Join ARI and The Undercurrent on Wednesday, January 14, at 6:00 PM ET for a special students-only webinar with senior fellow Onkar Ghate, “Charlie Hebdo, the Danish Cartoons and Free Speech.”
The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack has brought an encouraging reaction. You can see it on the streets of Paris and other cities. Last week, tens of thousands of people joined vigils in solidarity for the murdered journalists. Upwards of a million Parisians took the streets on Sunday. “Je Suis Charlie” read the signs. Online the corresponding hashtag has swept across social media. Some news outlets — more than I expected — have reprinted Charlie Hebdo cartoons. But what's more, the outlets that have refused to publish the images (or pixelated them) have been deservedly bashed. They shame themselves by cowering.
Following the massacre of journalists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, the intimidation of Sony Pictures over The Interview, and a growing climate of self-censorship, ARI will host a panel discussion on the freedom of speech with Flemming Rose.
For too long the right to free speech has been undermined by the weak and apologetic intellectual and political leaders of the West — leaders who are more concerned about not offending the assailants than they are about standing up for the victims and their right to speak their minds. And for too long we have seen the results of that appeasement in an endless series of shocking headlines. The senseless slaughter at Charlie Hebdo is just the latest in a long list of death threats and attacks going all the way back to 1989 with the fatwa on Salman Rushdie.
Following the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, Onkar Ghate, senior fellow at ARI, writes that “When foreign governments, religious leaders and their faithful followers threaten and murder individuals for daring to speak, anyone who values his own life and freedom must stand with, and speak for, the victims.”
Is there a climate of self-censorship regarding Islam? Has fear led artists and writers to avoid discussion and criticism of Islam? So it seemed to the journalists at Jyllands-Posten, Denmark’s largest daily paper, in the fall of 2005.
Monday, November 24, marks a deadline in the negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. A glance at where things stand tells you just how well Iran has gamed the process. The pattern: Iran has set the terms and pocketed concessions.
Hernando de Soto’s essay, “The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism,” is worth reading chiefly because of the data it surfaces on the scale of systemic political-economic corruption in the Arab world. One illustrative example is the 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who immolated himself, after the umpteenth shakedown by government inspectors.
The Islamic State, the jihadist force rampaging in Iraq and Syria, has succeeded in recruiting fighters because — wait for it — there’s no peace between Israel and the Palestinians. So claims the U.S. Secretary of State, John Kerry.
