{"id":92156,"date":"2016-03-31T18:33:54","date_gmt":"2016-04-01T02:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=92156"},"modified":"2016-03-31T18:33:54","modified_gmt":"2016-04-01T02:33:54","slug":"the-new-yorker-vs-free-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=92156","title":{"rendered":"The New Yorker Vs Free Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Kirchick writes for Commentary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Two days after Islamists killed nine staffers of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in January 2015, a writer for the most renowned magazine in the English-speaking world compared the victims to Nazis. On the website of the New Yorker, the Nigerian-American author Teju Cole wrote that while the slaughter was \u201can appalling offense to human life and dignity,\u201d it was nonetheless necessary to realize that such violence takes \u201cplace against the backdrop of France\u2019s ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab.\u201d Invoking a paradigmatic free-speech test case, Cole stated that Charlie Hebdo had a right to publish blasphemous cartoons in the same way that the National Socialist Party of America had had a right to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1979.
\nAnd Cole was just getting started.<\/p>\n

Before Westerners start making generalizations about Islam and free expression, he averred, they must first acknowledge their own bloodily censorious history\u2014a history they have yet to transcend. Connecting the \u201cwitch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition\u201d of yore to the more recent \u201ccensuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom,\u201d Cole ridiculed the West\u2019s pretension of seeing itself as \u201cthe paradise of skepticism and rationalism\u201d (even as he left unmentioned which of his opponents George W. Bush had burned at the stake). Preoccupation with Islamist violence and the chilling effect on free speech such violence creates, Cole argued, diverts scrutiny from Western governmental infringements upon liberty that are equally if not more grave. Citing the fate of fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, Cole asserted that Washington\u2019s \u201ctraditional monopoly on extreme violence\u201d and \u201charsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly\u201d\u2014Cole\u2019s euphemistic word salad for Snowden\u2019s stealing top-secret information and sharing it with America\u2019s adversaries\u2014is as much a peril to freedom of speech as weapon-wielding religious fanatics threatening to kill anyone who displeases them.<\/p>\n

Cole\u2019s characterization of Charlie Hebdo as a product of the far right\u2014a publication that \u201cin recent years\u2026has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations\u201d and carried out a \u201cbullyingly racist agenda\u201d\u2014betrayed his ignorance. Anyone who actually bothered to acquaint himself with Charlie would have learned from two minutes on Google that its \u201cpolitics,\u201d such as they are, are best described as anti-politics. Founded and staffed to this day by anarcho-leftist veterans of the 1968 student rebellions, Charlie Hebdo is anti-clerical and anti-establishment to the core. A survey by Le Monde of Charlie Hebdo covers over the preceding decade found that the vast majority mocked French political figures, and of the 38 covers that lampooned religion, 21 targeted Christianity while only seven went after Islam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James Kirchick writes for Commentary: Two days after Islamists killed nine staffers of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in January 2015, a writer for the most renowned magazine in the English-speaking world … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29674],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=92156"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92157,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92156\/revisions\/92157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=92156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=92156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=92156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}