2016, when Islamic terrorism was still the big bad and western media was praising France for their anti-terror re-education program. this shit sounds a lot creepier than vocational training, too. nothing from Adrian Zenz about France though, curious!
I do think the French conflict with political Islam (which has become a regular occurrence there, unlike in, say, Britain or Germany or the US) stems from an aggressive French secular nationalism, an attempt to quite thoroughly impose the French worldview on its immigrants. The quintessential expression of which is French beach resorts banning modest attire. I'm for nudism - but forcing people to UNcover when they don't want to is absurd.
The media describes this beheading as an attack on free speech, but this was a teacher showing deliberately offensive cartoons at a middle school, which understandably offends some parents. This is a kind of free speech fundamentalism - adding deliberately offensive material to the curriculum. If someone caricatures Mohammed - that's their right, not a particularly useful activity, but it's a basic right to draw whatever you want. Publishing deliberately provocative caricatures is a statement in defense of the freedom of speech, which is admirable in one way, but in another way it's doing so at the expense of the vulnerable and marginalized members of society. Does Charlie Hebdo republish materials from Wikileaks? Julian Assange is much more the hero of free speech than Charlie Hebdo.
Bringing those deliberately offensive cartoons into a middle school classroom is awful, awful judgment. It's a potential attack on the dignity of Muslims, who're treated in France just about how Blacks are treated in America. The teacher offered the Muslim students to look away, etc., but that's just another way of excluding them. There's a million other ways to talk about the freedom of speech or offensive material without bringing in materials that have gotten people killed before - of course people will be mad when they feel like their kids are being shown insults targeted at them as if that's alright and good. Save that kind of stuff for a university or a graduate course.
Of course the murder is awful and it's unsurprising that the killer's half-sister had joined IS - the strongest predictor of terrorist participation is having close friends/family do so. But this is the result of free speech fundamentalism going up against Islamic fundamentalism.
For us, Muslims are brothers and sisters. There's zero reason to mock or insult their traditions, however much they may seem alien to us. Communism is about the whole of humanity achieving its hopes and dreams without greater or lesser peoples, not about imposing one view of things on everyone.
It's kinda like if South Park was a country.
What kind of molly coddling nonsense is this. YES there is a reason to insult their traditions, of course there is. And it is precisely BECAUSE it offends. It is important in a free society to be able to challenge ideas about what is held as unchallangeable. And the deification and idolatry of Muhammad by Muslims is one of those ideas that are open to challenge, and the individual hurt feelings of Muslims surrounding that fact is of no more importance than the screeches of Christians when Piss Christ is exhibited or when Life Of Brian was released. Especially because the importance of challenging the sacrosanct nature of Muhammad is highlighted whenever it is done. Kurt Westergaard may be a dick, but he's a dick whose family lives in fear and whose grandchildren are hunted in their own homes by literal axe wielding psychopaths.
And I don't know whether it is appropriate to teach kids in middle school about transgressive art and the nature of blasphemy, but I sure as shit know that the punishment for badly planning a curriculum shouldn't be fucking murder.
Edit:
None of the muslim kids in attendance were in danger because their teacher showed them a work of blasphemy. The only one sticking their neck out is the one exhibiting the work, and it is very disingenous to imply that the teacher is endangering his students. Further, the idea of offensive material is best expressed with something that is actually offensive.
Perhaps I've expressed myself unclearly, because you're mostly talking past me.
I've stated outright that blasphemy and offensive art are a fundamental right. Of course murder is wrong, including in this case. I'm juxtaposing Islamic fundamentalism with free speech fundamentalism because I see that as the ideological source of the conflict here, but obviously a violent fundamentalism is worse than a non-violent one.
That's not what I was saying. The cartoons had gotten violent reactions before - and he went ahead and showed them to school kids. Parents are protective of their kids more so than they are of themselves. He was the one in the most danger, obviously.
Good, you don't know, because that's precisely the question I'm raising. How would you feel if your kid's teacher brought in racist New York Post cartoons, while you yourself feel oppressed by the same racism every day? The parent in the French case called for the teacher to be fired - an overreaction, but the animus behind it I think is understandable. You're an oppressed minority, and your school decides to insult your identity to your kids on top of it.
But that's all the parent did - get angry. Then a fundamentalist shit-for-brains youth heard about the story and snapped. If such fundamentalists didn't exist, then you could insult people's identities to their children all day long. But they do - they're part of the same world system, where France helped screw up the Middle East, armed militias in Libya, Syria, and Mali in recent years, and then benefited from the cheap labor of resulting migrants/refugees.
This sentence in particular sounds like free speech fundamentalism to me - insulting people for the sake of insulting people. When you do so against people who're already downtrodden, you're preparing grounds either for increased violence against them or for them to lash out with violence at you.
When it comes to dismantling oppressive, backward traditions - insults can be a healthy part of that. But I see zero utility in attacking an image or idea that someone considers holy. Again, you should have the right to do so. But if you bring your insults to someone's home, to someone's child - then you're just an asshole backing someone into a corner because you believe in insults with the same fervor that they believe in their religion.
Leftist apologia for Islamic violence is fucking pathetic.
There's nothing Islamic about the violence of Islamist fundamentalists, which I'm not apologizing for. I'm pointing out that France is poking the hornet's nest of those fundamentalists with its own fundamentalist stick and that it should perhaps stop.
The "what was she wearing?" of terrorist apologia.
Yes, Western imperialist states profiting off the cheap labor of the refugees they create and then insulting their identities are exactly like rape victims.
Violent Islamist fundamentalists are a scourge, but they're not the most powerful or aggressive entity in this situation.