“I speak only one language, and it is not my own” (Jacques Derrida)
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To begin with, I condemn unequivocally the killing of French cartoonists, journalists and editors of France's very antireligious Charlie Hebdo. I mourn their loss and my condolences go to their families and to a grieving French nation. Absolutely nothing can justify anymore the killing of innocent civilians along purely religious lines. I agree with the Pope's characterization of the event as stemming from a "deviant form of religion".
I am as horrified at this as I was at the attempted assassination of Malala Yousafzai in Pakistan and the shooting of a Canadian Forces member at the National War Memorial in Ottawa. The only real response to religious differences is rational debate and discussion, founded on deep and reverential respect for all religious beliefs and traditions.
However, it's very disheartening to me to see a country that's known for some of the most enlightened contemporary philosophic thought blindly follow a sort of tribal instinct to revile foreign ideas and peoples. I am certainly not about to throw my support behind proponents of a pure unbridled freedom of expression that cares not a whit about the rightness of indiscriminately lampooning and caricaturing religious ideas or figures in the most obscenely graphic images imaginable or, perhaps more importantly, about the consequences of this media assault on ethno-cultural sensibilities everywhere.
Any tenet of free speech must be premised on a mutual understanding of and respect for the right of any belief system to be protected from what can only be seen as unceasing assaults (whether in verbal or artistic forms) on religious faith-traditions and their sacred images and icons. Not to do so is to condone a hate speech rhetoric that has no place in a growing globalized world community There must be limits to what freedom of speech activists, using media resources and their vast market outreach, can say and show.
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| Holy Koran |
The Catholic will find himself these days being subjected to similar barrages of anti-Catholic rants and not a few obscene media representations of religious iconography dear to them. They are as offensive to Christians as the anti-Islam editorials and cartoons at Charlie Hebdo are to Muslims. I do not see here a difference.. The most egregious form of this similar sort of purposely offensive caricature came recently in an April 15th, 2014 Jon Stewart Comedy Central skit in which Stewart made an obscene mockery of the holy manger scene. The Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights and Catholics everywhere have condemned Stewart for this (as I do, too): the crass stupidity and ignorance of a celebrity figure who commands a wide television audience is not to be believed.
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| Holy Family |
If Je suis Charlie is a rallying-cry for freedom of speech without responsible limits and if its goal is to defend pornographic depictions of the sacred prophet of Islam and the sacred holy manger of Catholicism, I do not support it and never will. I support free speech as intelligent and respectful discourse always. Beliefs, customs and practices by which hundreds of millions govern their lives and which are bearers of a sanctity in their own right ought to be accorded better treatment.
