Double standards on free speech

Maurice Sinet just turned 86. In 2008 he wrote a column in which he expressed views described by Claude Askolovitch, a high-profile political commentator in France, as being as anti-Semitic. This later resulted in Sinet facing charges of “inciting racial hatred.”

He also received a death threat posted on a Jewish Defense League website, saying: “20 centimeters of stainless steel in the gut, that should teach the bastard to stop and think.”

Sinet, who works under the pen name Siné, got fired from his job but later won a €40,000 court judgment against his former publisher for wrongful termination.

Had he not been fired, he might now be dead — his employer was the magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Is there a double standard in the West when it comes to alleged anti-Semitism versus insults to Islam? Absolutely.

To a great extent, the media and those engaged in public discourse police themselves faithfully and fearfully because even if being accused of anti-Semitism doesn’t typically put the target’s life in danger it can certainly destroy someone’s career.

What is overtly a campaign of intimidation continues to be highly effective. Moreover, as an accusation explicit or implied, this is now the weapon of choice for deflecting criticisms of Israel.


But as MJ Rosenberg notes:


Among those concerned that the response to the Paris attacks is a reflection of Western double standards is a sheikh in Australia called Ustadh Mohammed Junaid Thorne. He tweets:


On Facebook the sheikh amplifies:

They were warned and even threatened more than once. On one occasion, their premises was fire-bombed, yet they forbade to learn a lesson. I’m not condoning what happened, but I’m just stating that there must be a line/limit for freedom of speech, and when people or religions are being affected, the boundaries shouldn’t be crossed.

He’s “not condoning” — just implying the journalists at Charlie Hebdo got what they deserved?

Unless you’re among those who believe that an insult warrants an execution, I’d say that focusing on Western hypocrisy right now — real as it is — risks offering excuses for murder.

After the attacks, Maurice Sinet wrote: “It is too much, it’s unbearable, abominable, inhuman. I have no words to describe how devastated and sad I am.”

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A dangerous moment for Europe

The New York Times reports: The sophisticated, military-style strike Wednesday on a French newspaper known for satirizing Islam staggered a continent already seething with anti-immigrant sentiments in some quarters, feeding far-right nationalist parties like France’s National Front.

“This is a dangerous moment for European societies,” said Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King’s College London. “With increasing radicalization among supporters of jihadist organizations and the white working class increasingly feeling disenfranchised and uncoupled from elites, things are coming to a head.”

Olivier Roy, a French scholar of Islam and radicalism, called the Paris assault — the most deadly terrorist attack on French soil since the Algerian war ended in the early 1960s — “a quantitative and therefore qualitative turning point,” noting the target and the number of victims. “This was a maximum-impact attack,” he said. “They did this to shock the public, and in that sense they succeeded.”

Anti-immigrant attitudes have been on the rise in recent years in Europe, propelled in part by a moribund economy and high unemployment, as well as increasing immigration and more porous borders. The growing resentments have lifted the fortunes of established parties like the U.K. Independence Party in Britain and the National Front, as well as lesser-known groups like Patriotic Europeans Against Islamization of the West, which assembled 18,000 marchers in Dresden, Germany, on Monday.

In Sweden, where there have been three recent attacks on mosques, the anti-immigrant, anti-Islamist Sweden Democrats Party has been getting about 15 percent support in recent public opinion polls. [Continue reading…]

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Marine Le Pen and the French far right are ready to seize the moment

Jonathan Laurence writes: For the first seven hours after the attack on the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, the National Front, France’s far right political party, kept an old feature about the influx of Roma and “gypsies” into French cities on its website. Then, shortly after noon, Marine Le Pen, the leader of the increasingly popular party with the slogan “The French Come First,” appeared in front of three French flags and hammered out her demands—and a selfless offer.

It is time for “frank and clear responses” against “inaction and denial,” she declared. In other words: The country’s two main political parties have failed to stem the Islamist tide, and you the voters now have all the evidence you need that France requires new leadership. “I intend to assume this vital responsibility so France can defend itself in the war that has been declared upon her,” she continued.

Populist parties in Europe have long done a fine trade based on the cultural and religious differences of Muslim citizens. That has been particularly true in recent years as efforts to integrate Muslims has become mired with controversy over headscarves, halal food, and the construction of mosques. The National Front, like other populist parties in neighboring countries, has emphasized the link between the cultural accommodation of local Muslims and recent political instability in Egypt, Libya, and Mali.

Mainstream French parties have tried to fend off the National Front’s advance ever since it unexpectedly made it to the final round of presidential elections in 2002. Last May, its nationalist, xenophobic message helped the party capture 25 percent of the vote in the European Union parliament elections. After Wednesday’s tragic attack, the party’s relevance can no longer be doubted. [Continue reading…]

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Mosques attacked in wake of Charlie Hebdo shooting

The Huffington Post reports: Several attacks on French mosques following Wednesday’s brutal Charlie Hebdo shooting have added to the fear of retaliation against the country’s Muslim population.

At least 12 people were shot and killed and more than a dozen others wounded in what is being called a terror attack against the French satirical newspaper on Wednesday. The publication faced threats prior to the shooting and was firebombed in 2011 for publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Two Muslim places of worship and a restaurant affiliated to another mosque were attacked Wednesday evening and Thursday morning local time. Three grenades were thrown at a mosque in Le Mans, west of Paris, and a bullet hole was found in one of the mosque’s windows, AFP reported.

A Muslim prayer hall in the Port-la-Nouvelle district in southern France also received shots shortly after evening prayers, while a blast erupted at L’Imperial, a restaurant affiliated to a mosque in the French village of Villefranche-sur-Saone. No casualties were reported at any of the attacks. [Continue reading…]

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How to spot terrorism

ter·ror·ism noun: the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

Yesterday, when asked whether he viewed the Paris attack as an act of terrorism, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told ABC News: “Based on what we know right now it does seem like that is what we are confronting here, and this is an act of violence that we certainly do condemn and if based on this investigation, it turns out to be an act of terrorism, we would condemn it with the strongest possible terms.”

I’m all in favor of avoiding rushing to judgement, but by the time Earnest spoke, as much of the world had already seen video footage of the gunmen conducting their operation and the target of their attack was known, it didn’t require the conclusion of an investigation to establish that this was an act of terrorism. Part of the purpose of the ongoing investigation must be to establish the motives of the suspects and what kind of organizational support they had, but I don’t think anyone in France is trying to figure out whether this was terrorism.

Not long after Earnest was hesitant about using the word “terrorism,” President Obama used it himself — not because of significant advances in the investigation, but most likely because he realized he’d sound like an idiot if he refused to use the expression.

It’s one thing to argue that terrorism is a term too imprecise to be clearly defined in law, yet in everyday language — even that used by a White House press secretary — there should be neither confusion nor controversy in calling yesterday’s bloodbath an act of terrorism.

Moreover, a White House that only two weeks ago exercised very little caution when concluding that North Korea instigated the Sony hacking — even though no hard evidence has been made public to back up this claim and an FBI investigation is still ongoing — seems to attach little value to its own credibility. Either that, or it sees value in confusion.

Lastly, here’s a nitpicky note for Earnest and the many others who believe that religions and other belief systems have tenants. What would those be? The occupants of a belief system?

The correct term is tenet — noun: a principle or belief, especially one of the main principles of a religion or philosophy.

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In the Middle East, as in France, satire is a weapon against extremists

Nahrain Al-Mousawi writes: In the wake of the deadly attacks on the Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, some are portraying the current showdown as one between Western free speech versus an angry and intolerant Islamic world. In fact, it is the Islamic countries of the Middle East that have led the way in attacking the extremists of groups such as Islamic State using the instruments of satire. The use of mockery and caricature as a way of mocking Islamic extremism is, in fact, in some ways far more pronounced in the Middle Eastern media than it is in Europe.

Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL) has slaughtered hundreds of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, raped and enslaved hundreds of women, held public crucifixions and stonings in Syria, and staged the executions of U.S. journalists and British aid workers. The group is revolting, abhorrent, and terrifying. But the region on which Islamic State has unleashed its sadistic campaign has responded producing a surprising volume of satire.

On Iraqi state TV, a satirical soap opera dedicated to mocking Islamic State, State of Myth, depicts the gruesome yet absurd “contributions” ISIS fighters and ideology unleash on a fictional town in Iraq, such as a green-energy car-bombing factory– cost-effective, reasonably priced, environment-friendly, and export-ready! All this information is provided by an IS engineer in a TV interview, where the female news announcer has resorted to wearing a sheet while asking questions.

While some claim humor is a way of taking back power – the power to name, to shame – on an uneven playing field, the show appears to be making fun of not only IS’s crude, fumbling, and sadistic methods to gain power, but also the strategic powerlessness of Iraqis trying to play along with, manipulate, and knowingly skirt the cruelty of that blundering power. [Continue reading…]

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Suspect’s journey from Pizza delivery to French police’s most wanted

Reuters reports: Twelve years ago, one of the two brothers suspected of the shootings at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was a young man like many others in France, more interested in girls and smoking dope than defending the Prophet Mohammad.

But between 2003, when Cherif Kouachi delivered pizzas and dreamed of being a rap star, and Wednesday, when he and his brother were named chief suspects in the killing of 12 people in Paris, the French national went from punk to most wanted.

Kouachi, 32, is being sought along with his older brother Said, 34, in a manhunt following what President Francois Hollande called a terrorist attack of “exceptional barbarism” against journalists and two police officers.

How Kouachi – described as a “pipsqueak” by his lawyer during a 2005 trial for involvement in a cell sending young French volunteer fighters to Iraq – started down the road to radicalism is a story becoming increasingly familiar in France and elsewhere in the West.

Questions are already being raised over how an ex-convict known to intelligence services for his radical leanings could have been able to carry out Wednesday’s massacre.

Born in eastern Paris to Algerian parents who died when the brothers were still children, Kouachi grew up in an orphanage in the western city of Rennes. Armed with a sports teacher diploma, Kouachi returned to Paris and delivered pizzas to get by.

“He was part of a group of young people who were a little lost, confused, not really fanatics in the proper sense of the word,” his ex-lawyer Vincent Ollivier, told Liberation daily. “He hadn’t really given any great thought to Islam and didn’t seem all that determined.”

In a 2005 France 3 documentary, which includes footage taken by a Paris community center, Kouachi is seen rapping in English, in jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, a baseball hat worn backwards on his head.

Despite a record for selling drugs and minor theft, he is described as someone more interested in pretty girls and music than the Koran. But that was before he met Farid Benyettou. [Continue reading…]

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The invasion of America

Claudio Saunt writes: Between 1776 and the present, the United States seized some 1.5 billion acres from North America’s native peoples, an area 25 times the size of the United Kingdom. Many Americans are only vaguely familiar with the story of how this happened. They perhaps recognise Wounded Knee and the Trail of Tears, but few can recall the details and even fewer think that those events are central to US history.

Their tenuous grasp of the subject is regrettable if unsurprising, given that the conquest of the continent is both essential to understanding the rise of the United States and deplorable. Acre by acre, the dispossession of native peoples made the United States a transcontinental power. To visualise this story, I created ‘The Invasion of America’, an interactive time-lapse map of the nearly 500 cessions that the United States carved out of native lands on its westward march to the shores of the Pacific. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS launches dawn attack on Samarra

BBC News reports: Islamic State militants have attacked Iraqi security forces in the central city of Samarra, killing two people and injuring 28 others, officials say.

They reportedly carried out five suicide bomb attacks on checkpoints along a motorway west of Samarra.

The bombings were followed by mortar attacks on the city itself.

IS surrounded Samarra, a predominantly Sunni city that is home to one of Shia Islam’s holiest sites, after launching an offensive in northern Iraq in June.

Soldiers and allied Shia militiamen have managed to stop the jihadists overrunning the city, and have recently retaken towns and villages to the south with the help of US-led coalition air strikes.

The latest assault on Samarra by IS militants, who regard Shia as heretics who should be killed, began before sunrise on Thursday. [Continue reading…]

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How to talk about a hashtag without using it. Time for metahashtags?

My heart sank when I saw #KillAllMuslims was trending yesterday. But then I saw how it was being used. Nearly all the tweets were condemning the hashtag with tweets like this:


And this:


Twitter needs to create metahashtags.

They would work something like this: Put a hashtag in front of a hashtag creating a metahashtag like ##KillAllMuslims. The extra hashtag would mean that this is a hashtag about a hashtag.

Metahashtags should be counted separately from hashtags in which case in the current situation it might be apparent that what is trending is conversation about the hashtag; not the hashtag itself.

If anyone at Twitter sees this, why not toss the idea around. The need seems to be real and the coding couldn’t be that difficult — at least in the eyes of someone who writes no code 😉

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The strange inevitability of evolution

Philip Ball writes: Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.”

What Wagner is talking about is how evolution innovates: as he puts it, “how the living world creates.” Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible. [Continue reading…]

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Confusion in U.S. on status of magazine attack suspects, but the French are not afraid

NBC News reports: After a long day of rapidly changing information, US counterterrorism officials said Wednesday night that they cannot be certain what the status is of the three suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine. Information from French sources has been contradictory, they said.

Earlier Wednesday, two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News that one of the suspects in the attack had been killed and that two others were in custody. However, the officials later said the information that was the basis of that account could not be confirmed.

Reuters reports: An 18-year old man sought by police over Wednesday’s shooting attack at satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo handed himself voluntarily to police in northeastern France, an official at the Paris prosecutor’s office said.

Police are hunting three French nationals, including brothers Said Kouachi, born in 1980; Cherif Kouachi, born in 1982; and Hamyd Mourad born in 1996, after suspected Islamist gunmen killed 12 people.

The official, who declined to identify the man, said he had turned himself in at a police station in Charleville-Mézières, in northeastern France at around 2300 GMT.

McClatchy reports: Security experts who viewed videos of the attack said the attackers clearly were professionals, likely with combat experience.

“They appear very calm during the attack. They’ve clearly handled weapons before. They know exactly what they’re doing, from the moment they arrive until they flee,” said terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp, the research director of the Centre for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defense College.

Still, the attackers apparently were unfamiliar with their target, reportedly arriving first at the building where the newspaper’s archives are stored. Once they realized their error, the Agence France Press news agency reported, they moved a few doors down to the weekly’s headquarters.

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Paris attack suspect dead, two in custody — suspects were on police radar for years

NBC News reports: One of the suspects in the Paris attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine has been killed and the two others are in custody, two senior U.S. counterterrorism officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

Mashable: French police officials have identified three men as suspects in the deadly terror attack at the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo newspaper.

One of the men, 35-year-old Cheriff Kouachi, was convicted on terrorism charges in 2008.

Two of the suspects, brothers Cheriff and Said Kouachi, 32, are French nationals who were born to Algerian parents in Paris. The nationality of a third man, Hamid Mourad, 18, is unknown; police believe he is a high school student.

Their names circulated on Facebook and Twitter for an hour before French authorities confirmed that the Kouachi brothers had been identified.

One of the officials who spoke to the Associated Press said they were linked to a Yemeni terrorist network.

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The anti-religion and anti-establishment history of Charlie Hebdo

Vice News reports: Charlie Hebdo has never paid much attention to sacred cows, and has lampooned everyone from the pope to presidents in its polemical caricatures and irreverent editorials.

Speaking to VICE News on Wednesday, Peter Gumbel, author and global fellow at The Wilson Center’s Global Europe Program, described Charlie Hebdo as “a magazine that provokes deliberately,” and called the attack “a carefully premeditated attempt to destroy the magazine and kill all the cartoonists.”

“They picked the day when there was an editorial meeting when all the staff would be there,” said Gumbel, “they knew who they wanted, they asked names of people before they killed them, it was premeditated murder.”

Tom Bishop, director of the Center for French Civilization and Culture, and a professor of French at NYU, explained that Charlie Hebdo “holds a very particular place in French culture because of the country’s tradition of satiric magazines.”

“They’re not at all party-aligned,” Bishop told VICE News. “They tend to be viewed as holding nothing sacred. That’s their attraction.”

Famous for its unsparing, sardonic — and often obscene take on the news, politicians, and religion, Charlie Hebdo was pretty much born out of controversy, after its former incarnation, Hara-Kiri (subtitled “Stupid and vicious newspaper”) was banned by the government in 1970 over an insulting headline about the death of former French president and military hero Charles de Gaulle.

The new publication, which was baptized Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly) in homage to Charlie Brown, soon made a name for itself as an anti-religious, anti-clerical, and anti-establishment voice in the French media landscape. Despite a limited circulation, the leftist and staunchly secular magazine was well known across France, and together with satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine came to form the backbone of French political and religious satire.

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Yemen bomb blast kills dozens near Sanaa police academy

BBC News reports: At least 37 people have been killed and 66 others injured by a bomb blast outside a police academy in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, police say.

Two men were seen getting out of a minibus and walking away shortly before it exploded beside dozens of people queuing to enrol at the academy.

Afterwards, body parts and debris from the bus were strewn across the street.

There has so far been no claim of responsibility, but an offshoot of al-Qaeda has carried out similar attacks.

Yemen has experienced a wave of violence in recent months, with militants from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) battling Shia Houthi rebels who have taken control of the capital.

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France to deploy aircraft carrier to fight ISIS, says report

AFP reports: The French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle and its fleet will be deployed to the Gulf to support operations against the Islamic State group, a military news site reported on Tuesday.

The deployment of the marine battle group is due to be announced by President Francois Hollande when he gives his annual new year’s speech to the armed forces onboard the Charles de Gaulle on January 14, according to the “Mer et Marine” news site.

The Elysee Palace confirmed to AFP that the carrier would travel to the Gulf on its way to India, where it is due to take part in exercises in mid-April.

“The Charles de Gaulle will be available to participate, if necessary, in all operational missions”, the Elysee spokesman said. [Continue reading…]

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