Je Suis Charlie

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emiliano_Zapata

A noticeable fact is how mainstream newspapers in France are careful not to make the amalgam between these few barbarians and a whole religion.

- Two people assaulted the office, and killed 10, wounded 11 (4 of which considered critical).

- They furthermore killed 2 police officers on their way out, one of them point blank as he lay wounded and was asking for mercy (do yourself a favor and don't look at that witness video. I mean it. NSFL).

- They are on the loose and are reported armed with automatic weapons and a rocket launcher. No kidding.

- Their car was found in a suburban ghetto (Pantin, in Seine-saint-denis)

Sorry for the gory details.

By everyone continuing to utilize their freedom of speech. It's really that simple. The only way to lose is to not make use of your freedom.

However horrible it may sound, I think our best course of action is to accept that these things do happen occasionally. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fight them, and that doesn't mean we shouldn't do our best to prevent them, but it does mean that we must accept that we'll never get to 100%.

If we can move forward with the idea that we'll do our best to reduce these attacks as much as possible, rather than with the idea that we'll eliminate them, I think the result will be much better.

As for what to do, I think the combination of smart intelligence (as opposed to NSA-style dragnets) and emergency response (to minimize the effects of attacks after they happen) are the way to go.

Edit: whee, downvotes. If you think I'm wrong, or even just right but insensitive, would you mind explaining yourself instead of (or, heck, in addition to) downvoting? I honestly don't see anything wrong with my comment.

Sure. And there were also numerous bombings and attacks in Europe by left-wing extremists during the "years of lead". That said, the difference between Breivik and these guys is just the beard length. Right-wing nutjobs are right-wing nutjobs, whatever their creed.

I don't strictly mean religion here. Among others, politics and political candidates meet the requirements. I think there is a lot of value to satirical political cartoons.

No. We shouldn't. We as a society need to stand for values of openness, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. There is no way to do this other than to accept that there are psychopaths and lunatics among the human race and sometimes they do something terrible.

After all, the only way to truly prevent acts like these is with an absolute police state. I am Charlie, and I will not stand for such a crackdown.

We have to stop imagining that we can entirely cure the human race from mental sickness or extreme radicalism. We have to accept that, in a free society, sometimes horrible things happen. One day it's a hurricane, the other day it's a terrorist attack. Nobody is to blame except the perpetrators and their direct influencers.

Stoltenberg (ironically now the boss of NATO) said it best the last time something like this happened in Europe: "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation". That's the only valid response.

This puts the onus on the Islamist murderers to stop killing people. When they stop killing people for making fun of them for being religion-addled killers, the number of people making fun of them for being religion-addled murderers will start a long slow decline, until eventually it will, as it were, die away.

Until then, we should all make fun of them for being murderous anti-Bayesians, because they are.

We should also depict the Prophet Muhammad ~0:-{= frequently and with great glee, because offending murderers and defending free speech is way more important than delicately tiptoeing around the sensibilities of the vast majority of Muslims, who are in any case the primary victims of Islamist hatred.

- top-left: "Mahomet overwhelmed by fundamentalists"

- in the speech bubble: "It's hard to be loved by dumbasses" (the meaning of "con" is hard to convey in certain cases, it has this idea of "nefariously idiotic" - translating it to "cunt" wouldn't do it justice I believe)

In any case, this is all very alarming. I hope nobody submits to the threats, as is the point of "Je suis Charlie". I also feel for all the Muslims who will end up being discriminated against for the actions of a few imbeciles.

https://twitter.com/MadAxes/status/552814382338826240

Not going to happen. French people value satire and freedom of expression.

Far too many people fear to name it for what it is.

Totally disregarding that machine-gunning to death 11 people because you're offended, which is what just happened, is a gross violation of free speech in addition to being a human tragedy. By bringing this up right now, how could this be interpreted any other way than believing these tragedies wouldn't happen if those people weren't so darn disrespectful of Muslims.

Shouldn't your heard sink for the victims first?

Looks like you have a pre-defined ideology ("muslim communities are OK always and a good fit for our society") and when faced when a counter fact ("under some circumstances like today, people of that faith can be wrong/dangerous") you try to ignore it.

Not saying that muslim communities are bad in general, but being open in what problematic spots they can exhibit (e.g. opression towards their women, they sometimes harbor extremists like that, etc) is more helpful than trying to absolve them with apriori ideas. Truth can also be a common ground with those not wanting the muslims in Holland. E.g. you might hate their racist propaganda and lies, but you both can agree to some specific problems and can try to work out solutions.

Else you have two camps, the racists and those that thing everybody is always rosy, and society never solves its issues, and can never integrate other communities.

edit: the meme originally came from the charliehebdo website. I'd venture to guess that they mean `you didn't kill Charlie. Charlie is everyone`.

edit 2: nope, I am wrong according to WP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je_suis_Charlie And that's why memes and absolutes suck.

The cartoon controversy was started by Jyllands-Posten not because they wanted to offend Muslims, but because they believed that discourse about Islam and its role in society was being constrained by self-censorship and fear. Their purpose was to open that discourse by re-establishing the right of free speech. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02...

The effort might have been dismissed as a juvenile stunt and an unnecessary provocation if the response had been a lot of angry criticism. The violence that has instead followed demonstrates the validity of their concern, and the necessity of their provocation.

I don't know what the site is about.

Edit: Alright, the domain is the actual domain of Charlie Hebdo. This isn't some kind of political message by a third party but most likely a message by the people of Charlie Hebdo. I don't know any more.

Your EQ is low, isn't it?

They were notorious for mocking all religions and have posted content offensive to all.

Right now it is thought that this was the work on islamist terrorists (I have not seen reliable info though, and crazy is cross religion)

Now to make matters worse the right is on the rise in Europe and the interfaith tensions are high due to complex reasons (being in economic depression for a decade helps little).

In a sense this was attack against the core values of what lots of Europe believes. And there are a lot of people for which anti muslim sentiment is a godsend ...

Actually that happens all the time - the reverse happens too of course.

I guess that it's to prevent abuses, but as you say, we are all affected. I think it's important to have a single main thread about this.

Seriously? You're making a comparison to the Nazis?

Edit: It's 3 assholes with assault rifles, not a totalitarian state. Can we calibrate our references to be a bit less hysterical and hyperbolic?

The problem lies in poverty, lack of education, propaganda... it's not going to be solved overnight. I just wonder who is leading this propaganda effort and trick those kids into murdering people. Is there an "evil brain" somewhere or is it some kind of "natural phenomenon" that feeds itself?

EDIT: not sure about the downvotes. Did I say something dumb? Living in France, my interpretation of the situation is that more and more teenagers or young adults are attracted to radical islam. This concerns usually people from the poorest neighbourhoods. Most of them aren't dangerous (even though it's quite shocking to read what they have to say on social networks). Atop of this, some get recruited by islamist organisation and are led to go to Syria for instance to fight there (A few hundreds according to the French government). Others are just lost people and commit terrorist attacks on their own behalf (like Merah http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Mohammed_Merah a couple of years ago).

So one hand, we know there are islamist groups recruiting people to commit terrorist attacks, but also there's very clearly an overall rise of radical islam in France that catalyse crazy behaviours.

For the record, I hit flag because while this was an outrageous act of barbarism, and indeed freedom of speech is important for all of us, the link does not particularly gratify intellectual curiosity[1]. Nor do I think it's a good idea to start discussing even significant non-hacker news of the day here. The (relative) focus of the hn community is one reason we have such an amazing stable of regular commenters.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Lots of people have asked and answered this type of question over the years, and most of it's been documented!

It could be argued that going out of your way to caricature a religious group is unethical. But it is legal (that is, should be allowed in a free society).

In either case responding with violence to a personal insult barbaric and unjustifiable. One can always read different magazines, watch different videos, etc.

Because then claiming offense becomes a sword, not a shield, and can be used to shut down legitimate criticism.

For example, saying "There is no honor in honor killings" can be very offensive and humiliating in the wrong crowd, but it is nevertheless a discussion which needs to be held anywhere honor killings take place.

Similarly, there are disingenuous morons in my country who claim all criticism of Israeli policy is anti-semitism. That can't possibly be considered valid. If it was, nobody could criticize Israel, which is obviously what the morons want, but a free society can't allow that.

> How come guys like Julian Assange are not protected under 'free speech'? How about people who sign NDA's?

You can't use "Free speech" as a way to get around other laws, including contract law in the case of NDAs.

> How come it would be heavily criticized (and probably illegal) for a newspaper to start running weekly cartoons where they make fun of the black population in America, depicting them with the all the token representations and slurs that are now widely accepted as 'racist'?

The KKK is a legal organization in America. David Duke is a legal human being, and is legally considered a human being despite evidence to the contrary, and legally has the right to say everything he's said, past and present.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke

And then there's the Westboro Baptist Church:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church

I fear your understanding of American free speech laws is quite flawed.

> Are there some written rules about this

Yes. A lot of them are in court cases, where judges have made decisions which bind on other judges. This is how a Common Law system works.

> or is it just the result of how things are perceived by the majority of the public (i.e. what we like vs what we don't)?

No. If it worked like this, the Westboro Baptist Church, for example, wouldn't be legal.

Because anything can be sacred to anybody, so we won't be able to discuss anything. When something is sacred to somebody it applies only to them not to non follower of these made up laws. Caving to that would be accepting de facto sharia law. You can't hide behind sacred. You can't censor something just because you are offended. This is basic free speech.

Religions are not exempt from criticism. Religious nutjobs deserve every bit of mockery and disrespect. These terrorists are the caricature.

Generally, when they are inciting violence, or knowing/recklessly making statements of fact that are both false and harmful to a particular victim.

Mocking someone's core beliefs generally doesn't fall into this. It may be rude, uncouth, or undesirable, but its generally within the scope of freedom, and as much as there are specific cases where I wish people wouldn't do it, I wouldn't want to live in any society where punishing or preventing it by force -- that is, viewing it outside the scope of protected liberty -- was accepted.