible, when performed under a constant rain of bombs, when speaking to people who live under the fear of constantly circling drones that spew hellfire at wedding parties and funerals. Peacekeeping is a hard sell to a man who has buried his wife and children and sifted the ashes of his home.

If Americans truly want peace, they must give the peacemakers a chance to do their work. That means halting the constant murder and maiming. It means allowing those peacemakers, governments, courts, and laws the opportunity to solve their own problems. It means halting enormous flows of military and financial aid to grotesquely oppressive governments.

Americans love to talk about free speech, and many will repeat that the cartoonists did not deserve to die for their offensive speech. But there is deep hypocrisy here.

Let us remove the giant beam from our own eye before we criticize the motes in Muslim eyes. Let us stop bombing them, starving them, caging them, and killing them. Leave them alone for at least as long as we have been raining hellfire upon them. Then, and only then, can there be any legitimate criticism of Muslim peacekeepers. Perhaps by then, we’ll have raised up a few of our own.

In Solidarity With a Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/solidarity-charlie-hebdo-cartoons/


When I first began to see these demands to publish these anti-Muslim cartoons, the cynic in me thought perhaps this was really just about sanctioning some types of offensive speech against some religions and their adherents, while shielding more favored groups. In particular, the west has spent years bombing, invading and occupying Muslim countries and killing, torturing and lawlessly imprisoning innocent Muslims, and anti-Muslim speech has been a vital driver in sustaining support for those policies.

So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due to approval of the content. Defending free speech is always easy when you like the content of the ideas being targeted, or aren’t part of (or actively dislike) the group being maligned.

Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in “solidarity” with their free speech rights. In fact, Douthat, Chait and Yglesias all took pains to expressly note that they were only calling for publication of such offensive ideas in the limited case where violence is threatened or perpetrated in response (by which they meant in practice, so far as I can tell: anti-Islam speech). Douthat even used italics to emphasize how limited his defense of blasphemy was: “that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended.”
[...]
With all due respect to the great cartoonist Ann Telnaes, it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo “were equal opportunity offenders.” Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. If forced, they can point to rare and isolated cases where they uttered some criticism of Judaism or Jews, but the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews. Parody, free speech and secular atheism are the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the primary goal and the outcome. And this messaging – this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech – just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.

To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?


One Student's Epic Tweets Call Out the Biggest Hypocrites Marching for Free Speech In Paris
http://mic.com/articles/108166/one-student-s-epic-tweets-call-out-the-biggest-hypocrites-marching-for-free-speech-in-paris


In what can only be described as an epic series of 21 pointed tweets, London School for Economics Middle East Society co-president Daniel Wickham points out that many of the world leaders who marched Sunday through the streets of Paris are not the world's biggest advocates for press freedom.
[...]
These tweets point out the hypocrisy of government solidarity with Charlie Hebdo.

"Politicians worldwide are enacting a slew of laws to impinge on free speech, but are the first to defend it when there’s a body count," writes the Daily Beast's Luke O'Neil. "It is grandstanding for a right rarely protected unless under immediate attack."

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?466187-Ron-Paul-Decries-quot-Obscene-quot-Paris-Attack-Blames-Bad-Foreign-Policy


"This is pretty obscene," exclaims Ron Paul with regard the massacre in Paris, "libertarians are pretty annoyed by anybody who initiates violence." But, he adds, "I put blame on bad policy that we don’t fully understand," pointing out Western inability to see foreign policy from the attackers' perspective, as "they see us killing innocent people... that doesn't justify it... but it does explain it."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/provocation-or-not/


Among Yahoo Questions and Answers is this one: “What did WE do to provoke Muslim fundamentalists -slash- Jihadists?”

The first long answer provides a partial list of actions initiated by the U.S. government that provoked terrorist responses. The second answer says there has been no provocation. Instead, they want to kill infidels. Another version of the latter is that they “hate our freedoms” or “hate democracy” or something along those lines.
[...]
What I see missing from the statements and reactions of American politicians, by and large, is the idea of provocation. The tendency is to regard terrorism as motivated by hatred or an ideological clash as opposed to understanding it as provoked by the actions of those who are being attacked by terrorists. Leaders do not want to admit that they have possibly done things that provoked retaliation. Even when the terrorists say so, they refuse to acknowledge their claims. The media tend to ignore the reasons stated by terrorists. The U.S. government ignores the injustices of its own interventions (and those of Israel), always claiming that what it is doing or has done is right and just.

Charlie Hebdo: Terrorist Acts Are Just Criminal Acts, So Let’s Treat Them That Way
http://governmentdeniesknowledge.com/charlie-hebdo-terrorist-acts-criminal-acts/


The deaths of a dozen cartoonists and other media personnel is a tragedy, and the perpetrators should be brought to justice. There is a part of me that feels ashamed to “use” their death as an opportunity to get on my soapbox, but it is merely to counter the sadly much more effective way these deaths are being used in the mainstream.

Because this was a “terrorist” act, we will be reminded that “they hate us for our freedom”. There will be no mention of their hating us because we invade their countries, bomb their weddings and funerals, and support their dictatorial regimes, despite them making that clear.

Because “they hate us for our freedom”, we will be told that it is necessary to grant the NSA, FBI, and CIA more latitude to spy on us and torture us. Out one side of the mouth we will be told that we must never give up our freedom of speech to these monsters, and out the other side they will continue to arrest and jail people for having certain opinions.

Of course, all of this is just a repeat of the bitter cycle that has plagued us since 9/11. The end result is a downward spiral into more and more tyranny and aggressive, unjust warfare.
[...]
By drawing an arbitrary and false distinction between terrorist acts and acts of crime, we play right into their hands. We are drawn into adopting precisely the policies that lead to more terrorist attacks. These are the very same policies that destroy our civil liberties and cause us to lose the moral high ground by stooping to their level and butchering many more innocent people in aggressive wars.

http://rall.com/2015/01/09/syndicated-column-editors-not-terrorists-killed-american-political-cartooning


The Charlie Hebdo massacre couldn’t have happened here in the United States. But it’s not because American newspapers have better security.

Gunmen could never kill four political cartoonists in an American newspaper office because no paper in the U.S. employs two, much less four, staff political cartoonists — the number who died Wednesday in Paris. There is no equivalent of Charlie Hebdo, which puts political cartoons front and center, in the States. (The Onion never published political cartoons — and it ceased print publication last year. MAD, for which I draw, focuses on popular culture.)

When I began drawing political cartoons professionally in the early 1990s, hundreds of my colleagues worked on staff at newspapers, with full salaries and benefits. That was already down from journalism’s mid-century glory days, when there were thousands. Many papers employed two. Shortly after World War II, The New York Times, which today has none, employed four cartoonists on staff. Today there are fewer than 30.

Most American states have zero full-time staff political cartoonists.

Many big states — California, New York, Texas, Illinois — have one.

No American political magazine, on the left, center or right, has one.

No American political website (Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, Slate, Salon, etc.) employs a political cartoonist. Although its launch video was done in cartoons, eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s new $250 million left-wing start-up First Look Media refuses to hire political cartoonists — or pay tiny fees to reprint syndicated ones.

These outfits have tons of staff writers.

During the last few days, many journalists and editors have spread the “Je Suis Charlie” meme through social media in order to express “solidarity” with the victims of Charlie Hebdo, political cartoonists (who routinely receive death threats, whether they live in France or the United States) and freedom of expression. That’s nice.

No it’s not.

It’s annoying.

As far as political cartoonists are concerned, editorials pledging “solidarity” with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists is an empty gesture — corporate slacktivism. Less than 24 hours after the shootings at Charlie Hebdo, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel fired its long-time, award-winning political cartoonist, Chan Lowe.

Political cartoonists: editors love us when we’re dead. While we’re still breathing, they’re laying us off, slashing our rates, stealing our copyrights and disappearing us from where we used to appear — killing our art form.

American editors and publishers have never been as willing to publish satire, whether in pictures or in words, as their European counterparts. But things have gone from bad to apocalyptic in the last 30 years.

Lucille
01-12-2015, 10:34 AM
Ron Paul!

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?466423-Lessons-from-Paris


The mainstream media immediately decided that the shooting was an attack on free speech. Many in the US preferred this version of “they hate us because we are free,” which is the claim that President Bush made after 9/11. They expressed solidarity with the French and vowed to fight for free speech. But have these people not noticed that the First Amendment is routinely violated by the US government? President Obama has used the Espionage Act more than all previous administrations combined to silence and imprison whistleblowers. Where are the protests? Where are protesters demanding the release of John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on the CIA use of waterboarding and other torture? The whistleblower went to prison while the torturers will not be prosecuted. No protests.

If Islamic extremism is on the rise, the US and French governments are at least partly to blame. The two Paris shooters had reportedly spent the summer in Syria fighting with the rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Assad. They were also said to have recruited young French Muslims to go to Syria and fight Assad. But France and the United States have spent nearly four years training and equipping foreign fighters to infiltrate Syria and overthrow Assad! In other words, when it comes to Syria, the two Paris killers were on “our” side. They may have even used French or US weapons while fighting in Syria.
[...]
Perhaps one way to make us all more safe is for the US and its allies to stop supporting these extremists.

Another lesson from the attack is that the surveillance state that has arisen since 9/11 is very good at following, listening to, and harassing the rest of us but is not very good at stopping terrorists. We have learned that the two suspected attackers had long been under the watch of US and French intelligence services. They had reportedly been placed on the US no-fly list and at least one of them had actually been convicted in 2008 of trying to travel to Iraq to fight against the US occupation. According to CNN, the two suspects traveled to Yemen in 2011 to train with al-Qaeda. So they were individuals known to have direct terrorist associations. How many red flags is it necessary to set off before action is taken? How long did US and French intelligence know about them and do nothing, and why?

Foreign policy actions have consequences. The aggressive foreign policies of the United States and its allies in the Middle East have radicalized thousands and have made us less safe. Blowback is real whether some want to recognize it or not. There are no guarantees of security, but only a policy of non-intervention can reduce the risk of another attack.

Lucille
01-12-2015, 10:38 AM
Je SuiS HYPoCRiTeS...
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-01-12/je-suis-hypocrites

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8645/16074371497_ab1132445a_z.jpg

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8598/16074805388_81969bdd73_z.jpg

enhanced_deficit
01-12-2015, 11:17 AM
From previous news it seemed EU/France did not have freedom of expression and some historians have been recently arrested just for expressing their view.


Holocaust denier gets 3 years in prison - NBC News (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/11455196/ns/world_news-europe/t/scholar-who-denied-holocaust-jailed-years/#.VK61p67zbwc)
Feb 20, 2006 - Right-wing British historian David Irving pleaded guilty Monday to charges of denying the Holocaust and was sentenced to three years in prison

EU adopts measure outlawing Holocaust denial
New York Times
Apr 19, 2007... facing prosecution in France. ... Laws against denying the Holocaust exist in Austria, Belgium, France, ...

Alleged Holocaust denier held at Heathrow
The Guardian
Oct 1, 2008 - An Australian teacher accused of denying the Holocaust was arrested in transit through Heathrow yesterday


The Union of Jewish Students apparently didn’t feel as magnanimous in 2013, when it successfully sued Twitter over posts deemed anti-Semitic. ..The government declared the tweets illegal
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...3d5_story.html (http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-it-means-to-stand-with-charlie-hebdo/2015/01/08/ab416214-96e8-11e4-aabd-d0b93ff613d5_story.html)

Charlie Hebdo fired cartoonist for anti-Semitism in 2009 (http://www.worldbulletin.net/world/152585/charlie-hebdo-fired-cartoonist-for-anti-semitism-in-2009)

French cartoonist Sine on trial on charges of anti-Semitism over Sarkozy jibe

A Left-wing cartoonist is to go on trial on Tuesday on charges of anti-Semitism for suggesting Jean Sarkozy, the son of the French president, was converting to Judaism for financial reasons.

By Henry Samuel in Paris
6:00AM GMT 27 Jan 2009

Maurice Sinet, 80, who works under the pen name Sine, faces charges of "inciting racial hatred" for a column he wrote last July in the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. The piece sparked a summer slanging match among the Parisian intelligentsia and ended in his dismissal from the magazine.

"L'affaire Sine" followed the engagement of Mr Sarkozy, 22, to Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, the Jewish heiress of an electronic goods chain. Commenting on an unfounded rumour that the president's son planned to convert to Judaism, Sine quipped: "He'll go a long way in life, that little lad."

A high-profile political commentator slammed the column as linking prejudice about Jews and social success.Charlie Hebdo's editor, Philippe Val, asked Sinet to apologise but he refused, exclaiming: "I'd rather cut my balls off."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...kozy-jibe.html (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/4351672/French-cartoonist-Sine-on-trial-on-charges-of-anti-Semitism-over-Sarkozy-jibe.html)





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#jesuis (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEms5or9OyA) un enfant irakien (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEms5or9OyA)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEms5or9OyA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEms5or9OyA