11 dead in French satirical magazine shooting

[Warspite]

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/16/7555961/john-kerry-james-taylor
America, WTF?

The US really needs a new director of comms. 

[Malthus]

As I say I don't think this necessarily matters as a defence of free speech - except of course as a defence of the free speech of the Muslims who haven't shot people over blasphemous images whose opinion we don't seek and is often dictated instead by the men of violence. So we assume Muslims are universally offended by this but we are ultimately taking the opinion of murderers to get that view. I don't think we should accept the extremists argument that this necessarily is of such overwhelming offence to Muslims until other Muslims actually voice an opinion.

Fair - but my impression is that Muslims typically *don't* like depictions of Mohammed. If it is true that, in fact, they don;t care much, then the issue of politeness doesn't arise.

But the issue I have is the duty of a newspaper/broadcaster to their consumers.

This is a factor - to my mind, to be balanced by politeness (or good taste). As you say below, pics of a guy shooting a cop in the head could well be in bad taste/impolite. Examples abound: another is the child sex murders we had here, where the psycho took pics of the kids begging for their lives - that would be highly offensive to print, even if it was a very significant part of the story.

For me the Larry Flynt analogy doesn't work. Everyone excepts there are limits on obscene speech and just because he's shot during an obscenity trial doesn't make his porn part of the story. The analogy I'd use is if a loony fanatic Catholic killed Andres Serrano and the gallery director, say Nicholas Serota, over a gallery showing Piss Christ. I think it's difficult to explain that story on TV or print without showing Piss Christ - albeit with an explanation of why people may find it offensive.

Why not? To me, it's a part - what makes this guy's porn so different from other porn, that people would kill over it?

The issue, to me, is that *we* are more likely to find porn disturbing or in bad taste - but care not a bit about pics of Mohammed. There is a certain inherent subjectivity about that.

The recent story is ever worse because it was about Charlie Hebdo's new edition with its frontpage. The entire subject of the story is that image. So if the gallery re-opens a week later and puts Piss Christ in pride of place that is the story. It's absurd to describe that with words. The NYT I think acknowledges this is newsworthy by, despite the offence caused, including it on their website.

It may well be that the newsworthiness of a particular image outweighs any impoliteness, and so you publish it. My only issue is that having such a balancing exercise isn't somehow an admission that you are soft on free speech.

[KRonn]

http://www.vox.com/2015/1/16/7555961/john-kerry-james-taylor
America, WTF?

Lol, I thought that Kerry would finally find his niche as Secretary of State, and finally be gone as one of my State's Senators, but he doesn't seem to be doing so well there either. 

[Liep]

I guess Charlie Hebdo is also responsible for the death of these 4 presumably innocent Africans.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30853305

[Duque de Bragança]

I guess Charlie Hebdo is also responsible for the death of these 4 presumably innocent Africans.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-30853305

From the link

A number of churches and the French cultural centre were among several buildings raided and set alight.

The churches were also responsible for the new Charlie Hebdo issue as well as the French cultural Centre I guess. Niger, please...

[Liep]

I wonder what the Charlie-guys would say to churches being burned down because of them.

[Razgovory]

I wonder what the Charlie-guys would say to churches being burned down because of them.

Good.

[Duque de Bragança]

I wonder what the Charlie-guys would say to churches being burned down because of them.

Not what they meant by irreverence?

[The Brain]

....

*Having said that I don't think front pages know much decency, in the UK 8 papers included the image of the policeman about to be shot on their front page which I find troubling:
....

Yes I too found that troubling as you didn't need photographic or evidence to understand the brutality of executing/finishing off an injured man with a shot to the head.

Yet the government has cracked down on consensual BDSM images....................I just cannot see the logic 

Brits enjoying being caned isn't news.

[jimmy olsen]

With this kind of rhetoric, she might just win.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/opinion/marine-le-pen-france-was-attacked-by-islamic-fundamentalism.html

Lire en français (Read in French) »

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
To Call This Threat by Its Name
Marine Le Pen: France Was Attacked by Islamic Fundamentalism
Lire en français (Read in French) »

By MARINE LE PENJAN. 18, 2015
53 minutes ago

Paris — "To misname things is to add to the world's unhappiness." Whether or not Albert Camus really did utter these words, they are an astonishingly apt description of the situation in which the French government now finds itself. Indeed, the French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius no longer even dares pronounce the real name of things.

Mr. Fabius will not describe as "Islamists" the terrorists who on Wednesday, Jan. 7, walked into the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo, right in the heart of Paris. Nor will he use "Islamic State" to describe the radical Sunni group that now controls territory in Syria and Iraq. No reference can be made to "Islamic fundamentalism," for fear that Islam and Islamism might get conflated. The terms "Daesh" and "Daesh cutthroats" are to be favored instead, even though in Arabic "Daesh" means the very thing to be hidden: "Islamic State."

Let us call things by their rightful names, since the French government seems reluctant to do so. France, land of human rights and freedoms, was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology: Islamic fundamentalism. It is only by refusing to be in denial, by looking the enemy in the eye, that one can avoid conflating issues. Muslims themselves need to hear this message. They need the distinction between Islamist terrorism and their faith to be made clearly.

Yet this distinction can only be made if one is willing to identify the threat. It does our Muslim compatriots no favors to fuel suspicions and leave things unspoken. Islamist terrorism is a cancer on Islam, and Muslims themselves must fight it at our side.

Once things are called what they are, the real work begins. Nothing has been done yet. Whether from the right or the left, one French administration after another has failed to size up the problem or the task to be accomplished. Everything must be reviewed, from the intelligence services to the police force, from the prison system to the surveillance of jihadist networks. Not that the French security services have let us down: They proved their courage and determination again during the Jan. 9 hostage crisis in a kosher grocery near the Porte de Vincennes in Paris. However their actions have been hobbled by a series of mistakes committed by the powers that be.

These mistakes must also be called by their names. I will mention only three, but they are of crucial importance.

First, the dogma of the free movement of peoples and goods is so firmly entrenched among the leaders of the European Union that the very idea of border checks is deemed to be heretical. And yet, every year tons of weapons from the Balkans enter French territory unhindered and hundreds of jihadists move freely around Europe. Small surprise then that Amedy Coulibaly's machine gun came through Belgium, as the Walloon media have reported, or that his partner Hayat Boumeddiene fled to Syria under the nose of law enforcement.

Second, the massive waves of immigration, both legal and clandestine, our country has experienced for decades have prevented the implementation of a proper assimilation policy. As Hugues Lagrange, a sociologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (C.N.R.S.), has argued, culture has a major influence on the way immigrants relate to French society and its values, on issues such as the status of women and the separation of state and religious authority.

Without a policy restricting immigration, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to fight against communalism and the rise of ways of life at odds with laïcité, France's distinctive form of secularism, and other laws and values of the French Republic. An additional burden is mass unemployment, which is itself exacerbated by immigration.

Third, French foreign policy has wandered between Scylla and Charybdis in the last few years. Former President Nicolas Sarkozy's intervention in Libya, President François Hollande's support for some Syrian fundamentalists, alliances formed with rentier states that finance jihadist fighters, like Qatar and Saudi Arabia — all are mistakes that have plunged France into serious geopolitical incoherence from which it is struggling to extricate itself. Incidentally, Gerd Müller, Germany's federal minister of economic cooperation and development, deserves praise for having the clear-sightedness, like the Front National, of accusing Qatar of supporting jihadists in Iraq.

These mistakes are not inevitable. But to rectify them, we must act quickly. The Union Pour Un Mouvement Populaire and the Parti Socialiste have called for a committee to investigate the recent terrorist attacks. That will hardly solve matters. "If you want to bury a problem, set up a committee," the French statesman Georges Clémenceau once said.

For now, one emergency measure can readily be put into action: Stripping jihadists of their French citizenship is an absolute necessity. In the longer run, most important, national border checks must be reinstated, and there should be zero tolerance for any behavior that undermines laïcité and French law. Without such measures, no serious policy for combating fundamentalism is possible.

France has just gone through 12 days it will never forget. After pausing to grieve its dead, it then rose up to defend its rights. Now the French people, as if a single person, must put pressure on their leaders so that these days in January will not have been in vain. From France's tragedy must spring hope for real change. The petty logic of political parties cannot be allowed to stifle the French people's legitimate aspirations to safety and liberty.

We, the French, are viscerally attached to our laïcité, our sovereignty, our independence, our values. The world knows that when France is attacked it is liberty that is dealt a blow. I began by saying that we must call things by their names. I will end by saying that some names speak for themselves. The name of our country, France, still rings out like a call to freedom.

________
Marine Le Pen is president of the Front National party in France. This essay was translated by Edward Gauvin from the French.

[Eddie Teach]

Stripping jihadists of their French citizenship is an absolute necessity.

Doesn't this go against a bunch of international treaties?

[Duque de Bragança]

Stripping jihadists of their French citizenship is an absolute necessity.

Doesn't this go against a bunch of international treaties?

If they have only French citizenship, yes.

[Martinus]

I cant be arsed but surprised noone is reporting the outburst of "Muslim street" protests against Charlie Hebdo in Africa and Middle East. Kinda explains why they don't care about Boko Haram.

[Warspite]

Stripping jihadists of their French citizenship is an absolute necessity.

Doesn't this go against a bunch of international treaties?

Under international agreements you are not permitted to remove citizenship if it would render a person stateless but it's rather hard to enforce.

[Martinus]

Yeah, a much better solution from the legal perspective would be to deprive them of public rights (such as voting rights) for their life times.