In a brazen attempt to cash in on the hysteria surrounding the "film" The Innocence of Muslims, the self-styled anarchists who publish Charlie Hebdo went all out with a special let's-insult-the-Prophet issue today.
After all, what publicity-hungry struggling magazine publisher could resist such a windfall of controversy? The so-called film led to rioting in over twenty countries, dozens of deaths, and thousands of arrests and injuries in the past week.
The think tank here at Falling Downs is of mixed opinion in this matter. Here in the Nations of Virtue we take great pride in our vaunted freedom of expression. Virtually every senior politician in France has at one time or another gone on record supporting Charlie Hebdo's right to free expression through their past brushes with controversy.
In principle I agree with them.
At the same time, we should ask ourselves why and how we have allowed that great freedom to be reduced to an excuse to allow the gratuitous slander of other peoples' beliefs.
Where is our free press when it is time to question the ruling elites on their next war or on their war on social welfare and the common good? Happily pandering to those elites while spreading their propaganda, that's where.
Already the French government has added extra security to many of its diplomatic missions in the Islamic world in anticipation of more outrage.
They'll be needing plenty of additional security right there in France as well, where a generation of disaffected young Muslims will seize this opportunity to lash out at a society that they see as having marginalized them.
Perhaps they can present the bill for all this extra security to the opportunists at Charlie who are glorying in all this publicity.
The magazine was originally called Hara-Kiri. Maybe they've finally managed it.
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