Here is a segment of Gerard Biard on Meet the Press.

The chief editor of Charlie Hebdo is defending the magazine’s controversial depictions of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, saying it skewers religious figures only when faith gets “entangled” in the political world.

“We do not attack religion, but we do when it gets involved in politics,” Gerard Biard said in an interview with Chuck Todd broadcast on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday. [Read more…]

The new ed-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo was on Meet the Press this morning. Mediaite transcribed a bit:

Meet the Press host Chuck Todd asked Charlie Hebdo’s new editor-in-chief Gerard Briard Sunday morning what he made of the decision of many American news outlets, including NBC News, to blur the cover of this week’s issue, which featured a caricature of the Islamic prophet Muhammed…

“Écoutez, we cannot blame newspapers that already suffer much difficulty in getting published and distributed in totalitarian regimes for not publishing a cartoon that could get them at best jail, at worst death,” he said. [Read more…]

Jane Harley explains at Comment is Free that Oxford University Press hasn’t banned pigs, it just…doesn’t want its education authors to mention them. (Scholars are entirely free to mention them, she says. Oh, whew.)

Given that our editorial guidelines that reference pigs and pork have been in place for as long as I can remember, little did I imagine that they would attract international headlines claiming that the Oxford University Press had banned sausages. To clarify, OUP does not have a blanket ban on pork products in its titles, and we do still publish books about pigs. Although there have been no recent changes to our guidance on this topic, these articles highlighted the fine balance needed when considering students’ cultural and learning needs.

[Read more…]

Nick linked to a piece by Mehdi Hasan so I just had to go read the whole thing. I do not like it. I never do like what Mehdi Hasan writes or says.

He frames this as an open letter to “Dear liberal pundit” – which is annoying. Should we reply “Dear conservative Muslim pundit”? Or should we play at being grown-ups.

The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”. [Read more…]

Nick Cohen too is unimpressed by the pope’s assertion that we can’t insult religion. He’s also unimpressed by the “Charlie Hebdo had it coming” crowd.

After the Paris attacks, the novelist Will Self claimed moral equivalence. Those who say “freedom of speech is an absolute right” – no one does, incidentally – have “a religious point of view”. Mehdi Hasan, political director of the Huffington Post, agreed that freedom was fanaticism. He condemned “the hypocrisy of free-speech fundamentalists” and cited a thought experiment of an Oxford philosopher called Brian Klug. If an Islamist had joined the free speech rallies in Paris and applauded the murderers, Klug mused on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, he “would have been lucky to get away with his life”.

And yet, and yet – when’s the last time journalists shot up the office of some Islamists? Hmm? That would be never, wouldn’t it. Imagining such a scenario is not quite the same thing as actually being able to point to one, or fifty.

Think before you go along with the pope’s argument that violence is the “normal” response to insults to family honour. Once the law accepted it was. A husband could beat a wife, who failed to stroke his ego and confirm his superiority and the police would dismiss the case as a “domestic”. A man could kill a woman who had betrayed his honour and the courts would dismiss it as a crime of passion.

We don’t live there any more. And you know what? We don’t want to.

 

And today in Niger – the protests against Charlie Hebdo continue, with extra added church-burning.

At least two churches have been set on fire in the capital of Niger amid fresh protests against French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

Saturday’s protests began outside Niamey’s grand mosque with police using tear gas a day after at least four were killed in the second city of Zinder.

The French embassy has warned its citizens to stay indoors.

[Read more…]