No, they were not all Charlie

By Giulio Meotti, INN

The threat to freedom of speech now emanates not only from the jihadists, but from within the democracies themselves.

“Everything has become blasphemous”, writes Riss, director of Charlie Hebdo, in the latest issue of the weekly issue that comes out on the anniversary of the massacre of his colleagues by two Islamists, the Kouachi brothers. Four years later, it is the same idea of ??freedom of expression that has become blasphemous in the West.

Charlie Hebdo‘s troubles, culminating in the murder of its journalists and cartoonists, began with the solitary republishing of the Mohammed cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. In the four years since the massacre at number 10 of rue Nicolas-Appert in Paris, no European newspaper has republished a single sticker on the Prophet of Islam and all mainstream media have pixelled Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures.

From France to Germany, journalists and intellectuals under police guard because of their criticism and ideas about Islam cannot be counted (from the French Eric Zemmour to the German Hamed Abdel-Samad and Thilo Sarrazin).

At the end of the year there was the historic ruling by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg on the case of an Austrian woman who had called Mohammed a “pedophile” because of his relationship with a child, Aisha. In Austria, the woman was convicted in a sentence validated by the Strasbourg judges, who ruled that freedom of expression ends on the border with Islam.

“The day freedom of speech died in Europe”, wrote the American magazine Commentary about this ruling. The highest supranational legal entity in Europe has incorporated, de facto, the idea of ??blasphemy used in sharia and which cost the lives of Charlie Hebdo‘s journalists.

But it is not just Islamists.

The threat to freedom of speech now emanates not only from the jihadists, but from within the democracies themselves. In the West there is now a pervasive aversion to the principle of freedom of speech. The issues around freedom of speech on European and American university campuses, for example, have dramatically intensified since the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Professors intimidated, disengaged, mobbed. Books censored or bleached in the parts that would offend the new common feeling.

It has come, as in Berkeley, to the disturbing use of force to silence voices with which we disagree.

The great battles in favor of freedom of expression abroad do not mobilize even a few groups of activists. Like the case of Asia Bibi,whose story fits perfectly into that “all became blasphemous” by Riss, a crime of having violated the Pakistani law on “blasphemy”.

“Christians are fed to the lions … and no one seems to care”, wrote one of Australia’s major columnists Greg Sheridan last week.

There is the case of Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger whipped and imprisoned for his liberal posts, and almost forgotten in his hovel in Riyadh.

And Charlie, the “new” Charlie Hebdo, gets a little bit too. In the issue released for the fourth anniversary of the massacre there are criticisms of the “anti-Enlightenment” elements, such as Zemmour and Michel Houellebecq, among others.

On 7 January four years ago, all the major newspapers, television networks and photo agencies, starting with the “Big Three” (MSNBC, CNN and AP), competed to justify the decision to censor and obscure the most famous “Islamophobic” cartoons by Charlie Hebdo. A year later, the same publications published the cover of Charlie Hebdo with the biblical God “killer” who runs away.

No one had a problem showing the new cover of the French weekly, where you can see a bishop and an imam. At the next anniversary, perhaps only the bishop will remain on the cover. And maybe they will all be Charlie again.

January 10, 2019 | 3 Comments »

Leave a Reply

3 Comments / 3 Comments

  1. 50 ways to spell Mohammed.

    The extent to which European governments have gone to suppress freedom of information is almost incomprehensible. Official institutions actively manipulate and censor all the data available in order to conceal that the real flood of islamisation.

    Let me provide an example of this political engineering.

    In numerous European communities, 35% of the newborns in Western Europe are migrants. Yet the reported popular names persistently remain full blooded Western, like Sam or Max. These innocuous sounding names are no coincidence. You may think this is the success of the melting pot, and all that talk about mass migration is overblown. Think again.

    True identities and statistics regarding European migrants are very hard to come by. Authorities on purpose deftly conceal the true impact of mass migration.

    An example from the Netherlands will prove my point.

    The most popular name in the Top-20 in Holland in 2017 was Noah, garnering 635 names during that year. All the other given names in the Top-20 were traditional Dutch like Max or Thijs.

    How comforting you may say.

    Now take note! Not one of the following names below, recorded in Holland in 2017 made it into the Top-20 most popular names list:

    Name Occurences
    Mohammed 221
    Mohamed 211
    Muhammed 110
    Ahmed 67
    Mustafa 60 an epitheton of Mohammed
    Mohammad 51
    Mehmet 50 Turkic form of Mohammed
    Muhammad 43

    Total Mohammed
    derivatives 813

    Indeed combined, the generic Mohammed with all its derivatives attained 813 ‘christenings’. More than sufficient to have reached the Nr.-1, First Place in the Holland in 2017.

    The policy of counting ‘unique’ spellings separately is upheld by the authorities, by design and for explicit own reason, evidently.

    You might point out that migrants arriving from different Arab countries assume differing spellings. Not true. Applicants registering their newborn boys are routinely assigned one of the spelling aberrations, arbitrarily and counter to their filings and even if they object. It is done on purpose.

    Confounded parents protesting they do not want to call their junior say, “Muhammad” which in Dutch diction would result in a mispronouncing, are not allowed to appeal. Correct pronunciation in Dutch would require to spell Muhammad as Moehammad.

    Moreover, there is a wealth out there of additional versions such as Mahmud, Mahmood, Mahmoed, Moehammad, Moehamad and Mechmet, Achmed, Ahmad which are assigned to parents and end up being suppressed in the official statistics of popular names. This is done by design.

    Because importantly, names that come up less than 25 times a year are not recorded by the office for statistics at all!

    That way, exotic foreign names and rare spellings such as Machmood, Mehmed and Mekhmet which are assigned less than 25 times in a year, are conveniently left out of the statistics altogether. A host of spelling variations of Mohammed are thus conveniently created each having less than 25 incidences per year.

    Registration offices insist and override frequent remonstrations of surprised parents confronted with birth certificates deviating from what they applied for.

    This is no coincidence. Names are willfully gerrymandered by the Ministry for Interior Affairs, all done to assuage the electorate and obfuscate the dramatic demographic transformation taking place. And the press remains silent.

    Check it out for yourself: http://www.svbkindernamen.nl/int/nl/kindernamen/wizard/zoeknaam/

  2. Notice that the CNN dispatch suggests that the Afp are racists and antisemites, and that they are responsible for “3,500 attacks” on “asylum seekers.” Notice also that mention is made of thousands of attacks, and a number of murders ,of Germans perpetrated by the “asylum seekers.”

  3. This from today’s CNN. Definitely proves Meotti’s point:

    Far-right German politician is beaten unconscious by masked men
    Frank Magnitz, shown here speaking in the Bundestag in September 2018, was attacked by at least 3 masked assailants.
    Frank Magnitz, shown here speaking in the Bundestag in September 2018, was attacked by at least 3 masked assailants.
    (CNN) — A far-right German lawmaker has been beaten unconscious by at least three masked assailants in an attack seen by police as “politically motivated.”

    Frank Magnitz, a member of parliament and the leader of the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party (AfD) in Bremen, was assaulted on Monday afternoon as he walked through the center of the city.

    Masked men knocked him unconscious with a piece of wood “and kicked him further” in the head as he lay on the ground, AfD wrote in a statement.

    A graphic image of the 66-year-old lying unconscious in a hospital bed was released by the party. It showed a large gash on his forehead, and his face was swollen and covered in blood.

    Bremen police, who have begun an investigation into the assault, said two craftsmen called an ambulance after discovering Magnitz lying on the ground.

    In an earlier statement, the police said that “due to the function of the aggrieved party, a political motivation of the act can be assumed.”

    ‘Fight hate with hate, you allow hate to prevail’

    AfD leader Alexander Gauland told a press conference Tuesday that Magnitz is now conscious and is expected to make a full recovery.

    The party called Monday’s attack a “black day for democracy” and voices across the political spectrum condemned the attack on Magnitz.

    Steffen Seibert, the chief spokesman for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, said he hopes the police will “apprehend the perpetrators” quickly.
    How 2018 became Angela Merkel's swan song, and who will succeed her
    Cem Ozdemir, a lawmaker for the Greens, wrote on Twitter that “there is no justification for violence even against the AfD… if you fight hate with hate, you allow hate to prevail.”
    “Violence must never be a means of political confrontation — regardless of who or what the motives are for it. There is no justification for this,” Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, from the SPD party, wrote on Twitter.
    This attack comes after an explosion targeted an AfD office in the eastern state of Saxony on January 3. Police said there has been a rise in attacks against the party, and that most incidents were acts of vandalism, Reuters reports.

    Anti-immigration and anti-Islam platform

    The AfD, which was only set up around five years ago, become the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since 1961. It ran on an anti-immigration and anti-Islam platform, winning almost 13% of the vote in the 2017 federal elections.

    The party says that Islam contradicts German’s constitution and insists that the country should accept only migrants with high technical skills.
    AfD has taken controversial positions on key issues in the past — like several other right-wing, populist parties across Europe. In 2017, prominent AfD politician Beatrix von Storch dismissed current debates around gender identity and LGBT rights as “foolish nonsense.”
    The arrival of some 1.4 million refugees in Germany during the European migrant crisis has energized the political right, and the number of xenophobic attacks has increased.

    During the height of the migrant crisis, German officials said hundreds of asylum seekers and refugees were injured in more than 3,500 attacks on them and their shelters in the country in 2016. This was a substantial increase in attacks from the previous year.

    Latest statistics also show that the number of anti-Semitic crimes in Germany rose by 2.5% in 2017, which added to fears of growing hostility in the country, Reuters reported.
    And last year, AfD marched with other far-right groups as thousands of people took to the streets of Chemnitz to protest against migrants.
    The protests saw some call for the return of Nazism and for foreigners to leave Germany. It was the biggest display of far-right sentiment in the country for many years and triggered a national debate.

    With reporting from Claudia Otto in Germany