At least 54 people have been detained by police in France for “defending or glorifying terrorism” in the wake of last week’s attacks in Paris. Many of the arrests are believed to stem from comments made on Facebook, Twitter and social media as the world reacted to the atrocities. They are part of a broader French crackdown on perceived hate speech, extremism and anti-Semitism amid a government push for tougher anti-terrorism measures. Anti-semitic French comedian Dieudonné was among those detained after he seemed compared himself to the gunman who murdered four people at a kosher supermarket, Amedy Coulibaly.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, some sort of backlash was inevitable. No matter how much reasonable people work to prevent it, there are always those ready, willing, and able to ascribe the barbarity of a few to the many. That this is as wrong as it is prejudiced should be self-evident. There have been reports of attacks on mosques across France, even though the attacks were as much about Islam as abortion clinic bombings in this country are about Christianity. For whatever reason, some people feel powerless, and there response is to lash out at those who look or think differently than the Caucasian Christian majority.
I wrote last week at some length about the travesty of associating Islam with terrorism. I’ve always believed that freedom of speech and expression is what separates the West from repressive regimes like Iran or North Korea. That right to speech and free expression shouldn’t come with different standards of tolerance for different classes…but that seems to be what’s happening in France, where anti-Semitism is a punishable offense, but anti-Islam speech is considered acceptable.
Evidently, hypocrisy is the norm in France and most of the rest of western Europe these days.
A tweet sent from an official French police account had asked people to report Twitter users who were endorsing the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the BBC reported.
A spokesperson for the French government said some of the people arrested have already been convicted of the offence.
While the #jesuisCharlie hashtag became one of the most used in the site’s history, #jesuisKouachi, using the name of the brothers who carried out the Charlie Hebdo massacre, was tweeted thousands of times.
By no means do I mean to justify or glorify the Charlie Hebdo massacre or those responsible for it. That said, glorifying that sort of barbarity might be reprehensible, is it really any different from what Charlie Hebdo does? No, they didn’t glorify mass murder, but they did manage to offend many Muslims…and yet many have vigorously defended their right to do so. They problem with free speech and expression is that sometimes it descends to the realm of obnoxious and objectionable speech and expression. If you’re going to criminalize certain types of speech and expression, where’s the line to be drawn…and who gets to draw that line?
Once a society begins heading down the slippery slope of criminalizing certain types of speech, it becomes much easier to ban other types of speech. How long before it becomes illegal to criticize the government? Where do you stop? Worse, CAN you stop once you begin to travel down that path?
What’s been happening on Twitter and Facebook is in many cases beyond disgusting. The idea that anyone could condone or, even worse, celebrate cold-blooded murder is beyond sick and disturbing…but should it be the place of government to proscribe and prosecute such speech? A good example of this is the German legal ban on glorifying the Nazis. The question becomes what passes as “glorification”…and who gets to make those decisions?
There’s no such thing as an impartial yardstick used when it comes to speech. Standards too often depend on a person’s sensibilities, ideology, and prejudices. When speech and expression becomes criminalized, it becomes easy for ever greater amounts and types of speech to be proscribed. Thus is tyranny born.
Several people called for those using the hashtag to be arrested or even tracked down and killed by a drone strike.
Others used it as an example of freedom of speech, demonstrating that people’s instinct to censor something held to be offensive contradicted the liberal values professed in the wake of the terror attacks.
If we truly believe in “liberal values,” things like tolerance, acceptance, and free speech and expression, we must be prepared for the likelihood that some will see their way clear to give voice to things we find highly offensive and objectionable. Such is the nature of a free society. You can’t preach free speech and expression…while proscribing expression you find offensive. No one person or group should be able to determine what sort of speech is allowable and what isn’t. Do that, and what you have is a society no longer free.
If we expect and demand free speech and expression, we can’t credibly demand the arrest and prosecution of those whose views we disagree with or find objectionable. That’s not freedom, and it sets a society to traveling down a slippery slope which can and probably will result in some very unanticipated and unintended consequences.
