Free speech the enemy of brutal militant Islamists The Daily Telegraph (Sydney), Australia Jan 9, 2015 32 In early June, 1944, one of the largest forces for freedom ever assembled stormed the French coast at Normandy to liberate France from tyrannical German occupation. A combined effort by troops and air support from the UK, the US, Canada, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Australia rushed German strongholds in an attack so massive that even now, some seven decades later, bullets, helmets and other battle equipment may still be found on Normandy’s wide beaches. France now faces another tyrannical threat, this time from militant Islam. Late on Wednesday night, Australian time, gunmen shouting oaths to Allah invaded the offices of the Paris-based satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and began calling out the names of individual staff members. They then opened fire, killing 11 people. Among the dead were a policeman and some of France’s most celebrated cartoonists, whose work had evidently offended the attackers’ indecipherably evil value system. The killers then took to the street where they cold-bloodedly executed another officer, a fellow Muslim, who was shot in the head as he lay prone and injured on the ground. As the murderer retreated, he screamed that the Prophet had been “avenged”. That line is worthy of further consideration. It refers to illustrations in Charlie Hebdo that depict the Prophet Muhammad in various mocking ways. It is difficult to understand the thinking of someone who sincerely believes that a mere cartoon could be offensive to a deity, yet we have seen other similar catastrophic over-reactions to perceived slights against Islamic icons and beliefs. In Sydney just three years ago, for example, city streets were taken over by violent protesters who were upset about a YouTube video made in the US that had no connection at all to our city or even our nation. On that day, protesters — including very young children — carried signs reading “Behead all those who insult the prophet” and “Our dead are in paradise, your dead are in hell”. The same brutal mindset evident in those protests is shown in the actions of the Paris murderers. Only by degrees of outcome were they different. In Sydney, extremists called for non-believers to be killed. In Paris, they were killed. Just as the free world came together in 1944 to rid France of its Nazi oppressors, so too have free nations again rallied to the French cause. “Religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today,” said author Salman Rushdie, who spent years under strict police security after fundamentalist Muslims vowed to kill him for what they claimed was a blasphemous book. “I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.” Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott drew parallels with December’s Martin Place siege, which left two innocent Australians dead. “Paris is an unspeakable atrocity, but it is of a piece with what we saw in Martin Place a couple of weeks ago,” he said. “It’s of a piece with what we saw with the Victorian police station a couple of months ago. It’s of a piece with actions that have been perpetrated by extremist fanatics in France before.” And US president Barack Obama identified the threat to western values represented by what he called a “cowardly, evil” attack: “The fact that this was an attack on journalists, attack on our free press, also underscores the degree to which these terrorists fear freedom of speech and freedom of the press.” Extremist Muslims, as the New Yorker’s George Packer pointed out, demand special exemption from western society’s traditions of free expression. “Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions that is currently unique,” he wrote following the attack. “Charlie Hebdo had been non-denominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too – but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism.” Their campaign of terror, although shocking and deadly, is destined to fail. The west’s power is not just evident in military terms, but also in social bonds that unite all free people. That is why the revulsion towards this latest atrocity is so heartfelt and universal. A clue may be found near
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 07:58:47 +0000
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