Rex Murphy on free speech
All over the Internet there are whole mobs holding up little signs: “I am Charlie Hebdo,” “We are Charlie Hebdo.” The idea, I presume, is to broadcast their commitment to the Western idea of freedom of speech and the press. Let’s put it plainly: The solidarity would have been a lot more impressive, more persuasive, some time before this week’s mass butchery.
Indeed, at our universities, newspapers and broadcasters, we have seen an ever-shrinking defence of free speech, a timid reluctance to take on those who claim special privilege to shut down those they simply don’t like. The great institutions of the West, the press and the universities, have been at best complicit and at worst cowardly when it comes up to defending freedom of speech — not from threats of Islamist fanatics with guns, but in much less demanding circumstances.
He talks in greater detail about some of the speakers disinvited from campuses for their lack of political correctness. This whole #JeSuisCharlie thing reminds me again of this cartoon on hashtag activism that sprang up after some of Boko Haram's activities in Nigeria (which is, unsurprisingly still going on - most recently with an estimated 2000 dead in a single attack).