freedom of speech is meant to allow's every one's political opinion to be heard. its a part of democracy. and it stop when your political views incite to violence or hatred.
if the attacks on charlie hebdo are grave and to condemn. charlie hebdo wasn't really pushing the limits where they should be pushed.
let me explain : freedom of speech is used to denounce the unease in our civilisation. it's basically the legitimacy of the poeple to resist the system, to protest etc. But charlie hebdo was either victim of the mass media influences or blatently a organ of hegemony itself. poking, legit or not at the muslim world isn't nowadays (and since 9/11) something brave or being "against the stream". ever since 9/11 muslims around the world, especially in western countries are being oppressed. not only are they citizen of second class economically because of their migrant status but they are also victim of an ambiant racism.
the unease in our societies is surely not the muslim and their "appearant" unsuited values to our societies, that said, charlie hebdo was willingly or not participating in some kind of stigmatization of an ethnic/religous group. in our case perpretrating islamophobia.
is that freedom of speech? yes, but is it perfomative? not at all because it is simply weighting on people's sensitivity. this means that when being a satirist you always have to cope with one sensitivity (and this has been confirmed by many writers/satirist etc) there is always a question of self-censure when it comes to satire.
the irony in all this matter is that french authorities and western authorities in general from now on are arresting people who make "apology of terrorism" on the basis that they do not respect the sensitivity created by this terrorist attack (im thinking of dieudonné who faces up to 7years of prison and 100 000$ fine for a facebook post).
then we can clearly see that its a matter of whose senstivity are we defending or not. its a matter of hegemony. when attacking the sentivity of those who are in power it is called "inciting to violence" and when it's attacking the sensitivity of the oppressed it is called "freedom of speech". we could make a parallel with radical left protests in the western world that are muted by police brutality and anti-protest laws, when in the same western world neo-nazi and facist marches (in some parts of europe) are left untouched by authorities. who calls for hainous political views here?
on my part i am pointing out the ambiguious treatment of this event by the medias and the public opinion. i'm not and i will never try to legitimize what happened at charlie hebdo.(simply protecting myself from mods here - we know some of them are quite something).
then on the topic of terrorism where should satirists aim their freedom of speech? precisly towards the corporation and state interests who financed these terrorist groups in the first place. remember who armed the talibans against the soviet? who armed Al-quaeda? who armed syrian rebels against assad? and so on.... the answer is : the western world, by the intermediate of Saudi and other warlords
so when we want to use our freedom of speech lets aim towards our own societies before we brainlessly offend 1 billions muslims under our right to say what we think.
On January 17 2015 04:15 Nyxisto wrote: The only reason why Charlie Hebdo comics are not considered racist is because you can take them as caricatures of how right-wingers see minorities. (the "nigerian welfare queen" cartoon for example) If you'd just take the cartoon itself without the context that they're actually a left wing magazine which strongly condemns racism they'd be clearly out of line.
Charlie Hebdo's message is antiracist and it uses satire, irony and ridicule to construct its message. Yes, if you utterly miss the point of satire, then sure, you'll think they're racist. And?
If a black woman facing a racist repeats his racist statements sarcastically by saying "Suuure, white people are CLEARLY intellectually superior to everyone else..." and rolling her eyes, that sentence is, in itself, racist, but it's the fact that we understand sarcasm and its codes that makes us understand that she's actually mocking the racist statement and not subscribing to it. It's the same for Charlie Hebdo - not knowing the codes of its humor makes you miss the message, which is clearly and unambiguously antiracist.
On January 17 2015 04:15 Nyxisto wrote: Also again this distinction between attacking religions and attacking people is ridiculous. Christians aspire to be like Christ, for them he is the perfect Human being. Same can be said for Muslims and the prophet. You can not attack central figures or parts of a religion without attacking their believers.
No, it's absolutely not ridiculous and you can certainly criticize religions as systems of belief without attacking religious people. The distinction between the two is clear and French law is founded on it. That's why there is a right to blasphemy and not to incitement to racial hatred.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
The one who target a powerful community is making hate speech, while the other that targeting a poor (but with 20 times the people) community is exercising his freedom of speech. And everyone is ok with that.
Dieudonné is not considered as making hate speech everytime. Just like he was not the only person to be arrested for apology of terrorism the last few days. Like you said, Dieudonné pretty much equals CH in that regard in that they were both satirical with a tendency to be kinda violent/provocative. Now Dieudonné did some things that were enough for him to be considered like an ass by a majority (?), or at least by an important part of the French population, and was sentenced for these things. CH did too, but was sentenced mainly for being insulting, not for hatred speech afaik.
@WhiteDog : Does islamophobia really come from the dominant classes? I know the French countryside a bit and I know plenty of people who are always accusing Muslims, Arabs or anything that loosely looks like them (I pretty sure they don't even know that some Arabs are Christians) of all of their troubles. And these people, putting apart the fact that they probably never saw a Muslim of their life, are not part of what I'd call the "dominant classes" ; but more like the low-middle class.
I didn't say dominant class but "dominant part of our society". More than anything, Islamophobia is institutionalized - unlike antisemitism - (the police and the judiciary system punish muslim more than any other religious group for exemple), and it is also heavily accepted within the media (Michel Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Philippe Val or Fourest are all islamophobic for exemple). There is also discrimination in the working place toward muslim. It's true that a lot of people feel fear toward the islamisation of part of France, but it's fueled by the dominant part of our society.
It's a plot by the great capital to split the worker class and make them forget their real enemy.
Ah ok I understand what you mean, and it is probably partly true. On the other hand, you could say that there is also an important anti-islamophobia movement from the dominant classes of society. I mean look at how every politician, except your usual far-right suspects, called to avoid the "terrorists = muslims" amalgam. Ironically enough this type of behavior precisely fuels far-right ideas and islamophobia.
Of course ! The bourgeois in paris are all bent on the fight against "discriminations".
i think many people have a blanket generalization on freedom of speech. for the same reason you dont go up to a random black person and call them t he N word, since its quiet predictable of the outcome, you shouldnt do the same to muslim since the predictable outcome is different from those of other religions. extremism aside, many of the islamic countries are heavily based on their belief, its part of the government and country and its inevitable to get strong reactions to offending content. to wave off this reaction with "freedom of speech is freedom of speech" is very arrogant and naive.
criticism of islam needs to come from muslims, not "western christians" since whatever good message it might have gets drowned and lost in the "west is criticizing us" attitude.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
Completely false on both counts.
The "Le Coran c'est de la merde, ça n'arrête pas les balles" cover denounced the slaughter of unarmed Muslim partisans of Morsi by the Egyptian military. The point of the drawing is to show that the dead had nothing to protect themselves but the Quran. There is absolutely nothing racist about the cartoon, which precisely condemned the atrocities in Egypt perpetrated by the military.
The cover with the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations!" combines two different news stories of the time: a reduction in allocations in France and the crimes of Boko Haram against women, including stories of kidnapping and of rape. The aim of the cover is to denounce and mock right-wing fantasies about foreigners coming to France to "steal" from the French social system - including the scarecrow often used by the right of foreign mothers coming to France to give birth on French soil. They were therefore ridiculing right-wing fantasies, not endorsing them.
Nothing about these drawings was attacking Muslims as religious people - one served to denounce atrocities perpetrated against Muslims, and the other served to denounce right-wing fantasies about immigrants, including Muslims. To think they were "racist" is to utterly misunderstand them. Again, Charlie Hebdo never "spit" on the Muslim community or on any other religious community - it criticized religions, not religious groups of people (except extremists, from every religion).
Siné was fired because of putting forward the idea that Jean Sarkozy became a Jew and married a Jewish woman for personal profit. It can very well be argued that what he wrote had antisemitic undertones (i.e. it was aimed at Jews themselves), which is why the decision to fire him was made. Siné was cleared by the courts, but it doesn't change the fact that the reasoning for firing him was that it was felt by those who took the decision that he was aiming at a religious group of people as such, contrary to what the journal does. There is no double standard.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
The one who target a powerful community is making hate speech, while the other that targeting a poor (but with 20 times the people) community is exercising his freedom of speech. And everyone is ok with that.
Dieudonné is not considered as making hate speech everytime. Just like he was not the only person to be arrested for apology of terrorism the last few days. Like you said, Dieudonné pretty much equals CH in that regard in that they were both satirical with a tendency to be kinda violent/provocative. Now Dieudonné did some things that were enough for him to be considered like an ass by a majority (?), or at least by an important part of the French population, and was sentenced for these things. CH did too, but was sentenced mainly for being insulting, not for hatred speech afaik.
@WhiteDog : Does islamophobia really come from the dominant classes? I know the French countryside a bit and I know plenty of people who are always accusing Muslims, Arabs or anything that loosely looks like them (I pretty sure they don't even know that some Arabs are Christians) of all of their troubles. And these people, putting apart the fact that they probably never saw a Muslim of their life, are not part of what I'd call the "dominant classes" ; but more like the low-middle class.
I didn't say dominant class but "dominant part of our society". More than anything, Islamophobia is institutionalized - unlike antisemitism - (the police and the judiciary system punish muslim more than any other religious group for exemple), and it is also heavily accepted within the media (Michel Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Philippe Val or Fourest are all islamophobic for exemple). There is also discrimination in the working place toward muslim. It's true that a lot of people feel fear toward the islamisation of part of France, but it's fueled by the dominant part of our society.
It's a plot by the great capital to split the worker class and make them forget their real enemy.
Ah ok I understand what you mean, and it is probably partly true. On the other hand, you could say that there is also an important anti-islamophobia movement from the dominant classes of society. I mean look at how every politician, except your usual far-right suspects, called to avoid the "terrorists = muslims" amalgam. Ironically enough this type of behavior precisely fuels far-right ideas and islamophobia.
Of course ! The bourgeois in paris are all bent on the fight against "discriminations".
I'm unsure if this is sarcasm or not? Because there are indeed some bourgeois, people who usually are lawyers or medical doctors or these kind of professions, who are strongly against everything that comes close to islamophobia and who do not hesitate to label as racist or islamophobic anyone who suggests a link between French Muslims and terrorism, or between French Muslims and crime, etc etc. I'm not saying they are the majority ofc, but they exist.
On January 17 2015 05:41 jinorazi wrote: i think many people have a blanket generalization on freedom of speech. for the same reason you dont go up to a random black person and call them t he N word, since its quiet predictable of the outcome, you shouldnt do the same to muslim since the predictable outcome is different from those of other religions. extremism aside, many of the islamic countries are heavily based on their belief, its part of the government and country and its inevitable to get strong reactions to offending content. to wave off this reaction with "freedom of speech is freedom of speech" is very arrogant and naive.
criticism of islam needs to come from muslims, not "western christians" since whatever good message it might have gets drowned and lost in the "west is criticizing us" attitude.
In essense your interpretation of freedom of speech is that the line is drawn when the aggrieved party responds with violence. Like the massacre directed at Charlie Hebdo. That is so very very wrong. The point of freedom of speech is that it is to be not under duress of those who will direct violence towards it.
Or to turn it the other way, in those Islamic countries you speak of, where blasphemy is punishable by death, well, they actually aren't very nice places to live at all. Take Pakistan for instance. Mobs literally run around burning and stoning and killing people for accused blasphemy, (for things like throwing away a business card with the name mohammed for instance or being not muslim), whilst the police and the courts stand by.
Polititians who stand by those accused of blasphemy or try to repel the laws are killed either by assasination or killed by their own bodyguards. This may sound like some sort of gross exaggeration but it is the truth. Now go read what you just wrote and be glad that you have the freedom of speech to write what you just did without being threatened of torture and death.
On January 17 2015 05:41 jinorazi wrote: i think many people have a blanket generalization on freedom of speech. for the same reason you dont go up to a random black person and call them t he N word, since its quiet predictable of the outcome, you shouldnt do the same to muslim since the predictable outcome is different from those of other religions. extremism aside, many of the islamic countries are heavily based on their belief, its part of the government and country and its inevitable to get strong reactions to offending content. to wave off this reaction with "freedom of speech is freedom of speech" is very arrogant and naive.
criticism of islam needs to come from muslims, not "western christians" since whatever good message it might have gets drowned and lost in the "west is criticizing us" attitude.
In essense your interpretation of freedom of speech is that the line is drawn when the aggrieved party responds with violence. Like the massacre directed at Charlie Hebdo. That is so very very wrong. The point of freedom of speech is that it is to be not under duress of those who will direct violence towards it.
Or to turn it the other way, in those Islamic countries you speak of, where blasphemy is punishable by death, well, they actually aren't very nice places to live at all. Take Pakistan for instance. Mobs literally run around burning and stoning and killing people for accused blasphemy, (for things like throwing away a business card with the name mohammed for instance or being not muslim), whilst the police and the courts stand by.
Polititians who stand by those accused of blasphemy or try to repel the laws are killed either by assasination or killed by their own bodyguards. This may sound like some sort of gross exaggeration but it is the truth. Now go read what you just wrote and be glad that you have the freedom of speech to write what you just did without being threatened of torture and death.
west went through the same phase, i expect the middle east to go through the same. changes require ugly events. pointing out the flaws like punishments of blasphemy is just pointing out the obvious to me, not something i can be for or against, its just the way it is with society east or west all depending on progress of said society.
what the extremists did is very wrong, what charlie hebdo did had risks from extremists and they knew it. now its spread to people in middle east mass protesting against what charlie hebdo did and is doing, western view says its freedom of speech and it shouldnt be stopped and thats where i said this view comes from blanket view on freedom of speech. such criticism needs to come within islam, not outside because the meaning gets lost.
western view has this high chair view when exact same shit has happened to them. in west, we're lucky enough to live in a time of post change while people born in middle east lives in pre change and we should treat it as such. i'm pointing out people, society, nations need to be talked with in accordance to their way of life, forcing your own view based on your own culture does not apply everywhere else. such differences and predictable outcome should always be considered yet, like i said, many likes to paint everything with the same brush then act surprised with the predictable outcome.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
Completely false on both counts.
The "Le Coran c'est de la merde, ça n'arrête pas les balles" cover denounced the slaughter of unarmed Muslim partisans of Morsi by the Egyptian military. The point of the drawing is to show that the dead had nothing to protect themselves but the Quran. There is absolutely nothing racist about the cartoon, which precisely condemned the atrocities in Egypt perpetrated by the military.
The cover with the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations!" combines two different news stories of the time: a reduction in allocations in France and the crimes of Boko Haram against women, including stories of kidnapping and of rape. The aim of the cover is to denounce and mock right-wing fantasies about foreigners coming to France to "steal" from the French social system - including the scarecrow often used by the right of foreign mothers coming to France to give birth on French soil. They were therefore ridiculing right-wing fantasies, not endorsing them.
Nothing about these drawings was attacking Muslims as religious people - one served to denounce atrocities perpetrated against Muslims, and the other served to denounce right-wing fantasies about immigrants, including Muslims. To think they were "racist" is to utterly misunderstand them. Again, Charlie Hebdo never "spit" on the Muslim community or on any other religious community - it criticized religions, not religious groups of people (except extremists, from every religion).
Siné was fired because of putting forward the idea that Jean Sarkozy became a Jew and married a Jewish woman for personal profit. It can very well be argued that what he wrote had antisemitic undertones (i.e. it was aimed at Jews themselves), which is why the decision to fire him was made. Siné was cleared by the courts, but it doesn't change the fact that the reasoning for firing him was that it was felt by those who took the decision that he was aiming at a religious group of people as such, contrary to what the journal does. There is no double standard.
I'm amazed. How can you think implying that all black and muslim women makes babies for allocations is not racist, but saying that he converted to judaism in order to marry his jewish wife, who is also the heir of the Darty familly, is antisemite. You can contextualize all you want, there is nothing in the caricature that imply it is a jab at right wing extremism (which is the reason why the caricature created an outrage in the far left), just like saying "the coran is shit", whatever the context, is clearly a global view on islam (just like drawing a bomb in Mohammed's turban is implying islam is terrorist by essence). Again, I find all that completly OK (I'm for a total freedom of press), and I am not at all saying Charlie is biased (Charb was a hero to me), but the public outrage that followed Siné's small text shows a lot on how the media and our society view all these events.
Even in Charlie, many people clearly stated that Charlie under Philippe Val was biased (even people who actually work/worked in Charlie : Tignous was one of them, so was Delfeil de Ton or Olivier Cyran) and believed attacking the muslim was non pertinent. Putting that aside, in the media it is pretty obvious that there is a double standard : Eric Zemmour, Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Fourest or Malka are all always invited and well known for some curious comment. If Houellebecq last book pictured a society with a jewish government, everybody would have instantly called it antisemite. Somehow, implying France is overrun by muslim give you open access to all medias.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
On January 17 2015 03:34 OtherWorld wrote:
On January 17 2015 02:50 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 17:13 OtherWorld wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:05 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 05:05 OtherWorld wrote:
On January 16 2015 04:51 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
The one who target a powerful community is making hate speech, while the other that targeting a poor (but with 20 times the people) community is exercising his freedom of speech. And everyone is ok with that.
Dieudonné is not considered as making hate speech everytime. Just like he was not the only person to be arrested for apology of terrorism the last few days. Like you said, Dieudonné pretty much equals CH in that regard in that they were both satirical with a tendency to be kinda violent/provocative. Now Dieudonné did some things that were enough for him to be considered like an ass by a majority (?), or at least by an important part of the French population, and was sentenced for these things. CH did too, but was sentenced mainly for being insulting, not for hatred speech afaik.
@WhiteDog : Does islamophobia really come from the dominant classes? I know the French countryside a bit and I know plenty of people who are always accusing Muslims, Arabs or anything that loosely looks like them (I pretty sure they don't even know that some Arabs are Christians) of all of their troubles. And these people, putting apart the fact that they probably never saw a Muslim of their life, are not part of what I'd call the "dominant classes" ; but more like the low-middle class.
I didn't say dominant class but "dominant part of our society". More than anything, Islamophobia is institutionalized - unlike antisemitism - (the police and the judiciary system punish muslim more than any other religious group for exemple), and it is also heavily accepted within the media (Michel Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Philippe Val or Fourest are all islamophobic for exemple). There is also discrimination in the working place toward muslim. It's true that a lot of people feel fear toward the islamisation of part of France, but it's fueled by the dominant part of our society.
It's a plot by the great capital to split the worker class and make them forget their real enemy.
Ah ok I understand what you mean, and it is probably partly true. On the other hand, you could say that there is also an important anti-islamophobia movement from the dominant classes of society. I mean look at how every politician, except your usual far-right suspects, called to avoid the "terrorists = muslims" amalgam. Ironically enough this type of behavior precisely fuels far-right ideas and islamophobia.
Of course ! The bourgeois in paris are all bent on the fight against "discriminations".
I'm unsure if this is sarcasm or not? Because there are indeed some bourgeois, people who usually are lawyers or medical doctors or these kind of professions, who are strongly against everything that comes close to islamophobia and who do not hesitate to label as racist or islamophobic anyone who suggests a link between French Muslims and terrorism, or between French Muslims and crime, etc etc. I'm not saying they are the majority ofc, but they exist.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
Completely false on both counts.
The "Le Coran c'est de la merde, ça n'arrête pas les balles" cover denounced the slaughter of unarmed Muslim partisans of Morsi by the Egyptian military. The point of the drawing is to show that the dead had nothing to protect themselves but the Quran. There is absolutely nothing racist about the cartoon, which precisely condemned the atrocities in Egypt perpetrated by the military.
The cover with the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations!" combines two different news stories of the time: a reduction in allocations in France and the crimes of Boko Haram against women, including stories of kidnapping and of rape. The aim of the cover is to denounce and mock right-wing fantasies about foreigners coming to France to "steal" from the French social system - including the scarecrow often used by the right of foreign mothers coming to France to give birth on French soil. They were therefore ridiculing right-wing fantasies, not endorsing them.
Nothing about these drawings was attacking Muslims as religious people - one served to denounce atrocities perpetrated against Muslims, and the other served to denounce right-wing fantasies about immigrants, including Muslims. To think they were "racist" is to utterly misunderstand them. Again, Charlie Hebdo never "spit" on the Muslim community or on any other religious community - it criticized religions, not religious groups of people (except extremists, from every religion).
Siné was fired because of putting forward the idea that Jean Sarkozy became a Jew and married a Jewish woman for personal profit. It can very well be argued that what he wrote had antisemitic undertones (i.e. it was aimed at Jews themselves), which is why the decision to fire him was made. Siné was cleared by the courts, but it doesn't change the fact that the reasoning for firing him was that it was felt by those who took the decision that he was aiming at a religious group of people as such, contrary to what the journal does. There is no double standard.
I'm amazed. How can you think implying that all black and muslim women makes babies for allocations is not racist, but saying that he converted to judaism in order to marry his jewish wife, who is also the heir of the Darty familly, is antisemite. You can contextualize all you want, there is nothing in the caricature that imply it is a jab at right wing extremism (which is the reason why the caricature created an outrage in the far left), just like saying "the coran is shit", whatever the context, is clearly a global view on islam (just like drawing a bomb in Mohammed's turban is implying islam is terrorist by essence). Again, I find all that completly OK (I'm for a total freedom of press), and I am not at all saying Charlie is biased (Charb was a hero to me), but the public outrage that followed Siné's small text shows a lot on how the media and our society view all these events.
I just explained to you why both covers that you mentioned were absolutely not aimed at Muslims. The cover with the Muslim women asking for allocations was, as I just said, to ridicule ring-wing fantasies on the topic, not to actually imply that Muslim women really do make babies for allocations. It almost only created an "outrage" among those who did not understand the cover because they probably don't read the journal. The same goes for the cover with the Muslim with the Quran getting shot, which condemned the Egyptian military for the massacre and not the Muslims who got killed. There is nothing racist about either message - all you need to do is understand how the cartoons work and what they mean.
On January 17 2015 06:15 WhiteDog wrote: Even in Charlie, many people clearly stated that Charlie under Philippe Val was biased (even people who actually work/worked in Charlie : Tignous was one of them, so was Delfeil de Ton or Olivier Cyran) and believed attacking the muslim was non pertinent. Putting that aside, in the media it is pretty obvious that there is a double standard : Eric Zemmour, Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Fourest or Malka are all always invited and well known for some curious comment. If Houellebecq last book pictured a society with a jewish government, everybody would have instantly called it antisemite. Somehow, implying France is overrun by muslim give you open access to all medias.
There is a difference between being too alarmist about extremists and being actually racist against the entire Muslim population. There was no anti-Muslims racism whatsoever at Charlie Hebdo. I despise Zemmour but he's been condemned for hate speech before and the double standard we were talking about was from the legal point-of-view. People get condemned when they preach hate against a religious, "ethnic" group or skin color, not when their target is a religion.
On January 17 2015 05:41 jinorazi wrote: i think many people have a blanket generalization on freedom of speech. for the same reason you dont go up to a random black person and call them t he N word, since its quiet predictable of the outcome, you shouldnt do the same to muslim since the predictable outcome is different from those of other religions. extremism aside, many of the islamic countries are heavily based on their belief, its part of the government and country and its inevitable to get strong reactions to offending content. to wave off this reaction with "freedom of speech is freedom of speech" is very arrogant and naive.
criticism of islam needs to come from muslims, not "western christians" since whatever good message it might have gets drowned and lost in the "west is criticizing us" attitude.
In essense your interpretation of freedom of speech is that the line is drawn when the aggrieved party responds with violence. Like the massacre directed at Charlie Hebdo. That is so very very wrong. The point of freedom of speech is that it is to be not under duress of those who will direct violence towards it.
Or to turn it the other way, in those Islamic countries you speak of, where blasphemy is punishable by death, well, they actually aren't very nice places to live at all. Take Pakistan for instance. Mobs literally run around burning and stoning and killing people for accused blasphemy, (for things like throwing away a business card with the name mohammed for instance or being not muslim), whilst the police and the courts stand by.
Polititians who stand by those accused of blasphemy or try to repel the laws are killed either by assasination or killed by their own bodyguards. This may sound like some sort of gross exaggeration but it is the truth. Now go read what you just wrote and be glad that you have the freedom of speech to write what you just did without being threatened of torture and death.
west went through the same phase, i expect the middle east to go through the same. changes require ugly events. pointing out the flaws like punishments of blasphemy is just pointing out the obvious to me, not something i can be for or against, its just the way it is with society east or west all depending on progress of said society.
what the extremists did is very wrong, what charlie hebdo did had risks from extremists and they knew it. now its spread to people in middle east mass protesting against what charlie hebdo did and is doing, western view says its freedom of speech and it shouldnt be stopped and thats where i said this view comes from blanket view on freedom of speech. such criticism needs to come within islam, not outside because the meaning gets lost.
western view has this high chair view when exact same shit has happened to them. in west, we're lucky enough to live in a time of post change while people born in middle east lives in pre change and we should treat it as such. i'm pointing out people, society, nations need to be talked with in accordance to their way of life, forcing your own view based on your own culture does not apply everywhere else. such differences and predictable outcome should always be considered yet, like i said, many likes to paint everything with the same brush then act surprised with the predictable outcome.
I think you have confused freedom of speech with Charlie Hebdo. Charlie hebdo does not represent freedom of speech, it is a magazine that can exist becuase of that precious right. Charlie hebdo audience isn't people in the middle east, unless the people of the middle east speak French and as far as I am aware they don't even sell in the middle east. They aren't forcing their views on anybody, they are selling a magazine. No one has to read Charlie Hebdo. No one has to sit down and read it, no one has to pay and buy it and certainly no one is arrested and killed becuase they didn't read it.
You call it a high chair. Let me tell you, not all cultures are equal. Some beliefs, some institutions, some cultures are just superior to others. You say that the west are forcing their own views. You act as if this was somehow a recent development as opposed to cultures which have changed over hundreds of years. The west didn't suddenly appear and enforce their values, forcing their beliefs into the middle east, from what I can see, the power structure of the middle east are resistant to "western" notions of liberty and freedom of speech. Of course saying that there are plenty in those countries who do beleive in those notions, hence the Arab spring and revolutions and civil wars and various other changes. In fact it is almost rascist to characterise the middle east as if somehow they will be a backward peoples, forever intolerant, and not be exposed to ideas different from their own.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
Completely false on both counts.
The "Le Coran c'est de la merde, ça n'arrête pas les balles" cover denounced the slaughter of unarmed Muslim partisans of Morsi by the Egyptian military. The point of the drawing is to show that the dead had nothing to protect themselves but the Quran. There is absolutely nothing racist about the cartoon, which precisely condemned the atrocities in Egypt perpetrated by the military.
The cover with the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations!" combines two different news stories of the time: a reduction in allocations in France and the crimes of Boko Haram against women, including stories of kidnapping and of rape. The aim of the cover is to denounce and mock right-wing fantasies about foreigners coming to France to "steal" from the French social system - including the scarecrow often used by the right of foreign mothers coming to France to give birth on French soil. They were therefore ridiculing right-wing fantasies, not endorsing them.
Nothing about these drawings was attacking Muslims as religious people - one served to denounce atrocities perpetrated against Muslims, and the other served to denounce right-wing fantasies about immigrants, including Muslims. To think they were "racist" is to utterly misunderstand them. Again, Charlie Hebdo never "spit" on the Muslim community or on any other religious community - it criticized religions, not religious groups of people (except extremists, from every religion).
Siné was fired because of putting forward the idea that Jean Sarkozy became a Jew and married a Jewish woman for personal profit. It can very well be argued that what he wrote had antisemitic undertones (i.e. it was aimed at Jews themselves), which is why the decision to fire him was made. Siné was cleared by the courts, but it doesn't change the fact that the reasoning for firing him was that it was felt by those who took the decision that he was aiming at a religious group of people as such, contrary to what the journal does. There is no double standard.
I'm amazed. How can you think implying that all black and muslim women makes babies for allocations is not racist, but saying that he converted to judaism in order to marry his jewish wife, who is also the heir of the Darty familly, is antisemite. You can contextualize all you want, there is nothing in the caricature that imply it is a jab at right wing extremism (which is the reason why the caricature created an outrage in the far left), just like saying "the coran is shit", whatever the context, is clearly a global view on islam (just like drawing a bomb in Mohammed's turban is implying islam is terrorist by essence). Again, I find all that completly OK (I'm for a total freedom of press), and I am not at all saying Charlie is biased (Charb was a hero to me), but the public outrage that followed Siné's small text shows a lot on how the media and our society view all these events.
I just explained to you why both covers that you mentioned were absolutely not aimed at Muslims. The cover with the Muslim women asking for allocations was, as I just said, to ridicule ring-wing fantasies on the topic, not to actually imply that Muslim women really do make babies for allocations. It almost only created an "outrage" among those who did not understand the cover because they probably don't read the journal. The same goes for the cover with the Muslim with the Quran getting shot, which condemned the Egyptian military for the massacre and not the Muslims who got killed. There is nothing racist about either message - all you need to do is understand how the cartoons work and what they mean.
On January 17 2015 06:15 WhiteDog wrote: Even in Charlie, many people clearly stated that Charlie under Philippe Val was biased (even people who actually work/worked in Charlie : Tignous was one of them, so was Delfeil de Ton or Olivier Cyran) and believed attacking the muslim was non pertinent. Putting that aside, in the media it is pretty obvious that there is a double standard : Eric Zemmour, Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Fourest or Malka are all always invited and well known for some curious comment. If Houellebecq last book pictured a society with a jewish government, everybody would have instantly called it antisemite. Somehow, implying France is overrun by muslim give you open access to all medias.
There is a difference between being too alarmist about extremists and being actually racist against the entire Muslim population. There was no anti-Muslims racism whatsoever at Charlie Hebdo. I despise Zemmour but he's been condemned for hate speech before and the double standard we were talking about was from the legal point-of-view. People get condemned when they preach hate against a religious, "ethnic" group or skin color, not when their target is a religion.
Dieudonné could say the same exact thing. What does he mean by Shoananas ? (He argued in court that it just about "hot ananas") By Charlie Coulibaly ? By the first sketch he had that made all this fuss ? If Dieudonné says "I said Charlie Coulibaly" to caricature the islamist extremists" does it work ? On this specific caricature, there are no reference to right wing extremist on the caricature. At least, it's pretty bad caricature.
The problem is not really that they are condemned, it is that despite the condamnation they are still there in the media giving their point of view on everything - like Fourest who got condemn for diffamation several times, which again show a certain double standard.
On January 17 2015 05:41 jinorazi wrote: i think many people have a blanket generalization on freedom of speech. for the same reason you dont go up to a random black person and call them t he N word, since its quiet predictable of the outcome, you shouldnt do the same to muslim since the predictable outcome is different from those of other religions. extremism aside, many of the islamic countries are heavily based on their belief, its part of the government and country and its inevitable to get strong reactions to offending content. to wave off this reaction with "freedom of speech is freedom of speech" is very arrogant and naive.
criticism of islam needs to come from muslims, not "western christians" since whatever good message it might have gets drowned and lost in the "west is criticizing us" attitude.
In essense your interpretation of freedom of speech is that the line is drawn when the aggrieved party responds with violence. Like the massacre directed at Charlie Hebdo. That is so very very wrong. The point of freedom of speech is that it is to be not under duress of those who will direct violence towards it.
Or to turn it the other way, in those Islamic countries you speak of, where blasphemy is punishable by death, well, they actually aren't very nice places to live at all. Take Pakistan for instance. Mobs literally run around burning and stoning and killing people for accused blasphemy, (for things like throwing away a business card with the name mohammed for instance or being not muslim), whilst the police and the courts stand by.
Polititians who stand by those accused of blasphemy or try to repel the laws are killed either by assasination or killed by their own bodyguards. This may sound like some sort of gross exaggeration but it is the truth. Now go read what you just wrote and be glad that you have the freedom of speech to write what you just did without being threatened of torture and death.
west went through the same phase, i expect the middle east to go through the same. changes require ugly events. pointing out the flaws like punishments of blasphemy is just pointing out the obvious to me, not something i can be for or against, its just the way it is with society east or west all depending on progress of said society.
what the extremists did is very wrong, what charlie hebdo did had risks from extremists and they knew it. now its spread to people in middle east mass protesting against what charlie hebdo did and is doing, western view says its freedom of speech and it shouldnt be stopped and thats where i said this view comes from blanket view on freedom of speech. such criticism needs to come within islam, not outside because the meaning gets lost.
western view has this high chair view when exact same shit has happened to them. in west, we're lucky enough to live in a time of post change while people born in middle east lives in pre change and we should treat it as such. i'm pointing out people, society, nations need to be talked with in accordance to their way of life, forcing your own view based on your own culture does not apply everywhere else. such differences and predictable outcome should always be considered yet, like i said, many likes to paint everything with the same brush then act surprised with the predictable outcome.
I think you have confused freedom of speech with Charlie Hebdo. Charlie hebdo does not represent freedom of speech, it is a magazine that can exist becuase of that precious right. Charlie hebdo audience isn't people in the middle east, unless the people of the middle east speak French and as far as I am aware they don't even sell in the middle east. They aren't forcing their views on anybody, they are selling a magazine. No one has to read Charlie Hebdo. No one has to sit down and read it, no one has to pay and buy it and certainly no one is arrested and killed becuase they didn't read it.
You call it a high chair. Let me tell you, not all cultures are equal. Some beliefs, some institutions, some cultures are just superior to others. You say that the west are forcing their own views. You act as if this was somehow a recent development as opposed to cultures which have changed over hundreds of years. The west didn't suddenly appear and enforce their values, forcing their beliefs into the middle east, from what I can see, the power structure of the middle east are resistant to "western" notions of liberty and freedom of speech. Of course saying that there are plenty in those countries who do beleive in those notions, hence the Arab spring and revolutions and civil wars and various other changes. In fact it is almost rascist to characterise the middle east as if somehow they will be a backward peoples, forever intolerant, and not be exposed to ideas different from their own.
my words were towards people defending charlie hedbo on behalf of free speech (charlie hebdo definitely represents free speech) and those interlorent of the middle east, such as thinking they're backwards people and i'm saying its just the nature of society and its not 100% correct to call them backwards. i think we're on the same page here as i dont disagree many of what you said but you seem to be misinterpreting what i said though caused by my lack of language skill.
my point was you can't use your cultural standards to get through another culture when their cultural standards are different, then act surprised why it doesnt get through. one culture suprior to another...yeah, look where that got us.
On January 16 2015 03:53 Nyxisto wrote: There is freedom of speech/expression and then there is simply spreading hate and racism. I mean most people would probably agree that punching somebody in the face should be illegal, because a person is getting hurt. Now the same can be done with words, often to much greater effect. Spreading racism or hate will result in discrimination and violence if it is done often enough. People can literally be bullied to insanity just by using "freedom of speech".
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
Completely false on both counts.
The "Le Coran c'est de la merde, ça n'arrête pas les balles" cover denounced the slaughter of unarmed Muslim partisans of Morsi by the Egyptian military. The point of the drawing is to show that the dead had nothing to protect themselves but the Quran. There is absolutely nothing racist about the cartoon, which precisely condemned the atrocities in Egypt perpetrated by the military.
The cover with the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations!" combines two different news stories of the time: a reduction in allocations in France and the crimes of Boko Haram against women, including stories of kidnapping and of rape. The aim of the cover is to denounce and mock right-wing fantasies about foreigners coming to France to "steal" from the French social system - including the scarecrow often used by the right of foreign mothers coming to France to give birth on French soil. They were therefore ridiculing right-wing fantasies, not endorsing them.
Nothing about these drawings was attacking Muslims as religious people - one served to denounce atrocities perpetrated against Muslims, and the other served to denounce right-wing fantasies about immigrants, including Muslims. To think they were "racist" is to utterly misunderstand them. Again, Charlie Hebdo never "spit" on the Muslim community or on any other religious community - it criticized religions, not religious groups of people (except extremists, from every religion).
Siné was fired because of putting forward the idea that Jean Sarkozy became a Jew and married a Jewish woman for personal profit. It can very well be argued that what he wrote had antisemitic undertones (i.e. it was aimed at Jews themselves), which is why the decision to fire him was made. Siné was cleared by the courts, but it doesn't change the fact that the reasoning for firing him was that it was felt by those who took the decision that he was aiming at a religious group of people as such, contrary to what the journal does. There is no double standard.
I'm amazed. How can you think implying that all black and muslim women makes babies for allocations is not racist, but saying that he converted to judaism in order to marry his jewish wife, who is also the heir of the Darty familly, is antisemite. You can contextualize all you want, there is nothing in the caricature that imply it is a jab at right wing extremism (which is the reason why the caricature created an outrage in the far left), just like saying "the coran is shit", whatever the context, is clearly a global view on islam (just like drawing a bomb in Mohammed's turban is implying islam is terrorist by essence). Again, I find all that completly OK (I'm for a total freedom of press), and I am not at all saying Charlie is biased (Charb was a hero to me), but the public outrage that followed Siné's small text shows a lot on how the media and our society view all these events.
I just explained to you why both covers that you mentioned were absolutely not aimed at Muslims. The cover with the Muslim women asking for allocations was, as I just said, to ridicule ring-wing fantasies on the topic, not to actually imply that Muslim women really do make babies for allocations. It almost only created an "outrage" among those who did not understand the cover because they probably don't read the journal. The same goes for the cover with the Muslim with the Quran getting shot, which condemned the Egyptian military for the massacre and not the Muslims who got killed. There is nothing racist about either message - all you need to do is understand how the cartoons work and what they mean.
On January 17 2015 06:15 WhiteDog wrote: Even in Charlie, many people clearly stated that Charlie under Philippe Val was biased (even people who actually work/worked in Charlie : Tignous was one of them, so was Delfeil de Ton or Olivier Cyran) and believed attacking the muslim was non pertinent. Putting that aside, in the media it is pretty obvious that there is a double standard : Eric Zemmour, Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Fourest or Malka are all always invited and well known for some curious comment. If Houellebecq last book pictured a society with a jewish government, everybody would have instantly called it antisemite. Somehow, implying France is overrun by muslim give you open access to all medias.
There is a difference between being too alarmist about extremists and being actually racist against the entire Muslim population. There was no anti-Muslims racism whatsoever at Charlie Hebdo. I despise Zemmour but he's been condemned for hate speech before and the double standard we were talking about was from the legal point-of-view. People get condemned when they preach hate against a religious, "ethnic" group or skin color, not when their target is a religion.
Dieudonné could say the same exact thing. What does he mean by Shoananas ? (He argued in court that it just about "hot ananas") By Charlie Coulibaly ? By the first sketch he had that made all this fuss ? If Dieudonné says "I said Charlie Coulibaly" to caricature the islamist extremists" does it work ? On this specific caricature, there are no reference to right wing extremist. At least, it's pretty bad caricature.
No, if you take a look at the specific cases where Dieudonné got condemned, he was clearly targeting Jews as religious people. Again, that has never been the case of Charlie Hebdo, for any group of religious people. Honestly, I'm not sure how you're still not understanding the difference between targeting religion/religious institutions/religious symbols and targeting religious people. In the two covers you mentioned, the targets were respectively the (far) right wing trying to demonize the figure of the immigrant in France, and the Egyptian military. Neither targeted Muslims. The fact that you didn't understand the covers does not mean that they were racist.
On January 17 2015 08:09 WhiteDog wrote: The problem is not really that they are condemned, it is that despite the condamnation they are still there in the media giving their point of view on everything - like Fourest who got condemn for diffamation several times.
If you agree that there is no double standard from the legal point of view, that's already something. Fourest is an intellectual who's done very valuable work on both the far right and on religious extremists, and I don't see why she should not be invited on these topics.
But where do you draw the line for what constitues hatespeech? Isn't a paper like Charlie Hebdo spreading hate? A majority of Muslims seems to think so - so much that it was banned nationwide in Turkey.
What you are promoting is a slippery slope towards oppression of anyone with a diverging opinion. Just look at Sweden where all political parties have agreed to for 8 years to keep Sverigedemokraterne from ANY influence - that is outright ignoring 13% of the population. That is a problem in a democracy.
Edit: just realised we might be on a tangent here. Anyone heard anything about the third subject?
Drawing the line is the role of the judges and of justice. Charlie Hebdo has been sued many times, and has been sentenced sometimes because the judges estimated that the line had been crossed. (iirc it's something like 9 sentences for almost 50 trials). And it's not about assuming people are dumb, it's about the simple fact that most people have a tendency to consider true what they hear others saying without taking time to research the actual facts and make their own opinions.
Wow, exactly like dieudonné :D But dieudonné is hate for some reason while CH is free speech. That's why the cursor problem is a problem, when people that say the same thing but on one side it's considered "hate" and another "freedom of speech".
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists
On January 16 2015 07:30 Ghostcom wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
So targeting one group is off limits, but the other is totally fine because... You said so? A Muslim will tell you that they have no more choice in believing than a Jew has of being jewish (which ironically is tied largely to Judaism). I'm sorry but your distinction doesn't really work.
Both of you are completely failing to understand the difference between Dieudonné and Charlie Hebdo. The difference was made clear by Acertos but I'll explain it again.
Dieudonné attacks religious people, namely Jews (for being Jews). He is clearly anti-semitic, has made anti-semitic statements, and has been condemned for them. Charlie Hebdo does not attack or criticize religious people. It does not attack Jews, it does not attack Muslims, it does not attack Christians (and it does not attack Arabs either, contrary to what you said). What Charlie Hebdo does is attack all religious extremists (not religious people in general) and criticize all religions and religious symbols (again, not religious people). Criticizing religions for the systems of beliefs they are, and mocking religious institutions and religious symbols for various reasons (for example for the Pope's stance on condoms), is not the same as attacking the religious people themselves. You're attacking ideas, institutions and figures of authority, NOT religious people as a group.
This is an important distinction and it explains why Dieudonné has been condemned for anti-semitism/incitement to racial hatred while Charlie Hebdo has not (its condemnations were usually for having insulted individuals). Charlie Hebdo is an antiracist publication which has never promoted the type of hate-speech that Dieudonné is well-known for. To the contrary, its cartoons ridicule hate speech and they use right-wing imagery to mock it and denounce it those right-wing ideas.
On January 16 2015 08:00 WhiteDog wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:52 MrCon wrote:
On January 16 2015 07:22 Acertos wrote: There is no point talking with you, Dieudoné targets Jews as a people while CH targets religions and right wing extremes.
Ok so forget dieudonné, most french people are brainwashed by years of media lies about him anyway so you're right talking about him is counter productive. Dieudonné targets everyone by the way, like CH.
Let's talk about CH instead, all year long they say arabs are terrorists and their prophet is too, but when one of their journalist makes a "jew have money" joke article he instantly gets fired because he somehow crossed the line and he's antisemitic.
There's double standard. Everybody knows about it.
WIth regards to the matter at hand, namely Charlie Hebdo and French law, there is absolutely no double standard, no. If you promote hate speech by targeting groups of people you get condemned. If you criticize religions, you don't. It's the same for everyone.
It's untrue. Some of Charlie's caricature were insulting - the coran is "shit" for exemple, or the one where all the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations !" (it's just racist plain and simple). I'm personally completly OKAY with those, and they didn't create any fuss in the media (aside from some specific extremist group), because, let's say it, spitting on the muslim "community" or the dominated class of our society is less "important" to our elites than any insult toward the jewish community (look at the Sine's affair, the chronique he was fired for was not antisemite at all, but it create a huge fuss in the media). Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media.
Completely false on both counts.
The "Le Coran c'est de la merde, ça n'arrête pas les balles" cover denounced the slaughter of unarmed Muslim partisans of Morsi by the Egyptian military. The point of the drawing is to show that the dead had nothing to protect themselves but the Quran. There is absolutely nothing racist about the cartoon, which precisely condemned the atrocities in Egypt perpetrated by the military.
The cover with the black pregnant women saying "Don't touch our allocations!" combines two different news stories of the time: a reduction in allocations in France and the crimes of Boko Haram against women, including stories of kidnapping and of rape. The aim of the cover is to denounce and mock right-wing fantasies about foreigners coming to France to "steal" from the French social system - including the scarecrow often used by the right of foreign mothers coming to France to give birth on French soil. They were therefore ridiculing right-wing fantasies, not endorsing them.
Nothing about these drawings was attacking Muslims as religious people - one served to denounce atrocities perpetrated against Muslims, and the other served to denounce right-wing fantasies about immigrants, including Muslims. To think they were "racist" is to utterly misunderstand them. Again, Charlie Hebdo never "spit" on the Muslim community or on any other religious community - it criticized religions, not religious groups of people (except extremists, from every religion).
Siné was fired because of putting forward the idea that Jean Sarkozy became a Jew and married a Jewish woman for personal profit. It can very well be argued that what he wrote had antisemitic undertones (i.e. it was aimed at Jews themselves), which is why the decision to fire him was made. Siné was cleared by the courts, but it doesn't change the fact that the reasoning for firing him was that it was felt by those who took the decision that he was aiming at a religious group of people as such, contrary to what the journal does. There is no double standard.
I'm amazed. How can you think implying that all black and muslim women makes babies for allocations is not racist, but saying that he converted to judaism in order to marry his jewish wife, who is also the heir of the Darty familly, is antisemite. You can contextualize all you want, there is nothing in the caricature that imply it is a jab at right wing extremism (which is the reason why the caricature created an outrage in the far left), just like saying "the coran is shit", whatever the context, is clearly a global view on islam (just like drawing a bomb in Mohammed's turban is implying islam is terrorist by essence). Again, I find all that completly OK (I'm for a total freedom of press), and I am not at all saying Charlie is biased (Charb was a hero to me), but the public outrage that followed Siné's small text shows a lot on how the media and our society view all these events.
I just explained to you why both covers that you mentioned were absolutely not aimed at Muslims. The cover with the Muslim women asking for allocations was, as I just said, to ridicule ring-wing fantasies on the topic, not to actually imply that Muslim women really do make babies for allocations. It almost only created an "outrage" among those who did not understand the cover because they probably don't read the journal. The same goes for the cover with the Muslim with the Quran getting shot, which condemned the Egyptian military for the massacre and not the Muslims who got killed. There is nothing racist about either message - all you need to do is understand how the cartoons work and what they mean.
On January 17 2015 06:15 WhiteDog wrote: Even in Charlie, many people clearly stated that Charlie under Philippe Val was biased (even people who actually work/worked in Charlie : Tignous was one of them, so was Delfeil de Ton or Olivier Cyran) and believed attacking the muslim was non pertinent. Putting that aside, in the media it is pretty obvious that there is a double standard : Eric Zemmour, Houellebecq, Finkelkraut, Fourest or Malka are all always invited and well known for some curious comment. If Houellebecq last book pictured a society with a jewish government, everybody would have instantly called it antisemite. Somehow, implying France is overrun by muslim give you open access to all medias.
There is a difference between being too alarmist about extremists and being actually racist against the entire Muslim population. There was no anti-Muslims racism whatsoever at Charlie Hebdo. I despise Zemmour but he's been condemned for hate speech before and the double standard we were talking about was from the legal point-of-view. People get condemned when they preach hate against a religious, "ethnic" group or skin color, not when their target is a religion.
Dieudonné could say the same exact thing. What does he mean by Shoananas ? (He argued in court that it just about "hot ananas") By Charlie Coulibaly ? By the first sketch he had that made all this fuss ? If Dieudonné says "I said Charlie Coulibaly" to caricature the islamist extremists" does it work ? On this specific caricature, there are no reference to right wing extremist. At least, it's pretty bad caricature.
No, if you take a look at the specific cases where Dieudonné got condemned, he was clearly targeting Jews as religious people. Again, that has never been the case of Charlie Hebdo, for any group of religious people. Honestly, I'm not sure how you're still not understanding the difference between targeting religion/religious institutions/religious symbols and targeting religious people. In the two covers you mentioned, the targets were respectively the (far) right wing trying to demonize the figure of the immigrant in France, and the Egyptian military. Neither targeted Muslims. The fact that you didn't understand the covers does not mean that they were racist.
On January 17 2015 08:09 WhiteDog wrote: The problem is not really that they are condemned, it is that despite the condamnation they are still there in the media giving their point of view on everything - like Fourest who got condemn for diffamation several times.
If you agree that there is no double standard from the legal point of view, that's already something. Fourest is an intellectual who's done very valuable work on both the far right and on religious extremists, and I don't see why she should not be invited on these topics.
I never said there was any double standard from the legal point of view ! Here is my first sentence : "Charlie was more or less equal, but don't tell me there's no double standard in the media." Actually one of the main problem we have with kids in 93 is that they barely ever know about the legal point of view on those things because the media rarely publicize the result : the time of the media and the time of the justice system are entirely different, and following the first makes you believe the society as a whole is biased.
Fourest did very valuable work ? LOL Please. She's a liar nothing more. "Working" in social science needs some kind of epistemology and rigor, she have none of those. Most of the book she wrote got condemned for diffamation (on Le Pen and on Ramadan for exemple).
Reza Aslan is a charlatan though. Claiming that countries like Indonesia and Turkey have "100% equal rights between men and women" is just ridiculous and he basically always tries to smash completely legitimate criticism with stupid platitudes.
reza has his faults but more rational than most people that talks about the middle east or religion in general. does men and women have equal rights in indonesia and turkey by law? by law its equal in korea but in real life it is not, i'd imagine its the same in most of the world. besides, inequality between sex is a cultural thing rather than religious.
On January 17 2015 05:41 jinorazi wrote: i think many people have a blanket generalization on freedom of speech. for the same reason you dont go up to a random black person and call them t he N word, since its quiet predictable of the outcome, you shouldnt do the same to muslim since the predictable outcome is different from those of other religions. extremism aside, many of the islamic countries are heavily based on their belief, its part of the government and country and its inevitable to get strong reactions to offending content. to wave off this reaction with "freedom of speech is freedom of speech" is very arrogant and naive.
criticism of islam needs to come from muslims, not "western christians" since whatever good message it might have gets drowned and lost in the "west is criticizing us" attitude.
In essense your interpretation of freedom of speech is that the line is drawn when the aggrieved party responds with violence. Like the massacre directed at Charlie Hebdo. That is so very very wrong. The point of freedom of speech is that it is to be not under duress of those who will direct violence towards it.
Or to turn it the other way, in those Islamic countries you speak of, where blasphemy is punishable by death, well, they actually aren't very nice places to live at all. Take Pakistan for instance. Mobs literally run around burning and stoning and killing people for accused blasphemy, (for things like throwing away a business card with the name mohammed for instance or being not muslim), whilst the police and the courts stand by.
Polititians who stand by those accused of blasphemy or try to repel the laws are killed either by assasination or killed by their own bodyguards. This may sound like some sort of gross exaggeration but it is the truth. Now go read what you just wrote and be glad that you have the freedom of speech to write what you just did without being threatened of torture and death.
west went through the same phase, i expect the middle east to go through the same. changes require ugly events. pointing out the flaws like punishments of blasphemy is just pointing out the obvious to me, not something i can be for or against, its just the way it is with society east or west all depending on progress of said society.
what the extremists did is very wrong, what charlie hebdo did had risks from extremists and they knew it. now its spread to people in middle east mass protesting against what charlie hebdo did and is doing, western view says its freedom of speech and it shouldnt be stopped and thats where i said this view comes from blanket view on freedom of speech. such criticism needs to come within islam, not outside because the meaning gets lost.
western view has this high chair view when exact same shit has happened to them. in west, we're lucky enough to live in a time of post change while people born in middle east lives in pre change and we should treat it as such. i'm pointing out people, society, nations need to be talked with in accordance to their way of life, forcing your own view based on your own culture does not apply everywhere else. such differences and predictable outcome should always be considered yet, like i said, many likes to paint everything with the same brush then act surprised with the predictable outcome.
I think you have confused freedom of speech with Charlie Hebdo. Charlie hebdo does not represent freedom of speech, it is a magazine that can exist becuase of that precious right. Charlie hebdo audience isn't people in the middle east, unless the people of the middle east speak French and as far as I am aware they don't even sell in the middle east. They aren't forcing their views on anybody, they are selling a magazine. No one has to read Charlie Hebdo. No one has to sit down and read it, no one has to pay and buy it and certainly no one is arrested and killed becuase they didn't read it.
You call it a high chair. Let me tell you, not all cultures are equal. Some beliefs, some institutions, some cultures are just superior to others. You say that the west are forcing their own views. You act as if this was somehow a recent development as opposed to cultures which have changed over hundreds of years. The west didn't suddenly appear and enforce their values, forcing their beliefs into the middle east, from what I can see, the power structure of the middle east are resistant to "western" notions of liberty and freedom of speech. Of course saying that there are plenty in those countries who do beleive in those notions, hence the Arab spring and revolutions and civil wars and various other changes. In fact it is almost rascist to characterise the middle east as if somehow they will be a backward peoples, forever intolerant, and not be exposed to ideas different from their own.
my words were towards people defending charlie hedbo on behalf of free speech (charlie hebdo definitely represents free speech) and those interlorent of the middle east, such as thinking they're backwards people and i'm saying its just the nature of society and its not 100% correct to call them backwards. i think we're on the same page here as i dont disagree many of what you said but you seem to be misinterpreting what i said though caused by my lack of language skill.
my point was you can't use your cultural standards to get through another culture when their cultural standards are different, then act surprised why it doesnt get through. one culture suprior to another...yeah, look where that got us.
A culture that respects the rights of women, that allows freedom of religion, that doesn't execute people for being homosexual is superior to a culture that bans every religion but islam, that executes homosexuals and adulterers, that don't let women vote or drive, that kill people for drawing cartoons.
On January 17 2015 08:48 Nyxisto wrote: Reza Aslan is a charlatan though. Claiming that countries like Indonesia and Turkey have "100% equal rights between men and women" is just ridiculous and he basically always tries to smash completely legitimate criticism with stupid platitudes.
I think Aslan is guilty of using rhetorics a little too much to strengthen his points, and so he will have those kind of hyperboles from time to time that make him look bad. Most of the time though, if you look for the core argument that he's making, it makes a ton of sense (as is the case in this video btw)
EPT
