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Hundreds of copies of the latest edition of Charlie Hebdo 'survivors' magazine are expected to be brought to the UK when it is published on Wednesday despite claims by radical preacher Anjem Choudary it is "an act of war".
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ct-of-war.html
An act of war? what a wonderful religion of peace.
1. All is forgiven
2. "where are the 70 virgins? they are with the killed journalists
3. terrorists : a 25 seconds job - a job for lazy persons.
Women in Charlie Hebdo Demonstration Whisked Mysteriously Away. Has Angela Merkle Been Abducted By Aliens?
No, life on Earth is even stranger than you think.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ie-hebdo-rally
There are over 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. It is unfortunate that a very small minority of them shape the image for those 1.6 billion people. The most visible extremists cannot even make up 1% of the entire population of Muslims, that would be over 1.6 million people.Quote:
Originally Posted by plankton
By the way, there is no such thing as the "Muslim religion".
I do have to say - I tend to agree with this article though: http://nypost.com/2015/01/13/hate-is-still-speech/
I agree. While I think on the hierarchy of things that are offensive to reasonable people, racial vilification should be above blasphemy, neither should be criminal. Such laws make the people who tend to violate them feel their views are suppressed because they're right rather than because they have said things that are indecent and threatening to minorities.Quote:
Originally Posted by fred41
The punishments don't act as a deterrent and the serial violators of these laws end up feeling empowered by the court judgments against them that are at most a nuisance (if the punishments were more severe they would be out of proportion to the offense committed). In the end the laws accomplish nothing and violate the spirit of free discourse even though they attempt to only censor the most vulgar and least valuable form of it.
That includes Holocaust denial which is illegal in several countries. While I understand why these laws may have seemed useful a short time after the Holocaust, and that they tend to only ensnare rank bigots, I think they should be repealed.
I did not know: "But under French law, insulting people based on their religion is a crime punishable by a fine of 22,500 euros and six months in jail" which is reported in Fred's link above. As the article speculates, this should certainly have a chilling effect on free speech in France and although it doesn't justify the murder of offenders, it does endorse the idea that people have a right not to be offended by speech––which is anathema to the concept of free speech as we understand it here in the U.S.
I completely agree that it would chill free speech. I wonder how this has been interpreted. I suppose that insulting a person based on their religion, is not the same thing as saying things about that religion that an adherent would find insulting. For instance, maybe you could insult Judaism or Islam (both the doctrine and the practices), but not insult the Jew or Muslim for practicing Judaism or Islam. When you have to make these micro-distinctions in real time, it chills speech.Quote:
Originally Posted by trish
I wondered exactly the same thing; the distinction just seems to fine to applicable.
France Arrests a Comedian For His Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the West’s “Free Speech” Celebration:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2...book-comments/