09 November 2011

A French Lesson in Free Speech

.... But the right to blaspheme is not only under frontal assault. Writing about the attack on Charlie's offices, Bruce Crumley, Paris bureau chief for Time magazine, did nothing to hide his contempt—not for the attackers, but for the magazine itself.

.... Such reactions cause one to wonder whether the deeper threat to free speech comes not from its avowed enemies but from its supposed practitioners.

That itself is an old story in the West, something the American political thinker Paul Berman, writing about the pre-World War II indulgence of French Socialists for the Nazi regime, has called "the liberalism of denial." Others might simply call it cowardice. [The Wall Street Journal] Read more