A French state attorney has called for the case against Charlie Hebdo to be dismissed, arguing that the Mohammed cartoons reprinted by the magazine denounced terrorists but not Muslims in general. The prosecutor, Anne de Fontette, defended the magazine’s right to free speech:
For a number of our citizens it is a lively reflection of the principle of press freedom in a democratic society which can never be a theocracy.
Testifying in support of Charlie Hebdo yesterday, Moroccan journalist Mohamed Sifaoui showed the court an example of the flag of Saudi Arabia, with verses from the Koran accompanied by a sabre, to demonstrate that the turban-bomb cartoon was not the first image to associate Islam with violence. I hope someone bought Mr Sifaoui a drink afterwards.
As MediaWatchWatch comments:
It seems that the entire French establishment, politicians, press, and judiciary, is standing up for Charlie Hebdo on this one. We are looking forward to a decisive and unambiguous rejection of this silly case on March 15.
Which inevitably leave you wondering what our establishment would do in similar circumstances. Of course, it would be a theoretical debate because none of our major newspapers or magazines had the guts to print the cartoons, so the situation would never have arisen.
Perhaps, in future, we should not be so ready to throw the cheese-eating-surrender-monkeys charge at the French.
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Posted by: ramesh | 29 March 2007 at 04:21 PM