Friday, January 9, 2015

What French Free Speech? - Gregory Hood - AmRen - "The reality is that Charlie Hebdo didn’t actually have much to say in terms of reasonable argument or serious discussion. And that is why it is so easy to stand up for it in retrospect. Offensiveness for the sake of offensiveness is safer than defending serious arguments that might more deeply offend certain people. It’s easy to defend pure vulgarity."


What French Free Speech? 

French elites who say "I am Charlie" are the first to ban free speech.

JeSuisCharlie

After the murder of journalists and police by Islamic terrorists, the Socialist President of the French Republic stood before the Tricolor and solemnly intoned that his country stood committed to free speech.

“An act of exceptional barbarism has been committed in Paris against a newspaper. A paper, in other words, an organ of free speech. An act against journalists who had always wanted to show that in France it was possible to defend one’s ideas, and exercise their rights that are guaranteed and protected by the Republic,” said François Hollande.

Tens of thousands of French citizens rallied throughout the country. People around the world claimed #JeSuisCharlie (“I am Charlie”) in solidarity with the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. And President Obama expressed his condolences to the French people and his support of the “universal belief in the freedom of expression.”

All of this is nonsense.

France has long restricted freedom of speech on important issues of immigration, history, and culture. These demonstrations are especially laughable because Charlie Hebdo was warned by the French state that it was in danger of breaking hate-speech laws.

Speech in France is regulated by Section 24 of the Press Law of 1881. According to The Legal Project, Section 24 “criminalizes incitement to racial discrimination, hatred, or violence on the basis of one’s origin or membership (or non-membership) in an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. A criminal code provision likewise makes it an offense to engage in similar conduct via private communication.”

There is also the Gayssot Law of 1990. Named after the Communist Party deputy that proposed it, the law makes Holocaust denial a criminal offense punishable by a year in prison and a fine of €45,000. A similar law was proposed for the Armenian genocide but was overturned by France’s Constitutional Council.

There are three ways these laws can be used, in what I would argue are increasing levels of seriousness–to punish isolated comments that people find offensive, to prevent satire or deliberate provocation, and to shut down political opposition. The Republic has used restrictions on free speech to do all three, and some of the very people who were involved in these cases are now rallying behind the banner of “free speech.” ...