Political Observer offers a telling portion of Rachel Shabi’s commentary!
Jan 07, 2025
Headline: Charlie Hebdo free speech debate: Nobody is listening
Sub-headline: The chilling attacks sparked a global debate about free speech and the right to offend.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/14/charlie-hebdo-free-speech-debate-nobody-is-listening
Editor: Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands.
Published On 14 Jan 201614 Jan 2016
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2016/1/14/charlie-hebdo-free-speech-debate-nobody-is-listening
…
During the week-long commemoration of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, free speech organisations around the world, spearheaded by the writers’ group Pen International, pointed out that the biggest threats to free speech came from governments “ostensibly motivated by security concerns”.
Pen’s statement on the issue drew critical attention to France’s new surveillance laws – which have elsewhere been condemned by human rights groups as being too intrusive and carrying no judiciary control.
And, while free speech is the foundation stone of a progressive, functioning democracy we can’t champion it in isolation, while losing sight of other key principles. The democracies whose politicians insist that we are all Charlie are the same ones chipping away at other freedoms. What of the suggestions of passport-stripping coming from both French and British governments – for dual-nationality terrorism convicts and those returning from fighting with ISIL, respectively? This might be one of the most anti-democratic things a state can do, flying in the face of the fundamental right to citizenship by birth.
It’s only when we get rid of what one writer has described as “discursive segregation” in the context of free speech and Charlie Hebdo, that we can start to fight for and uphold these invaluable collective rights, together. It’s the capacity to fight for two seemingly opposing things at the same time that we need to find – because, until we do, how will we ever find the operational common ground between them?
Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
Editor: A quick reminder of what Charlie Hebdo’s Satire expressed! All now carefully scrubbed from the record!
Political Observer. ( Thank you to Max Blumenthal!)
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