Free Speech in the Internet Age

Charlie Hebdo is back. The Huffington Post reports:

“The cover shows the Prophet Muhammad holding a “Je Suis Charlie” sign with the caption, “All is forgiven.” The newspaper said that it will print over 1 million copies this week, with financial help from Google, Le Monde and other organizations. It usually prints around 60,000.”

Imagine that: 60,000 went to 10 million! As Stephen Fry points out:

“Had the brothers stayed their bloody hands it would have been 60,000 at the very most. Mohammed must be very cross indeed that his two cretinous representatives have spread the ‘insults’ so unimaginably far and wide.”

Of course, not all of these new found “supporters” of Charlie Hebdo are exactly saints or angels. Daniel Wickham fired off tweets on “some of the staunch defenders of the free press attending the solidarity rally in Paris”. His barbs list included King Abdullah of Jordan, Turkey’s PM (“which imprisons more journalists than any other country in the world”), the Foreign Minister of Bahrain (“2nd biggest jailer of journos in the world per capita (they also torture them)”), and Ireland’s PM Enda Kenny (“where "blasphemy" is considered a criminal offense”).

No wonder then that the folks at Charlie Hebdo were not exactly appreciative of the celebrities who claimed to now support them:

“We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth, and Putin,” one of the magazine’s most prominent artists, the Dutchman Bernard Holtrop, told the Dutch daily Volkskrant amid the outpouring of support after last week’s killings. “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

Olivier Tonneau points out the errors the English speaking world makes when it comes to matters related to the French:

“Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience.”

After all, he wrote:

“We are the country of Voltaire and Diderot: religion is fair game. Atheists can point out its ridicules, and believers have to learn to take a joke and a pun. They are welcome to drown us in return with sermons about the superficiality of our materialistic, hedonistic lifestyles. I like it that way.”

Boy, did Salman Rushdie become the poster child for free speech in the wrong era! Yet another reminder of how different the pre-Internet world used to be.