The one year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks has
resulted in a barrage of articles talking about how Hebdo represented freedom
of speech, and at least one idiot with a knife and a fake bomb vest tried to
cause problems on the same day and time as the Hedbo attacks. Apparently, the
guy had documentation’ from ISIL and shouted Allah Ahkbar, but given that it
was one person and he was not a real threat, I’m thinking either the guy is a
wannabe, or ISIL is really diminished and is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Last year at this time, I was teaching two courses at two
different universities, I remember at one of them, one staff member had a ‘Je
suis Charlie’ poster on their door, and I remember thinking, ‘Je suis un racist?’.
While I support freedom of speech, Charlie Hedbo did not seem like hard hitting
political commentary. Jews are drawn with big noses, terrorists with
over-exaggerated turbans-the kind of stuff that I thought went out of style
with the Mad Men era. So, when does freedom of speech trump being a racist
asshole? I guess at the end of the day, it comes down to this-you can say, and
I can tell you that you are a racist asshole and should shut the fuck up. But
no one should be killed for either of those things.
No comments:
Post a Comment