À lire également ici : “Free speech was their cynical weapon, not their actual belief”
Days after the Paris march, the French governmentarrested the comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala “for being an ‘apologist for terrorism’ after suggesting on Facebook that he sympathized with one of the Paris gunmen.” Two months later, he was convicted, receiving a suspended two-month jail sentence. In November, on separate charges, he wasconvicted by a Belgian court “for racist and anti-Semitic comments he made during a show in Belgium” and was given a two month prison term. There were no #JeSuisDieudonné hashtags trending, and it’s almost impossible to find the loudest post-Hedbo Free Speech crusaders denouncing the French and Belgian governments for this attack on free expression.
In the weeks after the Free Speech march, dozens of people in France “were arrested for hate speech or other acts insulting religious faiths, or for cheering the men who carried out the attacks.” The government “ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.” There were no marches in defense of their free speech rights.
In October, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of activists who advocate boycotts and sanctions against Israel as a means of ending the occupation. What did these criminals do? They “arrived at the supermarket wearing shirts emblazoned with the words: ‘Long live Palestine, boycott Israel'” and “also handed out fliers that said that ‘buying Israeli products means legitimizing crimes in Gaza.'” Because boycotts against Israel were deemed “anti-semitic” by the French court, it was a crime to advocate it. Where were all the post-Hebdo crusaders when these 12 individuals were criminally convicted for expressing their political views critical of Israel? Nowhere to be found.
But this all highlights that free speech was not the principle being upheld here; free speech was just a weapon used by some tribalistic westerners to try to force people into cheering for anti-Islam and anti-Muslim cartoons (not merely the right to publish the cartoons without punishment or violence, but the cartoons themselves).
And what even more powerfully demonstrates the sham at the heart of this post-Hedbo spectacle is that before the Paris march, and especially since, there has been a systematic assault on the free speech rights of huge numbers of people in France and throughout the west who are either Muslim and/or critics of the west or Israel, and the newfound Hebdo free speech crusaders have exhibited almost no opposition, and at times tacit or explicit support. That’s because free speech was their cynical weapon, not their actual belief.