You and I didnt like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubyas slogan: either you are with free speech... or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo... or youre a freedom-hating fanatic. Im writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think youre defying the terrorists when, in reality, youre playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it a war declared on civilisation. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a clash of civilisations and referred to Europes belief in freedom of expression. In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a bid to assassinate free speech (ITVs Mark Austin), to desecrate our ideas of free thought (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime - not an act of war - perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 14:29:03 +0000
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