Publishing offensive content about the Prophet

[Moll Flanders]

Drawing the prophet: Islam’s hidden history of Muhammad images | World news | The Observer

There has been a lot of fascinating articles recently and apparently there has been a lot of history, going back seven centuries, of drawing the Prophet.

Why Islam forbids images of Mohammed - CNN.com

I think that some of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons do seem racist but that is my personal view. I don't see why the cartoons have to be so ugly and insulting especially when there are obvious tensions in French society with the popularity of FN.

 

[KLS52]

It's interesting. I can be very sensitive to jokes about my religion and even express said sensitivity, but at the same time I'd rather remove myself from a situation where insensitive remarks are being made than ask someone to censor themselves. So that would mean not reading a newspaper article or even posts on a particular forum.

For me, personally, I do not understand the need or desire for anyone to want to make ridiculing or offensive remarks about a particular group of people or an individual just because I don't understand or agree with them.

 

[Blobbenstein]

If a religion has a big effect on society then I think is can be ok to make jokes about it. People need to express themselves in all sorts of ways about important issues, and humour is one of them.
What I am against is abusive trolling, as I think that damages debate, and so damages freedom of speech...trolling can be a form of censorship, I think.

 

[Blobbenstein]

of course, even jokes that are ok, may offend someone......this is why it is important to not abuse freedom of speech just to out and out troll....trolling just leads to a shutting down of expression, which would shut down good jokes as well...


gentle trolling may add to debate, or just be funny to some.....I've see fairly gentle trolling on forms, and it can stimulate debate...so it's not all black and white.

 

[ledboots]

What should have happened in this situation is this magazine should have been shut down years ago. In New Zealand for example, such a magazine would not be allowed because we have a Race Relations Commission which does not allow it. Our government gets a lot wrong but at least it recognises that there are over 200 different ethnicities living in NZ and it is in everyone's interests to live in relative peace.

But the government putting its jackboot on the neck of a publication and shutting it down for content is a very frightening precedent. It could lead down a slippery slope of closing down any publications the government doesn't approve of.

I understand that we have a slightly different standard of freedom of speech here in the US than in many other countries.

 

[yakherder]

Oh, and the Koran doesn't forbid images of the prophet. They just don't like the infidel version of it, though their disapproval doesn't stop them from putting out anti semitic satire.

The Koran does not forbid images of the Prophet

 

[Freesia]

But the government putting its jackboot on the neck of a publication and shutting it down for content is a very frightening precedent. It could lead down a slippery slope of closing down any publications the government doesn't approve of.

I understand that we have a slightly different standard of freedom of speech here in the US than in many other countries.

Would you call New Zealand's Race Relations Commissions a jackboot though, even though it has been an important organisation in helping cut all the rough edges off the racism which occurs in a society with so many ethnicities mixed together. It puts people's human rights to live without racial harassment in priority over the rights of some pseudointellectual bully who wants to be horrible to everyone via media? The pen is also a sword you know.

Did you also know that the French government tried hard to shut down the Charlie Hebdo magazine but they could not get the legislation through to allow them to do so. They also viewed the magazine to be toxic for their multicultural society.

 

[Freesia]

Also, yes the images of the Prophet were really horrible. I have seen people on my Tumblr who were muslim who were quite upset because they kept seeing them in their feed and they were asking people to not post them at all....

But I am not myself a Muslim. The images that offended me personally the most were the ones about African people and Indian people. Also the images which made fun of shooting massacres, kidnapping and rape, and people with medical diseases.

 

[Calliegirl]

Up until the shooting happened I had never even heard of Charles Hebdo and never seen the cartoons. I looked at what I could find on the internet and it looks like it's all calling out the various groups on their hypocrisy, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Obviously, I haven't seen everything they've done, but I didn't see anything making fun of massacres, rape, diseases, etc, but I did see where they called out and mocked those who are doing those things or support them. I actually didn't see anything about disease. Is this the cover you were referring to? It has absolutely nothing to do with disease.

 

[ledboots]

Up until the shooting happened I had never even heard of Charles Hebdo and never seen the cartoons. I looked at what I could find on the internet and it looks like it's all calling out the various groups on their hypocrisy, racism, sexism, and homophobia. Obviously, I haven't seen everything they've done, but I didn't see anything making fun of massacres, rape, diseases, etc, but I did see where they called out and mocked those who are doing those things or support them. I actually didn't see anything about disease. Is this the cover you were referring to? It has absolutely nothing to do with disease.

Like you, I had not heard of the magazine or its cartoons before the attack. I am not interested in mean-spirited kinds of humor, so I don't know much about these.

I'm against the American government messing with the media content here, I understand that conditions and laws differ throughout the world.

I'm sorry about the jackboot comment @Freesia.

 

[Freesia]

Calliegirl, the one about diseases is this one here, which

https://31.media.tumblr.com/33e66f08e21126552f82732d3332d3aa/tumblr_inline_nhtxlrCCau1qzo8rg.jpg

1) Denigrates Chernobyl victims
2) Suggests the poor (and in many cases of colour) people in a poor area of Paris is made up of single mothers each with 36 fathers
3) Ridicules Bangladeshi people with leprosy and also draws them in a Vaudeville blackface style with oversized lips and dazed facial expressions.

How they manage to do this all in just 3 frames I dont know, but they did.

 

[Freesia]

Making fun of rapes: their cartoon about the "Boko Haram Sex Slaves" as they charmingly put it, also saying they were "asking for welfare checks". Considering the fact that many of the girls and women were teenagers, and were raped and some of which were murdered, why draw them like this?

http://negronews.fr/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CHARLIE-HEBDO.jpg

 

[Freesia]

Making fun of a massacre: a number of Egyptian government protesters were killed in clashes in 2013, and Charlie Hebdo commemorated the occasion with this cartoon: a

http://media.meltybuzz.fr/article-1921485-ajust_930/charlie-hebdo-s-est-deja-attire-les-foudres.jpg

and there are more cartoons which are pretty questionable at best.

 

[Freesia]

So, while I am sad that this has occured, and I am starting to feel uncomfortable with even talking about this, because no matter what those journalists did in their life, I feel that it is in many ways not good to criticise them as people, as they have lost their lives.

 

[Blobbenstein]

So, while I am sad that this has occured, and I am starting to feel uncomfortable with even talking about this, because no matter what those journalists did in their life, I feel that it is in many ways not good to criticise them as people, as they have lost their lives.

yes, I keep waking up each morning, recently, and think 'those guys actually lost their lives'.
I am quite often closer to reality when I have just woken up.

 

[Blobbenstein]

I think we shouldn't be quick to judge the Hebdo magazine, as for most of us it is another culture, and language. The covers are usually about recent news, within the political world of France, and are designed to be provoking.....I really don't know what is inside these magazines.

Here is something about the Boko Haram one
What was the context of Charlie Hebdo's cartoon depicting Boko Haram sex slaves as welfare queens? - Quora
although I don't quite understand it.

I can only confirm what Jean-Baptiste Froment and Stephen Reed's answers have been saying: it's easy now for non-French observers to imagine Charlie Hebdo as a right wing, racist, anti immigrant publication because of the fact that they have only seen covers about fundamentalist Islam.

The reality is, Charlie Hebdo is a far left, pro-immigrant publication, of which many contributors have been members of anti-racist organizations.

As the other answers have mentioned, this cover is simply the combination of two news stories to make a provocative joke. This is a very common occurrence in Charlie Hebdo front pages.

This cover is mixing two unrelated elements which made the news at about the same time:
- Boko Haram victims likely to end up sex slaves in Nigeria
- Decrease of French welfare allocations

 

[das_nut]

I don't see how society gains a net benefit from tight restrictions on speech.

 

[Spang]

I don't see how society gains a net benefit from tight restrictions on speech.

We shouldn't restrict such bigoted filth, but we also shouldn't be embracing it, which far too many people are doing.

 

[Freesia]

This cover is mixing two unrelated elements which made the news at about the same time:
- Boko Haram victims likely to end up sex slaves in Nigeria
- Decrease of French welfare allocations

But why, and what have hundreds of innocent girls being raped and murdered got to do with welfare checks? It is strange to put those two stories together and you have to question the mentality behind it.

 

[Freesia]

Also, I have seen posts around by French people saying that they object to the magazine. The first article I saw on this saying "Je ne suis pas Charlie" was by a French-African woman who was very unhappy with the magazine. And i have also seen some French-European people objecting to the cartoons too.