Silenced : How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide by Marshall Paul & Shea Nina

Author:Marshall, Paul & Shea, Nina [Marshall, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Silenced
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2011-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Complainants in France and Canada initiated legal proceedings against those who republished the cartoons but were ultimately unsuccessful. In France, the Grand Mosque of Paris, joined by other Muslim organizations, launched criminal proceedings against the journal Charlie-Hebdo, which had reprinted two Danish cartoons and its own original Muhammad cartoon, and its director, Philippe Val, for “publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion.”88 According to Val’s account, French authorities encouraged Islamic groups to push for legal action to block distribution of the relevant issue, but these attempts failed. Unfazed, President Jacques Chirac recommended the services of his personal lawyer to the groups, who subsequently filed racism charges and, together with the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, reportedly pressured a reluctant Paris Grand Mosque rector, Dalil Boubakeur, to commence a suit.89

Val declared that he published the cartoons to protest the sacking of another paper’s director who had done the same.90 One notable theme of his defense was that the cartoons he published did not constitute a hate-speech crime, because they had targeted “ideas, not men” or, as he explained in the Wall Street Journal, “not believers but religion when it is used as an alibi to perpetrate terrorist acts. When religion leaves the private sphere, it becomes an ideology like any other, and must accept to be criticized with the same virulence as any other ideology. That is the very essence of democracy.”91

He received support from then–presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who had often been lampooned by the magazine, and who declared he preferred “too many caricatures to an absence of caricature.”92 On March 22, 2007, Val was acquitted. The court found no sign of a “deliberate intention of directly and gratuitously offending the Muslim community.” The judgment emphasized such specific factors as the “context” of the drawings, that Charlie-Hebdo “is a satirical paper … that no one is obliged to buy or read,” and that caricatures are by definition intended to go “beyond good taste.”93 The courts also relied on the arguments that some or all of the drawings targeted only fundamentalists, not all Muslims, and that they contributed to an ongoing public debate.94

Canada

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