Oh, Do…

Just fuck off. Thanks to Kath in the comments for this diatribe from an apologist for evil in the Huffington Post. Poor Medhi Hassan is fed up with this freedom of speech stuff.

You and I didn’t 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 Dubya’s slogan: either you are with free speech… or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo… or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.

Actually, unlike Dubya’s false dichotomy, there is no third way option here. You either believe in free speech or you  don’t. Generally, those who don’t are freedom hating lunatics of the kind who stormed into the Charlie Hebdo offices last week. They are, also, the kind of “liberal” leftist and apologists for Islam who think that those of us who cause them offence by daring to ridicule their beliefs should be silenced by the law. The outcome is the same, though. Liberty dies another death.

I’m writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you’re defying the terrorists when, in reality, you’re playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims.

Go fuck yourself with the rough end of a pineapple. Demonising is exactly what is needed. And I sure as hell ain’t one of them. Hassan, it would appear is.

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 “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.

It was an attack on free speech. It was an attack on the West. And those who call it as such are correct. Islam is rooted in medieval barbarism. That many Muslims have done as many Christians did before them and rejected that aspect does not alter the facts.

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.

My word, so it’s all our fault. Go fuck yourself you egregious piece of shit. The only people to blame here where those who carried out the attacks and those who sponsored them. It was not the fault of the West. And yes, radical Islam is at war with the West. It is how Islam spread in the first place. Our very own Andrem Choudary is an example of what we would face if we submitted to this death cult.

Please get a grip.

Speak for yourself.

None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech.

I do. That’s what freedom of speech means.

We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Again, go fuck yourself.  Apart from incitement to violence and libel, which are not free speech issues, there should be no regulation on what people say. Taste and decency is irrelevant. No one has a right not to be offended, for without the ability to cause offence, there is no freedom of speech. And if  making crude jokes about your prophet offends you, then you probably need offending good and hard until you get the message. We are under no obligation whatsoever to consider your delicate sensibilities. If you want to follow the deranged rantings of a medieval warlord who invented a religion in order to extend his power-base and personal wealth, well, fine, your prerogative. We, however, are under no obligation to you for your absurd beliefs and you have no special rights because you believe it.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t).

Tu Quoque. Logical fallacy as is used by the charlatan who has no argument.

I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.

That responsibility translates as accepting that people will call you on what you say – not gun you down. They might not buy your goods and services, they might shun you, but not gun you down. This is classic victim blaming – which, frankly, the “liberal” left is quick to condemn when it comes to rape cases. No one said there is a duty to offend  – that is a strawman.

When you say “Je suis Charlie“, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo‘s depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?

This is just idiotic blathering. But, yes, I am perfectly happy with these things. That’s how free speech works.  People get to say offensive things. So what. Grow up and get over yourself.

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would “provoke an outcry” and proudly declared it would “in no circumstances… publish Holocaust cartoons”?

So what? That there is hypocrisy does not alter the point. Again, tu quoque.

Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren.

Just growing one would be a start. For the  most part, Christians and Jews shrug their shoulders and carry on.  What they don’t do is gun people down and they don’t generally whinge loudly demanding respect.

Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82% of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.

I am  more than  happy to allow this and would not seek to prevent it. That’s how freedom of speech works. But on the charge of hypocrisy – see above. That the “liberal” left are a bunch of freedom hating authoritarians much like their fellow travellers in the desert death cult doesn’t make them wrong on this one.

Apparently, it isn’t just Muslims who get offended.

And your point? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one, do you? Apart from the  fact that being a Muslim seems to make you think your beliefs make you special. They don’t.