We must stand with France against extremism and censorship
Controversial speech is not the price we pay for a free society, it is a condition on which it lives.
On Thursday morning, terror struck again in France. Armed with a knife, an Islamic extremist brutally murdered three people inside a church in the Southern city of Nice. The attack comes two weeks since Samuel Paty, a history teacher, was decapitated outside his Paris school. His ‘crime’, for which Paty paid with his life, was to host a class discussion on free speech. During the session, students were shown caricatures from the satirical left-wing magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was itself the target of a deadly shooting back in early 2015.
Every act of terror is a despicable crime that deserves our total and unequivocal condemnation. Yet what has happened in France is particularly sinister. The attack on Charlie Hebdo and the murder of Samuel Paty were not only intended to spread fear in the name of a twisted ideology, they were an assault on the very foundations of a free society.
Despicable also was the reaction among parts of the international community. Those who responded not with condemnation, total and unequivocal, but with victim-blaming, effectively calling on France to give in to the killer’s demands.
As President Macron defended his country’s proud traditions of secularism and free expression, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused him of being mentally ill. Meanwhile, Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation into Charlie Hebdo after the magazine published a cartoon that depicts Erdogan lifting the dress of a veiled woman (which you can see below). The president has also urged on a boycott of French goods.
His call was taken up throughout the Muslim world. In Bangladesh, a crowd burned an effigy of President Macron while some threatened to attack the French embassy. In Pakistan, the boycott effort also gathered pace, so did protests and the burning of French flags. Imran Khan, Pakistan’s Prime Minister, suggested that ‘Macron could have played appeasement’ towards the radicals who kill his people. A retail union in Kuwait decided to pull French products from store shelves, a move joined by a Qatari supermarket chain. The Saudi Foreign Ministry released a statement where it condemned ‘offensive cartoons of the Prophet’. Two days later, a man was arrested after stabbing a security guard at the French consulate.
Let there be no mistake that we are witnessing, and not for the first time, an organised effort to install a set of global blasphemy laws. And let us not forget what happens to those in the above countries who dare do what free French citizens rightly view as their inalienable right. In Turkey, open ‘disrespect’ of religious belief is punishable by up to a year in prison. Much longer sentences are handed out in Qatar and Bangladesh. In Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, blasphemy is punishable by death, with state-sanctioned execution frequently accompanied by horrific vigilante violence.
Just two years ago, Imran Khan proposed blasphemy laws at the United Nations, calling on his international partners to treat criticism of religion similar to how Holocaust denial is outlawed in much of Europe. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which represents some fifty-seven states, has repeatedly campaigned for a global blasphemy law at the UN. Unlike some of its members, the OIC readily condemned the recent killings, but could not bring themselves to do so without also expressing concern at the ‘ongoing practice of running satirical caricatures depicting the Prophet Muhammad’.
Shame on them and on anyone else who cannot condemn terror without attaching qualifications. Shame on them also for their damning silence towards China’s very real prosecution of its Muslim minority, whose human rights have been far more ardently defended by nations such as France. Shame on them not only for their repeated assaults on liberty but also for their cowardice.
There is a sentiment you often hear in countries that subscribe to basic rights concerning freedom of expression. That controversial, offensive, speech might be unfortunate, but is the price we pay for living in a free society. It reflects, in a sense, that thing which Voltaire never said - ‘I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it’.
That attitude is misguided. Controversial speech is not a regrettable side effect of a free society. A free society is built on it. To that effect, such a society does not merely hand out rights and freedoms, it requires them to be used. Otherwise, what stops us from forgetting what they are even for?
It is not only necessary that people have the right to critique religious orthodoxy. It is important that they do so. That everyone, of all religious affiliations and none, recognises that fellow citizens can and will exercise their rights, be it to write controversial books or to publish crude cartoons. Just as there is little point in defending the freedom of the press if no newspaper, as a consequence of social pressure, feels able to critique the government. All authority must be questioned, regardless of whether it dresses up in suits or holy orders. It is not good enough to agree with our values in theory, we must live up to them in practice.
