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First I find it really offensive that you bring that point up. Because I think you are blaming the victims. They had every right to publish what they did.

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.

>Because I think you are blaming the victims.

Didn't you read the disclaimer?

>Religious nutjobs deserve every bit of mockery and disrespect.

What? You are out of your mind dude.

No. I am very serious. Religious fundamentalists should be mocked and ridiculed. I find it very offensive that you would suggest otherwise. See? Different things can be really offensive to different people. Religious people don't have the monopoly on being offended nor on truth. If I turn the TV on, I will hear many offensive things. But first, I get over it. And second I don't claim that it should be illegal to express their view. Yet you do. You are out of your mind.

>Religious fundamentalists should be mocked and ridiculed.

You are saying that a group of people with different beliefs than yours should be (_SHOULD_, as in, "we as a society have to") mocked and ridiculed?

You are a sick person, dude; not much different than the guys that made the news.

You are interpreting. That's on you. An enlightened society should aim to peacefully put aside religious fundamentalism. That's obviously a personal opinion as everyone can have a different idea of what's enlightened. People have a liberty of conscience and I respect that, if some people embrace fundamentalism, it saddens me but it's within their rights, as it's my right to find it ridiculous. I don't go and shoot them, I don't condone violence and I don't want them banned in the limits of hate speech. If some cartoonists decide to draw to mock and ridicule, good for them, they have every right to do so. I was not a reader of Charlie Hebdo. You find some of their drawing distastful too? So what?

You don't have a right not to be offended, not to be exposed to distasteful content. People that want satire banned sure can't call themselves moderates.

> You are a sick person, dude; not much different than the guys that made the news.

Now you are being unreasonnable. It's so despicable that you can draw that parallel. You are way out of line. When you suggests that maybe these cartoons shouldn't be legal. YOU are the one siding with terrorists.

There's absolutely nothing illegal in the U.S. about insulting or disparaging black people, or members of any racial, ethnic, or religious group, including by slurs or caricatures.

Apparently there is... [1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_excep...

Which of those categories are you thinking of?

Fighting words and offensive speech.

Those are extremely narrow categories. You pretty much have to scream obscenities in someone's face and get punched for it right after for those categories to apply to something you said.

Yes, the fighting words doctrine requires that the fighting words be communicated in person to a particular person (not in a newspaper).

> I honestly want to know how is it allowed for someone to humiliate and make fun of something that is sacred to other people/culture. 'Free speech' I know, but when does someone's right to express themselves ends?

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.

The legal line, I think, is once a speaker goes beyond insults and causes demonstrable harm to another person. So defamation crosses the line. Causing a person to feel offended does not.

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.

> I honestly want to know how is it allowed for someone to humiliate and make fun of something that is sacred to other people/culture.

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.

Thanks for the explanation and the examples. I'm currently reading about hate speech cases and laws, definitely learning a lot. Apparently, even hate speech is protected as long as it is not thought to be the cause for an 'imminent danger'. Do you think that a terrorist threat could (or should) classify as an 'imminent danger' when it escalates to situations like these?

Terroristic threats are already illegal:

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

Again, though, that's things similar to "I'm going to bomb your store" or "I have placed a hidden explosive near your offices" or similar; things that, even if they're false, cause other people to have to take them seriously and waste time and resources.

In short, a terroristic threat doesn't insult someone, it makes that person think some specific terroristic action is going to be performed in the immediate future. It's not really that fine of a line. I'm fully in favor of those threats being illegal.

In short:

Legal: "[Those people] are stupid and smell bad."

Legal: "[Those people] shouldn't live around here."

Still Legal: "If [those people] don't move, bad things will happen."

Yes, Legal: "I have a gun. [Those people] shouldn't mess with me. I have ever so many firearms. I love to shoot, especially [those people]."

Legal: "It is time for [our people] to kill [those people]."

Not Legal: "Tonight, we all move in on [those people] and kill them."

Not Legal: "There is a bomb in the [Those People] Recreational Center."

The line isn't insults. It isn't even threats as such. It's threats of immediate violence.

About the terrorist threats, I was referring to, for example, if a terrorist group says "we are going to do ... if you publish that thing" (like what already happened), wouldn't that qualify as 'immediate violence' in order to stop the publication? or does the immediate violence threat has to be something implicit within the published message.

Btw, thanks, those examples are awesome.

> I was referring to, for example, if a terrorist group says "we are going to do ... if you publish that thing" (like what already happened), wouldn't that qualify as 'immediate violence' in order to stop the publication?

If they made a specific and credible threat to cause death, bodily harm, or serious property damage if someone published something, yes, I think that would qualify as an illegal terroristic threat under the law.

http://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federal...

Note that threatening to picket or boycott or otherwise protest isn't a terroristic threat. The threat has to be about something in the specific list I mentioned above.

I think the parent commenter's question was whether it would be illegal to publish something that was the subject of a credible terrorist threat, not to make a credible terrorist threat. You addressed whether people are allowed to make threats (no) rather than whether the government can use the threats as a reason to prevent the thing that is the target of the threats (generally also no).

> I think the parent commenter's question was whether it would be illegal to publish something that was the subject of a credible terrorist threat, not to make a credible terrorist threat.

Oh. Sorry. I guess I didn't even consider that, because it would be obvious to me: Yes, of course you can publish something that was the subject of a threat. That isn't even mildly controversial here; in fact, not publishing something because you were threatened would be seen as rank cowardice. Look at what happened to Sony for what was ultimately a brief delay in releasing The Interview.

> You addressed whether people are allowed to make threats (no) rather than whether the government can use the threats as a reason to prevent the thing that is the target of the threats (generally also no).

Right. Exactly.

(No snark intended), just google it. For example the Wikipedia page for free speech in the US is pretty detailed, and covers a lot of the legislation regarding it.

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

I see, when it comes down to the jurisdiction of the US the exceptions are clear enough. I see that Charlie Hebdo would have been in a lot of legal trouble if they were based on the US then. I don't know why I've tought that the law would be very similar in most of the world but it isn't, or apparently in France they were allowed to stay in business (although for what I've been reading they had been fined a few times regarding issues that violate the scope of freedom of speech).

The U.S. legal system is known as more tolerant of offensive speech than any European jurisdiction. I'm not quite sure where you're getting the inference that such speech is less protected in the U.S. than in France.

Because they've been operating for such a long time. If it were illegal they would have shut it down already.

> I see that Charlie Hebdo would have been in a lot of legal trouble if they were based on the US then.

I don't. Can you explain, please? I'm honestly interested in how you think American free speech law works.

Well, for what I've read in the past hour or so, apparently free speech does not apply when the subject is of an offensive matter, but to be clear I have no idea where to draw the line.

Do you have any better insight?

Just to consolidate our discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8854880

I think maybe he meant from the perspective of muslims. That answer is here :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27Asma%27_bint_Marwan

This is what makes this so difficult : muslims killing because of negative opinions on islam is something that is sanctioned by the religion, and that was practiced for over 15 centuries now.

A very uncomfortable question is what muslim children in the west are taught on this question.

I'm sure this will get downvoted, but it's simply the truth.

IIRC there are a lot more different sects of Islam then there are/have ever been of Christianity. Painting over a billion people with that broad a brush seems disingenuous to say the least.

There are no sects of islam that don't accept the prophet's actions as holy and unconditionally right. There are only differences about what those actions were, famously whether he appointed Ali as caliph or not (that's the difference between sunni and shi'a islam). All schools except one are part of all sects, all sects share all hadith, just not all hadith interpretations (they, and their many addendums and rewritten versions -very roughly- correspond to what is meant by a "school"). This is part of the islamic canon, which as I said is shared by all sects. Frankly, if this isn't in a sect, nobody would call them an islamic sect, but something else (example : the Baha'i, which originate from within islam, but nobody seriously considers muslims, merely because they disagree that the actions of the prophet were the "final" authority on morality. Their claim is that moral authority is to be found in any number of individuals, and that muhammad's teachings (especially the more insane ones) can and have been overridden. For this, there is a standing death penalty for any Baha'i that gets caught in >20 muslim countries. This mostly to illustrate that the vast majority of muslims accept the Bint Marwan story as moral authority, and that dozens of muslim countries consider it reasonable to execute people for not doing so).

I would also like to point out that killing for insults to islam is quite popular amongst muslims, even in the west. And frankly, we can't realistically tolerate even 1% of them having this opinion (because it'll lead to events like the Hebdo ones).

But even in general you're wrong "in practice". There are 2 islamic sects worth mentioning : sunni islam (~82%) and twelver shi'a (~13%). Yes the remainder has a million sects but, they're outlawed and persecuted in islamic nations, and their numbers are tiny.

Furthermore, given that Christianity is both older and much richer in spread (meaning it's spread in more varied cultures), much larger number of adherents, and variety (many Christian sects in single locations), so I'd be extremely surprised if there were more offshoots of islam (unlike islam, Christianity seems to leave older cultures mostly intact. Comparing South America with Indonesia, for example. In Indonesia, the old culture is completely erased. This makes regional branches of Christianity have their own identity, and leads to offshoots, whereas the violent repression that islam historically was spread by did not exactly promote diversity)

I don't know why you keep pasting that Wikipedia link. It even says that this story is false and fabricated.