08 January, 2015

Je suis Charlie (2)

By the way I'm not sure I want to hear too much from the French about freedom of speech.

If Charlie Hebdo, instead of printing cartoons about Mohammed, had said that fewer than 6 million Jews died in the holocaust, the magazine could have been closed and the journalists imprisoned. Equally if it had conducted a personal campaign against the President. The penalty for saying that the Turks didn't commit genocide over the Armenians during WW1? €45,000 fine and a year in prison.

A couple of years ago a French wine writer who described Beaujolais as a vin de merde was prosecuted for criminal libel.

Free speech should mean just that.

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