So, about those FBAR forms...

Double standards anywhere I say..!


Gee, some people don't get it.


Edit. Another hiding cartoonist or a made up story?
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/13/us...ill-in-hiding/

So in Franch they're having a crackdown on "hate speech". What I find odd is the following though:

• A man of 22 was jailed on Tuesday for a year for posting a video mocking one of the three murdered policemen
• A man of 20 was jailed in Orleans for shouting "long live the Kalash[(nikov]" at police in a shopping centre

Surely if no one is getting threatened then this is just freedom of speech? No matter how sick it may be.

Meanwhile, the media of the Muslim world don't seem to be able to distinguish between race and religion.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30812155

Just read this post on EF, the source of all truths.

From the same article, I found Russian reactions far more rational

Apart from one comment from a Saudi source about racism that article is a mixed bag of opinions.

Some of these case sound stupid and over-reach. Doing this shoots down their own moral case for Charlie Hebdo's right to free speech. It looks like they are trying to prove their own selves wrong. Such a typical French twist. They are making it more complicated than it needs to be.

Exactly, is all very well proclaiming the virtues off freedom of speech, but then you have to act on it. That includes everything, no matter how distasteful, so long as it's not racism or hate speech or harassment.

Perhaps this is just a crackdown on extremists, giving law enforcement a free hand to surveil and gather information to feed into Big Data warehouses. Whether or not these charges hold in court may not be the value of the arrests.

Mehdi Hasan
A polemical take on politics, economics and foreign affairs

As a Muslim, I’m fed up with the hypocrisy of the free speech fundamentalists

The response to the inexcusable murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff has proved that many liberals are guilty of double standards when it comes to giving offence.



Dear liberal pundit,

You and I didn’t like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubbya’s slogan: either you are with free speech . . . or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo . . . or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.

I’m writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you’re defying the terrorists when, in reality, you’re playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.

When you say “Je suis Charlie”, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?

Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on "members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power".

It's for these reasons that I can't "be", don’t want to “be", Charlie – if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine’s right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, “It is possible to defend the right to obscene . . . speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would “provoke an outcry” and proudly declared it would “in no circumstances . . . publish Holocaust cartoons”?

Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life – especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.

Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama – who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye behind bars, after he was convicted on “terrorism-related charges” in a kangaroo court – jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren’t you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the “unity rally” in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent “extremists” committed to the “overthrow of democracy” from appearing on television.

Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82 per cent of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.

Apparently, it isn’t just Muslims who get offended.

Yours faithfully,

Mehdi.

Source

I had to look at that one quite hard to get the "joke".
I'm surprised French Jews didn't condemn this.

Yet another idiot who doesn't seem to get it. The Holocaust and 9/11 actually happened. People were there. There's evidence. The idea that Mohammad was a guy with a direct telephone line to the almighty is purely that, an idea. It's never been proven, nor is there any evidence that he doesn't like to have his picture drawn.

People are free to mock 9/11 and the Holocaust (in most countries) if they want as long as it's not inciting hatred. It's not that difficult a concept. Most people just don't choose to do so, because it's distasteful, and they actually happened.

Anyway, they need to be seen doing something...And given the whole double-standards and other victimisations it's not really hard to believe there will be more attacks on the French Jews, is it?
Now we can say whatever we want about the double-standard thing but these people are very vulnerable.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/01/14/eu...rance-attacks/

I don't think that one fact being provably true and another quite possibly imagined provides sufficient grounds to treat them differently when it comes to mocking them. Satire can be about people's attitudes and reactions as much as it can be about hard fact.

Evolutionary biologists can mock creationists and creationists can mock evolution (and I can laugh at both types of cartoons as I don't want the "truth" to get between me and a good joke). I don't see different sets of rules applying. The scientific truth is determined by scientific method, not by who can draw the funniest cartoon.

I think he get's it perfectly. The Gayssot Act of 1990 doesn't just make it a crime to deny the holocaust (or Armenian genocide etc..) but in any way dispute the numbers. So saying it was 3 as opposed to 6 million who were killed is a crime.

With regards to 9/11 its again not a question that it occurred, but mocking the victims. Now I think that we can all agree that it is both offensive and reprehensible to mock the dead... but according to the 'nothing is sacred' principle of Charlie Hebdo, it should be done just to prove a point.

Or not?

All the cartoons with Mohammad were done after 9/11...a fact that is conveniently ignored.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...-timeline.html

Anyway, it is ironic that making cartoons on Mohammad, something I personally don't agree with but neither am horrified as much as I'm not horrified by any cartoons about other religious symbols, became the new form of "martyrdom" for the freedom of speech. There must be something really wrong at deeper levels if this rather "extreme" - according to some, "distasteful" or "puerile"- according to others, form of free speech/expression made even this small number of "adepts" given the risks involved.

You need to spend more time on YouTube (or preferably not). There are plenty of conspiracy theories out there. I have also seen jokes mocking the victims.

I would say you should be allowed to mock the Holocaust and 9/11, everything should be open, as long as it's not inciting hatred. But why would you want to do it? The majority of people would turn on you if you did, and rightly so.

I just don't see how mocking a religion can be compared with mocking actual events. And it seems that Charlie Hebdo don't either, hence their choice of subject matter.

"Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren."

I also found this line ridiculous. Has the author seen the Arab media? They're awash with antisemitism and antisemitic cartoons. Or is it only western media that counts? All in all, it's just another sob story.

I guess the US is more progressive in terms of guaranteeing their First Amendment rights... that is after all the base global template for YouTube, which is then censored country-by-country.

And Second Amendment rights

The US are way ahead of everyone in this regard, and rightly so. Look at the way in which they deal with the Westboro Baptist Church. There's no need to censor them, because everyone can see what a bunch of despicable clowns they are. If you don't like what's being said, then you just ignore them, or ridicule them.