{"id":115,"date":"2015-01-10T15:59:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-10T21:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys-apparently-not-so-much.html"},"modified":"2015-02-24T23:20:42","modified_gmt":"2015-02-25T05:20:42","slug":"cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys-apparently-not-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2015\/01\/cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys-apparently-not-so-much.html","title":{"rendered":"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Apparently, not so much"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

From my sole window to the world of the French people, an old high school friend who was in the US as the daughter of a expat, but who returned back to France to finish high school and has been there ever since (via facebook):<\/p>\n

Et voil\u00e0, une br\u00eache dans le mur : l\u2019auto-censure. D\u2019est donc bien la France, LE pays de la LIBERTE , pas les USA. D\u00e9fendons l\u00e0 ! Pas de br\u00eache, pas d\u2019aito-censure dans la presse et dans noyre quotidien. Nous nous devons de continuer \u00e0 soutenir Charlie Hebdo pour son irr\u00e9verrence, son insoumission, ses blasph\u00e8mes, ses bites volantes et ses railleries\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even if you don\u2019t read French, the word \u201cauto-censure\u201d you can pretty well understand as \u201cself-censorship\u201d \u2014 she is sharing an article from Slate.fr reporting on the New York Times\u2019 statement that it wasn\u2019t going to reprint the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, in order to avoid upsetting their Muslim readers. \u00a0 And, if my French isn\u2019t too rusty, she says, in effect, that this proves that it is France, not the U.S., that is standing up for liberty, and (in a follow-up comment) remembering its heritage from the French Revolution itself. \u00a0And a friend replies by sharing an article from lefigaro.fr<\/a>, pushing back on the \u201cI am Charlie\u201d meme:<\/p>\n

Si \u00abnous sommes Charlie\u00bb, tous les journaux de France et d\u2019Europe devraient s\u2019empresser de reproduire les dessins qui ont condamn\u00e9 \u00e0 mort les journalistes de Charlie Hebdo. Le feront-ils? Probablement pas.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Which translates, roughly, as<\/p>\n

If \u201cwe are Charlie,\u201d all the papers in France and Europe ought to print the drawings which condemned the Charlie Hebdo journalists to death. \u00a0Will they? \u00a0Probably not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(And she, by the way, has plenty of liberal bona fides, as her usual links are to Greenpeace articles.)<\/p>\n

So I wanted to flag this \u201csample size of one\u201d that the French see themselves as defenders of liberty, and of secularism.<\/p>\n

But also \u2014<\/p>\n

Is it really this simple? \u00a0Is it an equation of \u201crefusal to publish Mohammed cartoons = acquiescing to unjustified extremist demands\u201d really correct?<\/p>\n

Imagine that the Islamists got their panties in a wad about pornography, and attacked Hustler (does Hustler still exist?) and Larry Flynt. \u00a0No one would think that it was necessary to the cause of free speech for major American dailies to start publishing porn, or even \u201cpage 3 girls\u201d or even selected images that the Islamists had specifically complained about \u2013 and if they did so, everyone would think it\u2019s perfectly normal to black out the naughty bits. <\/p>\n

So what\u2019s the difference?<\/p>\n

Obviously, in the one case, it\u2019s a violation of community standards generally, and the free choice of the publisher, and in the other, it\u2019s a specifically religious tenet. \u00a0But that seems like an incomplete explanation \u2014 so at this point, as they said in my old actuarial math textbooks, this is \u201cleft as an exercise to the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From my sole window to the world of the French people, an old high school friend who was in the US as the daughter of a expat, but who returned back to France to finish high school and has been there ever since (via facebook): Et voil\u00e0, une br\u00eache dans le mur : l\u2019auto-censure. D\u2019est […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[85,83,84],"class_list":["post-115","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-charlie-hebdo","tag-france","tag-terror-attacks"],"yoast_head":"\nCheese-eating surrender monkeys? 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