NY Times: On the same day that the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo immediately sold out an initial run of five million copies of its latest issue—which featured a cover image of the prophet Muhammad—French police arrested the comedian and activist Dieudonné M’bala M’bala for writing on his Facebook page, “Je suis Charlie Coulibaly.” Dieudonné was charged with “incitement of terrorism,” for appearing to offer a gesture of solidarity with Amedy Coulibaly, the Islamist gunman who murdered four hostages in a kosher grocery store in Paris last Friday, apparently in concert with the terrorists who carried out the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s offices two days earlier.
The Facebook post was a shrewd move by Dieudonné. As I have written for this site before, the comedian has played a complex cat-and-mouse game with the French state for years, earning himself a raft of trials and half a dozen convictions for inciting racial hatred while, at the same time, building a considerable following, particularly among disaffected young people of North African and African origin. His comic performances have long included jokes such as “The Germans should have finished the job in 1945.” Charlie Hebdo, for its part, has survived forty-eight trials over the past twenty-two years, according to Le Monde, and has lost a total of nine times, generally for “injure”—personal defamation—rather than hate speech, after, for instance, describing a journalist as “a complete and utter cretin” and a right-wing politician as “the bitch of Buchenwald.” But attempts to punish the publication for religious insults have generally failed, whether it was referring to Pope John Paul II as “un pape de merde” (a shitty pope) or publishing cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.
Categories: Acting, Answers to Anti-Islam, Behaviour, Double Standard, Europe and Australia, France, Free speach, Free Speech, Freedom