Post-272: What Happened to Standards of Decency?

High-profile political killings in France last week.

Twenty people were killed in several gun attacks. Three were police and three were the perpetrators (Muslims; all three born in France in the early 1980s to non-European parents). That leaves 14 “civilians” among the killed. Of these 14, six were Jews and one was a Muslim, leaving seven“Français de souche” (old-stock French) victims. (I found an essay entitled “French Lesson” by Dr. Peter Frost to be insightful in analyzing the attacks.)

The main group of victims was at a (so-called) “satirical magazine” which publishes tasteless, filthy, deliberately offensive “political” cartoons. The worst of the cartoons are definitely inflammatory and humiliating, up to and including depictions of the genitalia of Mohammed and Jesus and graphic sexual acts involving the same.

(At the risk of speaking ill of the deceased,) The people behind this magazine seem to have been deeply nihilistic and perhaps psychologically disturbed. It doesn’t mean they deserve to have died. Yet it wasn’t so long ago that people who published such things would’ve been under serious risk of being lynched by local European Christians for either blasphemy or degeneracy or both.

I have to ask: What happened to standards of decency in publishing? Are they all out the window in France? Why were cartoons so inflammatory and frankly indecent by (surely) anyone’s standard allowed to be published and sold?

France is totally committed to free speech, I’m told, no matter who may get offended. Yet that’s not the case: France is one of the countries that has a law imposing heavy fines and even jail sentences on Holocaust revisionists, for one. For another, a Black comedian called Dieudonne was prosecuted for “hate speech” for his comedy routines and certain political statements. The government has imposed a total television ban on him. (Here he is on a TV program defending himself from a critic before the lifetime ban was handed down.)

So I am left confused.

Comments

I agree with the Roman Catholic Pope: No religion should be mocked or made fun of.
That being said, no one deserves being murdered by half baked religious fanatics who use their religion for their own power purposes.
The cartoons are sometimes tasteless and way overboard.
Like most issues there are no simple explanations.
One thing is certain, ordinary people must be protected.
Incidentally, I expect those “non-European parents” were French citizens from Algeria.

Some of this tragedy has to do with reactions to drones, torture, invasion, and support of dictators.
Some of this tragedy has to do with those who think they can issue death fatwas with impunity as well as instigate impressionable young men to commit murder with bogus thoughts of paradise, along with those instigating violence and murder in the name of god.

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