January 12, 2015
Source: Shutterstock
The Week’s Most Hateful, Fateful, and Ungrateful Headlines
EXCEPT FOR THE SEVEN BILLION OF US WHO AREN”T CHARLIE HEBDO, WE ARE ALL CHARLIE HEBDO
The news story that dominated all others last week was the massacre at the Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. The attack, which wiped out much of the paper’s staff, was executed by a pair of Islamist brothers who felt compelled to defend the honor of Muhammad and Allah”neither of whom appears emotionally equipped to handle the slightest criticism without freaking the hell out and demanding that their followers murder their critics. A dozen died in the initial attack; by the time the gunmen were found and killed, 20 had died.
The Charlie Hebdo victims join the familiar litany of those murdered for speaking against Islam such as Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, but they appear to be getting extra sympathy due to the fact that Charlie was an aggressively left-wing publication. Sure, there are the predictably West-hating dimwitted stalwarts who are blaming the attack on historical karma or “hate speech” and are issuing panicked, dire warnings about the potential rise of the “extreme right” and “reactionary fascists.”
But the mantra “Je suis Charlie“ erupted across the globe, with even those who”d typically rail against “Islamophobia” suddenly identifying with the victims. For the first time in memory”naturally, when some of their own got killed”the liberal masses found free speech to be more important than political correctness.
But despite all the chest-thumping about “free speech,” lost in the shuffle were all the victims of French speech laws such as Brigitte Bardot, John Galliano, and European Parliament member Bruno Gollnisch, who in 2007 was slapped with a huge fine merely for suggesting that historians have a right to discuss the facts of the Holocaust.
Amid all the rallies and vigils and candle-burning, there was scant mention that back in 1995, the ostensibly freedom-loving Charlie Hebdo urged that the National Front party should be banned. One heard nary a whisper about the fact that in 2008, Charlie Hebdo fired one of its own columnists for the extraordinarily mild and statistically accurate intimation that marrying a Jewish woman may ease one’s path toward success.
France has a hate-speech law that provides for fines and imprisonment of anyone who uses speech to “incite to discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or group of persons because of their origin or of their membership or non-membership of an ethnic group, nation, race or religion…gender, sexual orientation or disability.” It also has a law providing for the imprisonment for anyone who dares engage in the purported thoughtcrime of disputing any facts whatsoever about the Holocaust.
Countless people have been jailed and fined under these laws. And suddenly this is the country that is waxing sanctimoniously about “free speech”?
Such contradictions are epitomized in the person of Sacha Reingewirtz, president of France’s Union of Jewish Students. In 2013, his organization successfully sued Twitter to remove “anti-Semitic” tweets from its site and hand over users” personal details. Yet there amid last week’s “free speech” rallies was Mr. Reingewirtz, proclaiming that Charlie Hebdo
is the embodiment of French journalism, of French freedom of expression and of French values….They want to scare French citizens and prohibit any criticism of religion, so here we are to remind them that religion can be freely criticized.
Well, all religions except for one, obviously.
ELIZABETH WARREN, FAKE POPULIST
Gearing up for the 2016 elections, Democrats are stewing over which mannish female would make a more suitable presidential candidate”Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren?
The extraordinarily wealthy Clinton has already tried to pretend she’s poor, issuing the provably fraudulent lie last year that she and Bill “came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.”
Warren apparently suffers from a psychological defect that causes her to identify with the oppressed. She has been dubbed “Fauxcahontas“ for making the apparently false claim that she has Cherokee heritage in order to secure tenure at Harvard.
And just like every champagne socialist throughout history, she attempts to ease some of her “wealth guilt” by railing against the wealthy on behalf of the indigent and seeking to level the economic playing field by redistributing everyone’s money but her own. She curses “the rich” and “millionaires” and “the 1%” without ever admitting she belongs to all three groups. In fact, she’s openly denied it. She even boasted that she “created much of the intellectual foundation” for the rich-bashing Occupy Wall Street movement.
It turns out that Warren has an average net worth of $8.75 million and may be worth nearly $15 million. This places her in the top 15% of all members of Congress. Exactly how “in touch” with the plight of American workers could this phony New England class warrior be?
