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Comment by nkurz | Hacker News Reader

We should exercise free speech to minimize the risk of future attacks like the attack in Paris, by openly disagreeing with the kind of thinking that leads to attacks like that.

I greatly appreciate your comments on this site, and worry I'm being obtuse, but I'm not sure what you feel is the "thinking that leads to attacks like this". I read Hirsi Ali as saying that we must band together and deliberately offend conservative Muslim sensibilities to protect free speech. This seems greatly at odds with many of the tenets of modern multiculturalism. Are you suggesting that we need to move away from the form of multiculturalism that grants power to the violent fundamentalist?

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Multiculturalism, modern or otherwise, is impossible if offensive speech from any one group is not tolerated by any other. (They don't have to like it, merely tolerate it. They should be free to speak out against it, but not to respond to mere words with violence.) We can't just resolve to avoid offense. We need to be able to tolerate offense.

If any group in a multiculturalist society cannot do this, then we must either built up their tolerance to offense, or look back on our objectives and reevaluate if they are realistic.

The idea of having to worry about offending people at all costs is silly.

If there was a group that murdered people for using the color purple, I'm sure tons of people and companies would proudly display people. Why should it be any different here? Why cower because someone might be offended over some arbitrary rule?

Because unlike the color purple, the Islamic community of France is an oppressed underclass. If this was a bunch of racist stereotypes of blacks, would our answer be to continue to publish racist trash?

These things can offend more than just extremists. Obviously this massacre is absolutely terrible, but the content of Charlie Hebdo regarding Islam was extremely offensive, and served mainly to increase the isolation of the French Muslim community

Hmm, yeah, if people were executed for putting on blackface, it seems a good protest might have people putting on blackface. The point being that even if you normally wouldn't be "offensive" you would to make it clear that offending people is far less important than executing them.

I also like how these cartoons are extremely offensive, as if that has any bearing on anything. Perhaps people shouldn't invent rules that makes them so offended? Like that Onion article about "no one was killed over this image".

Please dont equate mockery of a set of beliefs with mockery and oppression of a set of people based on genetic traits. I guarantee the French Muslims have not gone through a fraction of what blacks have gone through in terms of outright physical violence and state-sanctioned oppression.

If anything France, and Europe as a whole, seem more than welcoming to muslims, at least from an immigration and social safety net perspective.

Belief systems from Christian to Muslim to atheism must be subject to public criticism and mockery in a free society without threat of violence. People who dont feel this way should be free to leave.

I think this connection is not as arbitrary as you make it out to me.

The intersection between muslims and Arabs is pretty large. I'm not sure the same secular identity politics exists in the Middle East as exist in America.

Beyond that, the Civil Rights movement in America had 3 feet in Islam. I think the comparison is an appropriate one.

Orthodox Islam, to the extent that it was effective in the US Civil Rights movement in the 60s, had its start with Malcolm X and its end with Clarence 13x and his founding of the Five Percent Nation, which is a rejection of Islam at its most fundamental level: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_13X It replaces the "Mystery Spook" Allah and the Prophet Muhammed with the individual himself "A.l.l.a.h" (arm, leg, leg, arm, head) which is an acronym of a human being. There is no god, other than the living person. This is nothing more than atheism with a healthy dose of Randian objectivism. I fail to see the "3 feet" you mention here.

France is not a free society in the same way America is. French people are happy to live under many more restrictive laws but we don't often see it. For instance, Charlie Hebdo's staff could have gone to prison if they had published a cartoon mocking the holocaust. Some people's offense is treated as more valuable than others in France.

In “America”, laws forbid people drink beer in public. Not old, forgotten laws: policemen use these everyday as reason to arrest and search people in the street.

In fact, in recent weeks, did US courts not repeatedly find nothing illegal had happened when the police executed someone who was standing in the street not being a danger?

France is not perfect but you need to get out more if you think “America”, as you call it, is better.

I was just thinking about freedom of speech. I don't deny America has a problem with police violence. It has a bigger problem with violence in general too.

It is still quite bizarre that not being in France, I can safely say "The holocaust didn't happen" But a French person is at risk of having their online identity discovered, then imprisoned just for making a political claim like that. This is really quite scary.

You're right in that the oppression is not as systematic. I made the comparison to something universally recognised, but it was exaggerated.

I am not arguing against freedom of speech, but I am arguing for not buying magazines that promote such damaging stereotypes (just like I recognise that far-right parties can exist , but will never donate a cent to them).

The issue for me, is that as a society we trumpet freedom of religion, but to me it seems like this is only accepted so long as your skin is white to go along with it. The attacks on islam do translate to attacks on people from the Middle East.

Most people assume that if you're from Turkey you're probably muslim (even if in name only). The firebombed kebab shop the day after that attack: nobody knows whether the guy was actually muslim, but it doesn't matter to the attackers because this is really a race problem, and not a religion problem.

I think the idea that we can fight extremism with freedom of speech is wishful thinking. There's very clear indication that pictures as those published not only increase extremism in muslim communities, but also in far-right groups. I also think we are being a bit arrogant if we think that it's a few pictures and not global conflicts that are the main reasons for the existence of these attacks.

So attackers that explicitly call out "offensive" materials as the reason for their attacks are simply unaware of their own motives? The calls for Rushdie to be killed was due to global conflicts, not his writings?

They are aware of their own motives, but they are probably not aware of why they have those motives in the first place. Offensive materials drive a person to violence, but the question you should ask is "what created this type of person, who kills over a cartoon?"

Note that this does not excuse the actions of the murderer. They are still responsible and still must be punished. But you can punish murderers for their crimes, and adjust your policy so that you don't create so many murderers. They are not exclusive goals.

Sure, I agree! The policy of being polite, of not calling people out on inane beliefs is what generates these problems. We have failed as a civilization where someone ends up believing it's OK to kill someone for renouncing their faith, for instance.

I'm not so sure about that. What _drove_ the Spanish to drive out the Arabs from Iberia and execute those that stayed behind? What made them act like that? Or what made the Huns go and conquer half of Europe and kill about half of those and subjugate the rest? Was there something which could have prevented that had the Europeans just been different in some way?

Let's keep in mind that shifts in zeitgeist can shift somewhat quickly --the rise or decline of racism, or the rise or decline of women's rights (say in Russia or China). Things can change due to how people perceive things... but at the same time I don't think anyone outside those societies are or should feel responsibility for how societies change with change in the world...

It'd be like saying, yeah, Japan in the 70s - 80s was at fault for the steel workers in America feeling alienated, emasculated and crushed. No, absolutely not. We needed to adjust, not the Japanese. The world at large changes, you need to change with it.

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