Death in Paris and the revolution in Europe

Coming back from my holiday the taxi driver told me at 3 a.m. about the murders of twelve people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris because the magazine published a couple of years ago a cartoon of Mohamed.

This morning I see that a propos of the cartoons, someone in the Guardian has opined: 

"Observant Muslims anywhere would be angered by such images... Islam is not unique. Judaism forbids the use of “graven images”

So far, so laughably predictable, I thought. 

Someone on Facebook has equally predictably posted a wiki link to Anders Brevik, reminding us that it's not only Islam which commits atrocities and someone else a comment that the professionalism of the two men points to them being a false flag French SAS style attack. Sky News pointed out that these people aren't real followers of Islam. 

The freedom to cause offence is sacred and we are losing it. I'd like Europe to return to freedom of speech and decriminalise offensive behaviour and hate speech. I also think we should also bring to an end immigration into Europe from outside but, even if Europe does so - and it won't - hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers will continue to pour in. 200,000 people sought asylum in Germany last year, many of them from Syria. 

But life is very complicated. When I saw the cartoons in Charlie Hebdo I saw they were not innocent jeux d'esprit. The cartoons below are the ones that led to this murder and I have to say that they are very wrong.  So I found myself partly changing my mind.





This is a weak joke about copies of the Koran not being able to stop bullets. It uses the word 'merde' which means excrement to describe the Koran, though in French 'merde' is used so much that it has lost its force and means something like 'crap', not 's-t'. 

These things are wrong, even though I do not think that they should be illegal in a Christian country or in a secular country like France. That they should never have been published does not in any way ameliorate or justify murder but it does, unfortunately, explain it.  I realise that this is not a very satisfactory conclusion.

There is something infuriating about advocates of immigration and multiculturalism expressing outrage about these killings - the same people who extol the merits of diversity. They combine great dislike of conservative religion with an inordinate love for Islam, along with love for feminism and homosexual rights. Instead of getting angry with the murderers I find I am angry with Angela Merkel, Francois Hollande and David Cameron. And yet for people who want Europe to become increasingly multicultural, increasingly an ethnic and religious mosaic, Islam is the threat to their project.

This is another Charlie Hebdo cover from the past. 

The caption reads:

Muhammad Overtaken By Fundamentalists: "It's a drag being loved by a-holes."

But I wonder whether Muhammad would have disowned the murders or not. I am not sure. I do think he was probably an Islamist. I say 'probably' simply because we know nothing for sure about Muhammad - even his very existence, though supported by evidence from  Christian sources, is not certain. I suspect that the murderers may have been good Muslims in killing the journalists, though who am I to judge? 

I have recently acquired a Muslim Facebook friend who posted this.

So many toss pots will come forth and say "not in my name" -
Most Muslims will agree - inflicting punishment is the job of the state - and will not agree with the shootings /

But please don't ask me to feel sorry for those that insulted my Prophet - pbuh
And for those that pray for them - May the curse of the Prophet be upon you -/

I suspect he speaks for many, perhaps most Muslims.

One of my most intelligent Facebook friends, a libertarian and republican atheist, made this comment with which I tend to agree:

Donald Trump has been reported as having said in a "Twitter rant" that if the Charlie Hebdo journalists had been armed they'd have had a chance. This is of course true, and it's the only way they could have had a chance. It's the only way massacres could be prevented in shopping centres and the like, and it's only a matter of time before one of these happens.The choice might be between a police state, an armed society, or a society that suffers regular random large scale massacres.

Actually I am not sure what I think about gun control laws but I get cross with all those annoying people who read the Independent and who bore on about the subject with much moral superiority. They may be right or wrong but no-one in the UK seems to care anymore about freedom. They seem to now after these murders in Paris but they don't really. They still want hate speech to be illegal (and probably rude remarks about homosexual marriage too) -  and all the rest of the curbs on freedom.

We must demand free speech but Islam does not brook offending God and never will. Islam is a warlike creed. We are at the limits of the liberal imagination. They were always fairly narrow. 

Things were easier, perhaps, when the law of blasphemy protected the Christian God from insult, as it did in England and Wales until Tony Blair's government abolished the offence. There is no going back to that. I wish it were just France that has a problem (and things are worse in France than elsewhere) but Western Europe has the problem - because of a small minority of Muslims. 

I don't think this problem has a solution.

If you know of one please tell me.