A Dime a Dozen Blog

Translation: AMSH - Association of Muslims with a Sense of Humour. Allah is Funny. Infidellllllls!

One of the few papers in France to publish the Mohammad cartoons is in trouble again.  They were able to weather the Mohammad thing without firing anyone, but this time, maybe not so much.

In an editorial by a man named Bob Siné in Charlie Hebdo, President Sarkozy’s son Jean was attacked as was his Jewish girlfriend.  The mainstream French press is cried (probably justly) anti-semitism and demanded that Siné be sacked.  Which he was.  Now on a twist to the usual story, Siné is suing his former newspaper for defamation.

The IHT has a good piece on this in today’s paper:

Several political bloggers have asked why Val, in the name of free speech and solidarity with a Danish newspaper under fire, bravely republished cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, but chose to draw the line at Siné’s caricaturing of the purported relationship between Jews, money and the opportunism of a young Sarkozy with a nascent political career in the department of Hauts-de-Seine, near Paris.

On the other side, in a statement in Le Monde called “For Philippe Val and a Few Principles,” a panoply of intellectuals including Elie Wiesel, Claude Lanzmann, Robert Badinter and Bernard-Henri Lévy declared that “once again, once too often, Siné has crossed the line between humor and insult, caricature and hatred.”

Lévy, in an eloquent earlier front-page commentary in the same newspaper, drew out the ugly French history – from 19th-century anti-Semitic tracts about the money-grubbing Jews through the Dreyfus affair to modern-day innuendo about President Sarkozy’s partly Jewish heritage – that, in his view, makes Siné poisonous to the point of unacceptability.

“We have not made too much of the “Siné Affair,”‘ Lévy concluded. He compared it to what Michel Foucault called a “secretion of time” – a small thing that condenses “the spirit and malaise of an epoch.”

Let’s be clear on three things. Siné clearly nurses some vile views about Jews. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as refracted in France through a growing Muslim population and virulent anti-Zionism among leftists, has produced new forms of anti-Semitism. There are murmurings in a Catholic-right French establishment about Sarkozy’s rise and the Jewish backgrounds of several people close to him.

These are not, however, sufficient reasons for turning Siné into a martyr by making too much of his bad joke. I’m with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the American jurist who wrote in 1919 that: “I think we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”

I know, American First Amendment freedoms are distinct from French practice. Here, for example, denying the Holocaust is a crime. But I remain a free-speech absolutist. In that spirit, I defended the publication of the Prophet Muhammad cartoons. Curtailing speech is generally far more dangerous than allowing even vile views to be aired, not least by a cantankerous has-been like Siné.

Where should one stand on this?  People should be able to say what they want, and giving leave to print the Mohammad cartoons, but not equally offensive cartoons about Jews is hypocritical.  Then again, the paper is a private company – and it should have the right to hire and fire any of its workers.

My first inclination is to acknowledge that the paper is well within its rights to fire the man – but it hurts the cause of free speech by doing so.  I’m open to having my mind changed on this though.