The tragic murder of twelve people in France over the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons offensive to Islam, and the dramatic unfolding of the killing of the suspects by French authorities today, has set off lively debates across the media spectrum, and attracted the usual fear mongering suspects of American politicians eager to exploit this latest act of terrorism.
I believe free speech and freedom of the press to be one of the most important rights we have in the United States, and the murder of journalists, writers, cartoonists, editors, and others, rightfully causes outrage among anyone supportive of this fundamental pillar of free societies. Various U.S. media outlets have debated whether or not to re-publish the cartoons that inspired the terrorist attack, rightfully concerned over the wisdom and safety of doing so. There are many people claiming that the media has an obligation to re-publish the cartoons, as an act of defiance against intimidation by those who wield violence to silence opposing viewpoints. This position has merit, and I salute those who have the courage to re-publish cartoons that have the potential to provoke more violence. However, I also respect the restraint shown by news organizations choosing not to show the offensive cartoons. While speech should never be criminalized, it is also not necessary to deliberately pour fuel to the fire to prove one’s right to do so in the first place. I understand and support both viewpoints and decisions.
It is worth noting though, that when a small time Florida preacher planned a Koran burning a few years back, the Obama administration made a quiet appeal for him to not do so, for fear of “endangering the troops abroad,” and most U.S. news organizations were in agreement of not “promoting” this Florida jackass to fame, should his actions lead to violence or riots. I don’t recall the enthusiasm and call to bravery in support of free speech by the masses to support his Koran burning, to prove how much we love free speech.
It is also worth noting that in the United States, “free speech” is actually much more free than it is in our European counterpart nations. “Hate speech,” as it is called, is banned throughout many Western European countries, France included. In the United States, the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, has provided lawyers to protect the hate speech of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the past. Undoubtedly, many Muslim bashers will point to the terrorist attack on the French newspaper as proof of Islam’s “intolerance” towards Western values, conveniently omitting the hypocrisy of French tolerance towards speech within its borders that the mainstream consider offensive. In an opinion piece in Politico.com, author Judah Grunstein, who has lived in France for the past fourteen years, points out this distinction between American ideas about free speech, and France’s, writing:
“Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all speech that can be considered an incitement to hate. That is something that very few Americans understand—or approve of.”
Among politicians in the United States, fear pedaling war monger, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, wasted no time racing to the microphone to cast the incident as proof of a “religious war.” Senator Graham, who has recently been sounding the panic horn about how the U.S. must send troops to Iraq and Syria to fight to keep ISIS from “coming back home and killing us all,” had this to say on Wednesday after the attack in Paris:
“We’re in a religious war. These are not terrorists. They’re radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted.”
Mr. Graham’s motivations to portray this and other conflicts in the Middle East as religious wars, with our freedom and safety in the U.S. threatened by a barbaric form of religion unmotivated by actual U.S. foreign policy, is just a continuation of overall U.S. government efforts to rally the tribe to continue to fight an endless “war on terror,” and keep us afraid enough to continue to allow the U.S. government to erode our freedom and civil liberties in the name of, ironically, “protecting freedom.”
Even as Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia to avoid being thrown in jail forever by the U.S. government, for revealing the truth about Washington’s unconstitutional, Orwellian, massive surveillance program being conducted by the N.S.A, former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden went on NBC’s the “Today” show and characterized the Paris attack as “the high end of the new genre of attacks” composed of “increased sophistication.” This is following the very popular propaganda flowing from Washington that describes ISIS as “something like nothing we have ever seen before” and as a terrorist group so radical and violent that “even Al Qaeda rejected them.”
If by sophisticated, Mr. Hayden means using guns to go on a shooting rampage to kill a bunch of innocent people, then it would appear that America has been full of sophisticated home grown terrorists for years. Mass shootings and murders of innocent civilians are a regular event in the U.S., with the “soft targets” often being school children. Despite the regularly occurring massacres at the hands of heavily armed gunmen, and despite polls showing that around 90 percent of Americans support a simple law requiring background checks for all gun purchases – Congress has failed to act. But when a crazed gunman is a Muslim in another country, we are warned of the “sophistication” of terrorist who threaten our way of life.
So, still no universal background checks to see if a criminal is attempting to purchase an AK-47 at a gunshow, but your emails, phone calls, texts, and other private information are still being collected by the federal government without search warrants to allegedly protect our “freedom” from the sophisticated threat of Muslim terrorists with guns. This is worth remembering in the days to come in which other war mongers in Congress will take to the airwaves to exploit the tragedy in Paris to call for more blood, treasure and sacrifice to fight the never ending war on terrorism, and conversation about our own government’s illegal eavesdropping on our free speech, is quietly overlooked.