Charlie Hebdo Attack Spin: Blaming the Victims and the West
Who’s to blame?
The wake of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo is littered with a confusing mix of blame, counter blame, politically correct waffling, and outrage from every possible race and creed.
Financial Times columnist Tony Barber went down the familiar road of blaming freedom of expression by way of a call for “common sense”:
Charlie Hebdo is a bastion of the French tradition of hard-hitting satire. It has a long record of mocking, baiting and needling Muslims. Two years ago the magazine published a 65-page strip cartoon book portraying the Prophet’s life. And this week it gave special coverage to Soumission (“Submission”), a new novel by Michel Houellebecq, the idiosyncratic author, which depicts France in the grip of an Islamic regime led by a Muslim president.
This is not in the slightest to condone the murderers, who must be caught and punished, or to suggest that freedom of expression should not extend to satirical portrayals of religion. It is merely to say that some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo, and Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, which purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims.
But that’s just one columnist’s opinion, right? (To be fair, the Financial Times editorial board went in a completely different direction.)
In an op-ed from today’s New York Times one Nick Kristof is ready to string up the attackers, but doesn’t want to put a label on what motivated them:
One of things I’ve learned in journalism is to beware of perceiving the world through simple narratives, because then new information is mindlessly plugged into those story lines. In my travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam.
So let’s avoid religious profiling. The average Christian had nothing to apologize for when Christian fanatics in the former Yugoslavia engaged in genocide against Muslims. Critics of Islam are not to blame because an anti-Muslim fanatic murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.
…
The great divide is not between faiths. Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who “otherize.”
Who’s really responsible? Maybe the Jews. Or the West. Or people who assume “freedom of expression” means freedom to insult Muhammad without getting blown away. At least that’s what’s swirling around on Twitter right now:
Offending/printing things the powerful don't want printed is brave. Offending a population the West constantly bombs is not.
— Joel Gillin (@joelgillin) January 7, 2015
Typical. Too cowardly to post cartoons that got Charb killed, so @oxfamfrance @PFPalestine post an anti-Israel BDS cartoon instead @Oxfam
— NGO Monitor (@ngomonitor) January 7, 2015
Pensée émue pour Charb, qui avait dessiné pour nous et @PFPalestine cette affiche de campagne en 2002 #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/kWWGNhWN8t
— Oxfam France (@oxfamfrance) January 7, 2015
How do Americans feel about Muhammad cartoons? http://t.co/rCCP5gisNH pic.twitter.com/PDcSASluiu
— Aaron Blake (@AaronBlakeWP) January 7, 2015
This act of terrorism in France is reprehensible. So is the terrorism inflicted by the self-righteous western leaders exploiting it.
— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 7, 2015
.@AliAbunimah's reaction to the #CharlieHebdo attack is "Je ne suis pas Charlie" and this: pic.twitter.com/3QUvZg8viT
— Nurit Baytch (@NuritBaytch) January 7, 2015
It is not inconsistent to believe in free speech AND be against insulting other people’s faith traditions. #CharlieHedbo
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) January 7, 2015
Freedom of expression does not extend to insulting the Prophets of Allah, whatever your views on the events in Paris today! #ParisShooting
— Anjem Choudary (@anjemchoudary) January 7, 2015
Since 9/11, right-wing extremists (incl anti-abortion, anti-gov) have killed more Americans than Islamic extremists — http://t.co/1IiyXdi2cj
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) January 7, 2015
Reports regarding the apprehension and investigation of suspects are trickling in, and it’s likely to be days if not weeks before we know the extent to which radical Islam—or any other “radical” for that matter—was responsible. But when those reports do come in, it will be our job to make sure that those to blame are held responsible—even if that’s the politically-incorrect result.
[Featured Image Source: Twitter]
Amy Miller contributed to this post.
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Comments
I would like Ms. Kohn to compare the number of people killed by Tea Party folks with the number of people killed post-Ferguson/Gruber, at the Boston Marathon, and in that tragic episode of “workplace violence” committed by the muslim Army psychiatrist.
It’s easy to rig the numbers when terrorist attacks get officially classified as workplace violence.
Sally needs to spend a month or two in Syria.
She’d have more fun if she ran around Tahir Square during one of their protests.
“It is not inconsistent to believe in free speech AND be against insulting other people’s faith traditions.”
Well, Sally, you poor, stupid pervert, yeah, it kind IS, depending on what you mean.
See I WILL republish cartoons that caricature Mohammed (a guy) any time I care to, and I’ll defend those who do.
If that “insults” Islamists who then threaten me or others with violence, I’ll do it HARDER. I’ll do it until they become civilized.
Now, on the other hand I won’t cross the street to bad-mouth other people’s “faith traditions”, or call them bigots because they don’t approve of your “gay marriage”.
I wondered how outraged Sally was when Charlie Hebdo not only slandered Pope Benedict XVI but also committed blasphemy against a cornerstone of Catholic theology, the doctrine of transubstantiation.
As someone pointed out yesterday, Kohn herself has publicly mocked and slandered the Mormon faith.
So apparently it’s okay to insult some peoples’ faith traditions (just not the muslims, since they’ll retaliate by trying to murder you).
A real profile in courage, isn’t she?
France under a Muslim President? What about the US who actually has a Muslim president?
Now *that* one left a mark!
“It is not inconsistent to believe in free speech AND be against insulting other people’s faith traditions. ”
Then why do you insist on insulting the faith traditions of Christians and Jews?
I have a faith tradition. You have a bigoted cult.
This business about alleging that these cartoons cause outrage among Muslims is a fraud. We found that out after the first set of cartoon wars.
The original set of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper simply did not upset the local Muslim community all that much. Some visiting “imams” decided to take a little outrage show on the road to the Middle East, where they learned to add other cartoons to it, along with tales of how Danish Muslims (who were not excited about the original publication) were abused by the Danish.
There was a demonstration in Iraq, and one of the founders of Iraq the Model wondered in print how the locals could possibly have seen the cartoons, which had not, to his knowledge, been published there. He searched for a local publication, and could not find one.
In Egypt, bloggers Freedom For Egyptians and The Sandmonkey remarked that they thought the cartoons had been published, to no reaction whatsoever, in a Cairo newspaper about 6 months before. The Sandmonkey, who apparently is a bit of a packrat, won the race to document the prior publication.
In Afghanistan, somebody took a gun to what the clerics had intended to be a peaceful demonstration. Shots were fired and the local (yes, Muslim) clerics shut down the demonstrations because “somebody had hijacked the demonstrations for their own purposes.”
Ordinary Muslims are not so nucking futs as to go crazy about some stupid cartoons. Islamists will use anything as an excuse to kill people, including haircuts they don’t like, smoking, women showing too much ankle, ect., ect., act.
Anjem Choudary is an Islamist.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/07/anjem-choudary-islamic-state-isis
So is Ali Abunimah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Abunimah
“The original set of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper simply did not upset the local Muslim community all that much.”
Need to read up more on the murders that followed the cartoons… as in Van Gogh. Please feel free to walk alone in Malmo Sweden these days to sample the local Muslim communities and their view of present day life.. just don’t expect the police to save you. Or maybe a walk about in certain London reas… I understand that 40% of such populations welcome mayhem on cartoonists… 1/6 want armed jihad… it is a numbers game… the more Muslims the greater the pressure to conform to Islam… or else.
What I wrote is true.
Islamists like to pretend that Muslims are oh-so-sensitive, etc. It’s a lie. Islamists will use any stupid, minor thing they decide to call a transgression as an excuse to kill anybody, primarily other Muslims, because that’s mostly what is in their reach.
It is not, and never was, the cartoons. It’s the Islamists.
Need to read up more on the murders that followed the cartoons
The murders didn’t directly follow the cartoons. They followed a Middle East tour of instigation by some imams who were frustrated at the initial lack of reaction to those cartoons. So frustrated that they had a couple of new ones added to the Jyllands-Posten gallery, and went on a Tour of Outrage – which did succeed in burning some embassys and ending some lives.
Read the first fifty or sixty pages of Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism. It’s a litany of stories including the incitement by Imams which inevitably resulted in the mass murder and periodic pogroms in Muslim countries and is happening here in the West.
Thanks to an administration that is just as much an enemy of the people as the terrorists themselves we have a hands-off policy on mosques and all things “Islam”. The only reason we’re not seeing the type of terrorism that’s happening in France is because the radicals know they have a good thing going when it comes to Indoctrinating in our universities and recruiting in the mosques and Muslim communities like Dearborn.
Here’s an example of how things never change when it comes to Muslims, Islam and the hatred of Jews:
The 4th Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research: Arab Theologians on Jews and Israel. Sept. 1968 Translated by D.F. Green/David G. Littman (Support Secure Freedom)Front to back; 95 pages of outrageous lies, inversion and vile Jew-Hatred. I’ve read this whole thing. I invite you to find any comparison with Jewish, Christain or Buddhist “Conferences”.
http://supportsecurefreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/Arab-Theologians-on-Jews-and-Israel-4th_Ed_082011.pdf
Read Andrew Bostom’s The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and read from page 51 on the above topic to page 53 the 2003 Putrajaya Islamic Summit and a little beyond to a speech by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on the same page. The whole chapter is one horrific example after another of Islamic mass murder and pogroms but go ahead and start with this.
And this:
Dr. Wafa Sultan exposes Islamic values with Sheikh Omar Bakri Muhammad
http://www.mrctv.org/videos/dr-wafa-sultan-exposes-islamic-values-sheikh-omar-bakri-muhammad
This less than 8-minute video segment, if viewed objectively and dispassionately, could do more to educate the American public on the theory animating the practice of “Islamic international relations,” without any further explanation required. Andrew G. Bostom-The Legacy of Jihad and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.
People should read the article on jihad by Sheikh Abdullah bin Humaid. I found it in my Summarized Bukhari I’d ordered online. The Publisher is the general manager of Sound Vision; a subversive “education” system spreading across this country like the Gulen Movement.
Note: is it because of my Charter service or that LI is a shameless Ad Whore that that spinning blue thing is almost a constant on this page.
Exactly. I always keep in mind that just as our media tends to distort the nature of Occupy Wall Street and the current #blacklivesmatter demonstrations, they seldom get the rent a mob culture of the Islamic world correct.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran the cosmopolitan Iranian intellectual Azar Nafisi noted that few in the masses outside the US embassy in 1979 had a clue what they were demonstrating about. She reported that many of those bused in from rural villages actually thought they were going to America itself rather than the American embassy.
Back in 2001 the UK Telegraph had an account from a pro Taliban demonstration in Pakistan. The reporter noted that while none of the demonstrators spoke English several carried English language signs It had also been carefully timed to end before afternoon teatime. The crowd, which undoubtedly had been paid to show up, was already drifting away as teatime approached and it was time to get back to their shops. The local media pretty much ignored the event but the CNN cameras were up and running for the whole show.
“Who’s to blame?”
I blame Estragon!
No, wait. Scratch that. I blame Mohammed!
Voltaire just shed a tear for his country.
Actually I suspect Voltaire may have smiled at the thousands who showed up at demonstations in support of Charlie Hebdo all across France Wednesday night dispite the concerns of the cowardly French bureaucrats.
While pissing on other religions isn’t my schtick. The whole world needs to step up and piss on this part of Islam this month and punch a bully in the face.
The effect needs to be the exact opposite of their intent. Muslims need to hate this gunmen for the reaction they have caused.
In a sense, they made their own bed. I suspect the entire staff was smugly anti-gun, and vocally proud of their country’s enlightened disarming of its few good citizens. Even their police can’t be trusted with those evil guns. I bet their final thoughts included wishing they has SOME WAY to combat the monsters. But of course not guns! I wonder if they tried literally surrendering, which is in their national genes.
Even their police can’t be trusted with those evil guns.
One of those Editors had his own police guard, right in the room. He died with the rest of the staff. The world wants to know, what attempts did he make at a defense, and how far did he get? Was he even armed?
Well, they were French after all. I think you have your answer.
My response to Sally would be: “A morally grounded human being would express disgust at the murder of innocents for expressing their ideas without the need to make a politically correct caveat.”
Sweetheart, there is no moral equivalency, much less a moral relativity to those two ideas.
Egypt’s President al-Sisi has the right idea in that Islam needs to undergo its own reformation, if it in fact has never done so previously. Someone here mentioned that Ataturk had done a version of that reform but he instead tried to bring Turkey into the modern era, with some immediate success but now there’s a lingering regression back into its version of Islam.
Still, while Islam will do what it will, we outside of Islam need to stand up with Charlie Hebdo and not knee down to Islam. New Hampshire has a motto that says “Live Free or Die;” true, because how else shall we live?
By the 1950s modern political and social reforms had spread across the region from Tehran to Casablanca with most governments set up along secular lines. Of course, during this era western intellectuals were also encouraging this trend. The intellectuals didn’t like colonialism, but western style socialism was still being actively promoted as the the wave of the future for the Muslim world and Islami religious leaders were seen with the same disdain with which the socialists treated Christianity’s leaders. Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi began his rule as a socialist. So did Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Nasser’s United Arab Republic and the Baath parties in both Syria and Iraq were socialist.
Then came the likes of Edward Said, the embrace of guilt over imagined sins of all western culture and the entire field of post colonial studies. Soon the academic-media axis was embracing the Islamists in the name of Said’s ideas about authenticity, as if non western cultures were artifacts to be protected from the forces of change.
For this reason, I caution that we don’t always know what might really be happening on the so-called “Arab Street”. Until 1978 the western media saw the area through the lens of Fabian socialism and didn’t report much about the anger of the imams, mullahs and ayatollahs over the reforms being undertaken in the name of modernization- reforms that lessened their power and traditional control over the distribution of alms. Today they media mostly views the region though the lens of Said and “Orientalism”, which discounts any voices of dissent from “authentic” Islam.
Indeed, until the 1980s, western intellectuals prided themselves on how the West had improved health care, education and the rights of women across the region. Today the western intellectuals embrace the worst excesses of the Islamists.
A retributive cycle. Perhaps when the Chinese colonize Africa with their excess males, then dreams of old conquests will finally be put to rest.
Kohn is simply wrong (i.e. she lies). I can’t count them up without a lot of work, but the DC sniper alone killed more than ‘right-wing extremists’ since 9/11. To be honest, I can’t come up with a anyone killed by a right-wing extremist. Does anyone have a clue who she is counting? Those killed in the Gifford shooting???
The Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was NOT right wing. He was (and still is) a paranoid schizophrenic. According to a few students who knew him from school, he disliked politics but when he did express a political opinion, it was usually left wing. The friends also said Loughner distrusted women, and believed they should not hold positions of power.
Loughner targeted Gabrielle Giffords after he met her at a Tucson event in 2007, and they exchanged words. Loughner felt that Giffords had disrespected him, and he wrote in his journal shortly after that meeting that he was going to kill her. The 2011 shootings had absolutely nothing to do with “right wing politics” (or Sarah Palin), and everything to do with Loughner’s mental illness and his feelings of outrage over Giffords’ perceived slight of him in 2007.
That, of course, is the whole point. She has to take left-wing or no-wing killings and declare them to be right-wing. I wouldn’t be surprised if she declares any shooting with a gun to be ‘right-wing’. After all, if a gun was used, it must be a 2nd amendment wacko.
One of the biggest problems with the Left is that they are so committed to their beliefs, no matter if all their arguments are refuted with the facts, they will not change their minds.
A lot of liberals can be reached. I was actually a high-info liberal at one time. My willingness to look at info led me to Milton Friedman and soon I was no longer a liberal. So it is worth reaching out to to libs, but I fear the leftists (i.e. Kohn) are a lost cause. Nothing short of God can turn them around.
George Tiller killed by Scott Roeder is probably one she’s counting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Roeder#Roeder.27s_background
Kohn includes Ted Bundy’s 36 victims because he was a registered Republican.
Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989, so unless he has come back from the dead, he hasn’t killed anyone since 9/11.
Please tell me you didn’t think I was serious.
Let’s see what the NY Times has to say after these kind of characters eventually ‘visit’ the NY Times.
I doubt they would. There are too many at the Times who see the works of Palestinian Edward Said as their template for reporting on all evens related to Islam. According to the template the West is always at fault no matter what outrage the Islamists have committed.
“Who’s to blame?”
Here’s a clue:
Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom and The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America by David Horowitz
“Indoctrinate U.” Watch This Documentary!!! (You Tube Video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHyvRHrYYBA
The Least Free Place in America (You Tube video-Prager Univ.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJaM8IOev7E
Ivory Towers On Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America by Martin Kramer
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men by Christina Hoff Sommers.
Jew Hatred and the kinds of anti-Semitism not seen since 1930’s Nazi Germany is now fashionable on our college campuses. To make things worse college students today haven’t got the brain-power 8th Graders had at the turn of the century. This local Jew hatred is intellectual laziness at its worse.
As a country we’re degenerating into a nation of Martin Niemoellers. Our law enforcement and government haven’t even got the guts to go after those social predators in those “boomer cars”; Audio Terrorists who have single-handedly destroyed the peace and quiet and quality of life of whole communities. I call it a symptom of the disease that is the decline of this country: At one time, just a few years ago we wouldn’t have tolerated this rudeness. Today we not only tolerate but encourage the type of Jew Hatred that destroyed half of Europe and is staging a come-back in the form of radical Islam.
Blame Western Leftists – if it weren’t for decades of their consistent opposition to Free Speech, magazines lampooning Islam would be commonplace and muslim violence in response would be universally condemned.
Instead, the Left, everywhere, condemns those exercising their free speech and blames them for the violence committed by muslim savages.
@sallykohn American soldiers are “Americans,” Sally!!!
“Who’s to blame?” The three Islamic Supremacists that did the shooting, the Imams that taught them Mo-Ham-Head’s ideas, and the Qu’ran (as abrogated) that codified the Profit’s* pedophilia, blood lust, and manic behaviors and enshrined him as The Perfect Man.
*No, this is not a typo; it is commentary. “Allahu mish Akbar!” — Allah is NOT greater!