How Speech Rights Went Wrong in France
One 28-year-old man, for example, was found guilty of shouting support for the attackers as he passed a police station, according to the New York Times. He was sentenced to six months in prison.
More notoriously, the famously anti-Semitic French-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonne M'bala M'bala was arrested for a Facebook post. "Tonight, as far as I'm concerned," he wrote, "I feel like Charlie Coulibaly."
He was reacting to the popular "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie") slogan by inserting the name of Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four hostages at the kosher grocery store and a police officer the day before.
Dieudonne, as he prefers to be called, says his tasteless remark was no worse than the often tasteless cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. On that narrow issue, he may have a point. Charlie Hebdo proudly calls itself a "journal irresponsible" and is widely defended for carrying on the French tradition for unshackled iconoclasm.
But as the French see it, the right to free speech is protected, not the right to hate speech. After the pain of World War II, France, Germany and some other European countries have passed laws against denying the Holocaust and against any other speech that appears to attack people, not just ideas.
Yet, even by that narrow standard, angry Muslims are not the only folks who detect a double standard. Is it what Dieudonne said that counts, they ask, or who is saying it?
I feel the same about Dieudonne as I do about Charlie Hebdo. I strongly disagree with what he says, but I defend to the death his right to say it. That's my paraphrase of Voltaire's famous quote. He was French, too, although his immortal wisdom seems too often to be forgotten by his countrymen.
Dieudonne's statement, painful as it was, did not seem to glorify terrorists as much as it expressed the pain and frustration of many law-abiding Muslims whom Hollande ironically is trying to reach. Just as the murders at Charlie Hebdo boosted the weekly's sales, heavy-handed efforts to silence Dieudonne may only deepen that divide.
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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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