For those who think that Charlie Hebdo had it coming, all I can say is, you missed the point. As soon as you censor any comment you have left the road open to censor them all and I don’t really think that those who have anything to say in this world want that to happen. Even those who don’t have anything to say will find it a bad situation. If you have no opinions and nothing intelligent to say about anything, then I can see where you don’t want anyone’s feelings to get hurt. I just don’t want to live in that world.
I have been a big fan of the new Pope but even those that we all admire can’t be right all the time. So it is with Pope Francis and his opinions on what we should be allowed to say about religion. Look, I know that religion is the Pope’s bailiwick but even he should understand that no one attacks the good parts of religion. No one does satirical cartoons about nuns working free in hospitals in the Congo. No one does cartoons about Church programs to feed the poor. The cartoons get made about thousands of priests, the holy men who are supposed to lead us away from sin, abusing children in their care. If Pope Francis doesn’t see the difference then he needs to slow down his assault on the social evils that he has been condemning and get a firmer hold on what has happened in his own church.
Francis is the best pope that the Catholic church has seen in my long lifetime, but what has gone before him, has left a trail of disasters that stood for anything but what we expect from those who claim to represent God.
Of course the same is true of all other religions, including Islam, in spades. If you are a true believer and you aspire to stand up for whatever religion you believe in, than it behooves you to make sure that the religion to which you give allegiance is doing the right thing. If Catholics or Jews want others to respect the church and not mock it in any form then it is up to them to make sure that the face the church puts forward is the same as the one to which they aspire. Don’t tell me what a great church you belong to while its priests are molesting children, while its hierarchy is accumulating enormous wealth even as they speak of helping the poor. If you are Muslim, don’t tell us that you are against those who in your name are creating chaos in the world. If you don’t want outsiders mocking that which you hold dear, it’s your job to stand up on your hind legs and stop the evils that are being done in the name of your religion by those that claim to be representing your religion but are only in it for what they can get.
There is a significant minority that seems to feel that certain things cannot be said in public and with all due respect I must say that they are wrong. We are not speaking about political correctness here. We are speaking about freedom of speech and there is no freedom of speech unless we are free to say anything that we feel it necessary to say. As soon as you close down the most reprehensible aspects of freedom of speech you destroy the concept completely. That is not to say that those who are raised and educated in a civilized society shouldn’t know what is acceptable to say and what is not. There is a difference between what is censorship and what is intelligent regard for the effects of what we say but it is up to the speaker and only the speaker to make that distinction.
The big argument against saying or in this case showing certain images, is that although we have the right of free speech it cannot be used to shout fire in a crowded theatre. That may be true but in fact that is not what Charlie Hebdo was doing. When one yells fire in a crowded theatre one releases a crowd of terrified people on a mad dash for safety in which others may be harmed or killed. That’s not what happened here. Yes the people who reacted to the cartoons may be less stable than most, but they were not motivated by terror or a fear for their safety. They were motivated by hatred and anger, emotions that we expect civilized humans to conquer, to hold in check. That these killers were unable or unwilling to do that is not Charlie Hebdo’s fault. If we are to have any free speech we cannot limit it to support the desires of those who are not in control of their emotions. To do that is to do away with that freedom entirely.
The fact of the matter is that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons were a satirical look at intolerable actions committed by a power motivated faction of a religion that might otherwise be fine, but that in this instance is being used as an excuse for uncivilized behavior. Anyone who thinks that beheading people or burning them alive is not sufficient motivation for satirical retaliation isn’t up to being in the argument.
There have been huge demonstrations across the Muslim world against Charlie Hebdo even as the magazine’s first run after the massacre in its offices has sold millions of copies. Sure these demonstrators are upset about what they think of as disrespect shown to their Prophet but none of them obviously has considered why that disrespect materialized. Maybe if Arabs, and it has long been this column’s contention that the problem is overwhelmingly Arabs are using their religious roots to mask an insane power grab and not necessarily Muslims who have shown all over the world that they can live peacefully and amicably with their fellow man.
If you are an Indonesian or Indian Muslim you should also be attacking the Arab Muslims for usurping your religious heritage as a mask for their political or military goals.
And as far as those who are worried about Charlie Hebdo’s or anyone else’s attacks on religion, don’t forget that the freedom to do that is the same freedom that those religion’s receive from those who would attack them. It is only when we have freedom of speech that we can enjoy real freedom of religion.
Terror alerts are flashing all over Europe and raids are taking place in a number of European countries, that, up to now, have accounted for over three dozen terrorist suspects being taken into custody . This makes it open city on everyone who could possibly be involved in terrorist activities. So all the intelligence agencies that were revealed by Ed Snowden to be digging into regular American citizens business, have now jumped back on their high horses and are busy rattling their swords, demanding access to all our personal data in order to protect us from those awful terrorists.
But is that necessary? Do we have to give up all our privacy to NSA and the likes? Not on your life. Look, the problem right now, isn’t that we don’t know who to arrest. The problem is that we don’t have the inter-agency communication to make the information that web have already acquired, work. Auithorities already knew about the brothers who bombed Boston and the brothers who attacked Charlie Hebdo. We didn’t need to find out anything more about them. We had them on our radar but we didn’t know what to do with them. That’s the problem. NSA doesn’t have to get into every American’s underpants to stop these terror attacks. It just has to know what to do with the information it already has. It has to learn to function on at least a minimum level.
The French already knew about the Charlie Hebdo killers, they just didn’t have anyone clever enough to put the whole picture together until it was too late, just like in Boston where everyone except Morning Joe told the FBI that these guys were dangerous but no one wanted to pull the trigger on them until it was too late. Catching terrorists has nothing to do with gathering more information than we already are able to. It has to do with knowing what to do with the information you have already gathered.
Perhaps the Muslim world should just stop and take a look at the kinds of demonstrations that the Charlie Hebdo attacks have elicited. In France, a million people marched in complete order and without casualties to make their point that they supported free speech and Charlie Hebdo. In and around the Muslim world there were many smaller demonstrations objecting to Charlie Hebdo’s exercise of free speech. In Pakistan, Algeria, Indonesia, etc., many were killed by both police and fellow demonstrators. It’s really difficult to get anything done right if you are not a civilized factor.
I keep hearing the same question. How is it that these terrorists are able to motivate these young people to follow their perverted sense of values? How about the fact that most of those who have been drawn into this Arab terrorist fold are poor, discriminated against and have no hope of anything better. There is no more potent motivator for negative action than hopelessness. No matter where one looks in Europe, one sees Muslim communities that are hell holes of poverty and where young people see no way out. Unemployment is sky high and poverty rules.
There is much conjecture about the roots of terrorism, but it is possible to cut through all the theories and arrive at only two that are genuine. There have been many studies on this subject and almost all of them, having mentioned poverty come to only one conclusion. I’m not speaking here about warmongers like John McCain who wants to up the ante and invade everybody with a square yard of land. I’m talking about interviews with terrorists as to why they got involved in attacking the west in the first place. It’s universal; they almost without exception acted because of our invasion of Muslim areas such as Iraq, Afghanistan and countries in the Muslim world. Our occupations and interventions of Middle Eastern countries including the killing of Muslim civilians and information about our treatment of the people who occupied the lands we invaded, whether accurate or not, is the main, almost the only, reason for Muslim terrorist activities against America and our allies. The one comment that is forever on the lips of terrorists is that they decided to attack America because of our killing of their people and our destruction in their area of the world.
America has already intervened in 13 Islamic countries since 1980 with zero success in stopping the Islamic terrorists or creating peace in the region. Continuing this policy of invasion without any sign that it will lead to success is insanity. We should have leaned by now that we cannot achieve or be responsible for peace in this region. These people hate each other more than they hate us and all we’re doing by being there is to give them more reason to hate us for trying to do what some of our leaders think of as the right thing but that the intelligent ones realize is a fools errand motivated by a mineral that we no longer need.