- Jun 6, 2007
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The recent murderous rampage at the Paris office of satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, over its publication of dispariging images of the prophet Muhammed should give the world two lessons. First, the critics are right that major print media outlets should be ashamed of themselves for their lack of courage and allowing themselves to be cowed by people that would threaten violence for speech that offends the Muslim religion. Major print media outlets throughout the world should form a collective and monitor the Muslim world and when identifiable threats of this nature occurr, the collective should print the threatended speech en masse. This would create the situation where there is so much "threatened" speech distributed throughout the world that these extremists Muslims groups believe justify violence that it would be pointless for them to conduct such violence because it does not make a material difference in the publication of such spech. In America, this collective should include in part the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the USA Today, the Washington Post, etc.. These media outlets laude and make a big deal about the courage of their individual journalists but how about the management of these media outlets showing courage and standing up for free speech against these Islamic extremist terrorists.
The second lesson from the murder of these twelve people over the publication of disparaging speech of the Muslim faith is that countries throughout the world have to be forced to take a stance, that being, are you for free speech or against free speech. There needs to be an international convention, like the Geneva convention against the mistreatment of prisoners captured in time of war, that all countries throughout the world should be signing on to that stands for the proposition that violence against promulgators of speech no matter how offensive the speech is, even speech on religion, is wrong and prohibited. The speech that is at the genesis of these murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo are disparaging images of Muhammed first published in the Danish Newspaper Jyllande-Posten and one of the sovereign acts that arose out of this matter is that the country of Saudi Arabia recalled their ambassador from Denmark in protest to this speech. How is the world going to get individual people and groups of people not to overreact to offensive speech when country's like Saudi Arabia overreact. This writer is christian and is offended when speech disparaging Jesus Christ and the Pope is published and so recognizes individuals and governments offense at speech offending a religion but the responsible response is just verbal condemnation of the speech not overreaction.
The world is going to see more badness arising out of the Muslim religion in Western countries unless the people and governments in these Western countries stand up for good in their countries on the subject of the Muslim religion. What is this all about "no go zones" and "sharia courts" for Muslim communities in Western countries. Muslim communities are not countries in and of themselves in Western countries; this is preposterous, absurd, unreasonable and out-of-the-question. These communities are part of a sovereign country and should be subject to the same power of government officials as non-Muslim communities throughout the country; police, fire department personnel, child welfare personnel and the like should have unimpaired access to these communities and people obstructing that access should find themselves in jail it is that simple. A critically important element of a sovereign country is its court system and the laws which guide its operation; it is an egregious off-the-charts violation against the sovereignty of a country to ignore a county's secular laws and just say in these communities we are going to disregard secular law and just apply another law whether it is a specific religion or another entities' law. Besides this alone compelling justification for this prohibition, a fully good country or society is not going to restrict its law to the Koran or Bible or any text limited to a fixed time in history because a fully good country knows that human knowledge and reason grows and progresses over time and that law needs to account for this and grow and change with these advancements. The Muslim religion is a wonderful and beautiful religion and should hold an outstandingly good place in human history ad infinitum but humanity should not allow this religion to hurt human history!
The second lesson from the murder of these twelve people over the publication of disparaging speech of the Muslim faith is that countries throughout the world have to be forced to take a stance, that being, are you for free speech or against free speech. There needs to be an international convention, like the Geneva convention against the mistreatment of prisoners captured in time of war, that all countries throughout the world should be signing on to that stands for the proposition that violence against promulgators of speech no matter how offensive the speech is, even speech on religion, is wrong and prohibited. The speech that is at the genesis of these murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo are disparaging images of Muhammed first published in the Danish Newspaper Jyllande-Posten and one of the sovereign acts that arose out of this matter is that the country of Saudi Arabia recalled their ambassador from Denmark in protest to this speech. How is the world going to get individual people and groups of people not to overreact to offensive speech when country's like Saudi Arabia overreact. This writer is christian and is offended when speech disparaging Jesus Christ and the Pope is published and so recognizes individuals and governments offense at speech offending a religion but the responsible response is just verbal condemnation of the speech not overreaction.
The world is going to see more badness arising out of the Muslim religion in Western countries unless the people and governments in these Western countries stand up for good in their countries on the subject of the Muslim religion. What is this all about "no go zones" and "sharia courts" for Muslim communities in Western countries. Muslim communities are not countries in and of themselves in Western countries; this is preposterous, absurd, unreasonable and out-of-the-question. These communities are part of a sovereign country and should be subject to the same power of government officials as non-Muslim communities throughout the country; police, fire department personnel, child welfare personnel and the like should have unimpaired access to these communities and people obstructing that access should find themselves in jail it is that simple. A critically important element of a sovereign country is its court system and the laws which guide its operation; it is an egregious off-the-charts violation against the sovereignty of a country to ignore a county's secular laws and just say in these communities we are going to disregard secular law and just apply another law whether it is a specific religion or another entities' law. Besides this alone compelling justification for this prohibition, a fully good country or society is not going to restrict its law to the Koran or Bible or any text limited to a fixed time in history because a fully good country knows that human knowledge and reason grows and progresses over time and that law needs to account for this and grow and change with these advancements. The Muslim religion is a wonderful and beautiful religion and should hold an outstandingly good place in human history ad infinitum but humanity should not allow this religion to hurt human history!
