Sunday, 11 January 2015
On Free Speech, UN and French Rulers Side With Jihadists
Written by Alex Newman

After the gruesome Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris last week, free-speech and defending freedom of expression suddenly became all the rage in France and across much of the world. Overlooked amid the global outpouring of support for the right to speak freely — #JeSuisCharlie was trending on Twitter for days — is the fact that the Socialist Party-run French government and the United Nations represent a far greater threat to free expression than murderous terrorists ever could.

In fact, the UN, widely ridiculed as the “dictators club,” has for years been waging a war on free speech worldwide and any criticism of Islam under the guise of advancing what it calls “human rights.” French authorities, meanwhile, have imposed some of the strictest criminal sanctions on controversial speech anywhere in the Western world. The difference between the UN and French government view on free speech and the position of jihadists, then, stems largely from what punishment is appropriate for the “crime,” legal experts observed.

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But modern-day France, at least in the commonly understood American and Western sense, hardly qualifies as a genuinely free society any longer. Of course, employees of Charlie Hebdo received regular threats from Islamic fundamentalists outraged by the attacks — and French authorities still infringed on their right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.

Less known, though, is that in France, government has literally criminalized speech that “insults, defames or incites hatred, discrimination or violence on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, disability, sex or sexual orientation.” In fact, Charlie Hebdo staff had been threatened and harassed by French authorities for years over many of the same cartoons that reportedly inspired fanatical jihadists to murder them, according to media reports.

In 2006, for example, following the publication of Muhammad cartoons by the satirical paper, then French President Jacques Chirac singled out Charlie Hebdo for special condemnation over its “overt provocations” that could fuel “dangerous” passions. “Anything that can hurt the convictions of someone else, in particular religious convictions, should be avoided,” the French president was quoted as saying. “Freedom of expression should be exercised in a spirit of responsibility.”

Since then, French authorities have gone still further, prosecuting and censoring speakers and speech that may “hurt the convictions of someone else.” In fact, the year before that, politician and presidential candidate Jean Marie Le Pen was actually convicted of “inciting racial hatred.” His alleged “crime”: Trying to warn his countrymen in comments published by a major French newspaper about what he viewed as the dangers of unrestricted Islamic immigration into France. Even racist or anti-religious comments made on social-media services such as Twitter have been declared “illegal” in France.

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More:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news...-with-jihadists