Oui. Je suis toujours Charlie.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/did-we-learn-anything-from-charlie-hebdo/
It's hard to believe that it's been a decade since a couple of islamofascists gunned down twelve people in Paris for the crime of being offensive. It's also been ten years since the day when my pet issue shifted to that of the right to free speech.
Before that day I was living in somewhat blissful ignorance. You'll never find a poll in which a majority of people in western nations openly say that they oppose free speech. It is still, in an odd way, fashionable to say that you support free speech. On January 8th -- perhaps even to around January 10th -- of 2025, it was particularly fashionable to stand up for free speech.
It wasn't long after when a French comedian was jailed for making a joke about the Charlie Hebdo shooting. It didn't take long for Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League, to engage in victim blaming, saying that Charlie Hebdo's editor, Charb, "Didn't understand the role he played in his tragic death."
Free speech is the strangest of all rights. I was nearly thirty years-old before it occurred to me that there might be books to read on the issue of free speech. I've come to know, over the past decade, that most people live their entire lives never reading a book on the subject of free speech. In fact, most people live their entire lives believing that they supported free speech, no matter how passively, while supporting a multitude of "buts."
I share Mr. O'Neill's frustration and pessimism. I learned something ten years ago. I know my fair share of people who learned something ten years ago. Most of you didn't. Even a shocking amount of self-identified libertarians view the stifling of speech by private actors as falling outside of the issue of free speech. As if the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda cutting off the lips and punching padlocks through the mouths of people who dare to offend isn't a free speech issue because the Lord's Resistance Army isn't a government.
I encourage all of you to read Charb's posthumously published manifesto Open Letter -- you can get through it in a few hours. Even if I can't convince any of you to read a book about this issue, I ask that you at least look up A Plea for Free Speech in Boston by Frederick Douglass.
The massacre was a tragedy when it happened. All we could hope to do would be to learn something, and show the world that we stand with the brave souls who put themselves in peril to speak the truth as they saw it, and exercised free speech in a hostile climate. We have failed them thus far. I can only hope that it's not too late.
To quote Mr. O'Neill:
"Everyone will condemn the massacre today. Yet the moral logic of the massacre still lives. The ideological fuel of that barbaric act – that criticism of Islam must not be allowed – is now an article of faith in polite society. Hence the movie The Lady of Heaven was withdrawn from British cinemas in 2022 on the basis that it was offensive to Muslims. And the Batley Grammar schoolteacher remains in hiding for the ‘sin’ of showing his pupils an image of Muhammad. And critics of Islam are blacklisted from university campuses.
Our punishment of blasphemy is less barbarous than that visited on Charlie Hebdo ten years ago, but it is equally as yellow-bellied and regressive. Enough is enough. It’s time for a full-throated defence of freedom of speech, the liberty upon which every other liberty depends. No god, prophet, book or fad should be ringfenced from our hard-won right to criticise and mock. Je suis toujours Charlie – et vous?"