Dissident Veteran For Peace: Freedom of Speech in France

Dissident Veteran For Peace

"I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America." —Alexis de Tocquevile. Democracy in America, Book I, Chapter XV.

With a nod to the Most Rev. Dom Helder Camara: When I support Palestinians some call me an 'anti-Semite', when I try to explain why I stand in solidarity with Palestinians they call me a Nazi.

"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." —Major General Smedley Butler, USMC (ret.)

"... no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end." —character of O'Brien in 1984, part 3, ch. 3 by George Orwell.

"Every prophet has realized that nobody loves you for being the enemy of their illusions. Every prophet has realized that most of us want peace at any price as long as the peace is ours and somebody else pays the price. That is why the prophet Jeremiah said, ' "Peace, peace," they say, when there is no peace,' ..." —The Rev. William Sloane Coffin. "Not to Bring Peace, But a Sword."

Sunday, May 05, 2019

Freedom of Speech in France

The image below on the left is an actual magazine cover published by the controversial French magazine Charlie Hebdo in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in Belgium in March 2016 that killed 32 people and wounded hundreds of others.

The person caricatured is the Belgian singer Stromae, who, in 2013, released a song entitled "Papaoutai" or "Papa où t'es" which is French for "Dad, where are you?". Surrounding the image of Stromae are severed body parts answering his question "here" (ici) (là) and "here also" (et là aussi). Stromae's father was reportedly killed in the Rwandan "genocide" in 1994.*

The image on the right is a parody of the Charlie Hedbo cover asking "Shoah (i.e. holocaust) where are you?" It appears to feature Charlie Chaplin at center (though I'm not sure why). In any case, hair (or a wig), a shoe, a bar of soap (?), and a lamp shade all answer. The Chutzpah Hebdo image appeared on the web site of Égalité et Réconciliation.

Alain Soral co-founded Égalité et Réconciliation (E&R) in 2007. Soral claims he did not draw the cartoon and that he is not the "publication director" nor the "editor-in-chief" of the E&R web site, where it appeared. Nevertheless, on April 15, 2019, a French court sentenced Soral to one year in prison "for denying the existence of the Holocaust" via the cartoon. There is an informative write-up of the case on unz.com and it features Soral in a video discussing the affair (watch it before YouTube removes it).

Note
*I've place genocide in quotes because the term is highly politicized. There is also reason to believe that the events in question are more accurately described as war crimes in the context of a long-term Rwandan civil war that was not a simple inter-ethnic conflict. The evidence suggests Hutus and Tutsis were both variously victims of atrocities, including acts of genocide (see e.g. here and here and here and here). Western and Tutsi (the victors) narratives have generally obscured the complexity of these events. For what it's also worth, in 2016, Israel's Supreme Court ruled that documents pertaining to "Israels arms sales to Rwanda during the 1994 genocide there will remain sealed and concealed from the public".

Labels: Africa, censorship, civil liberties, Europe, Israel, thoughtcrime, Zionism