had patently made them a news story, such pied pipers of elite opinion as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and network news divisions on both sides of the Atlantic declined to publish them. Yale University Press even banned the cartoons from a book about – yes – the cartoons. And Jyllands-Posten itself declined a request to republish the cartoons, with the telling admission, “Violence works.”
In a schizophrenic France, Charlie Hebdo’s defiance left it in an ambivalent space. To be sure, official deference to free-expression principles made it the beneficiary of heightened – if ultimately ineffectual – police protection. But the republic is deracinating its centuries-old foundation of vibrant political expression and secularist civil society, its foundation for centuries. Consequently, the magazine was also subjected to no small amount of public scorn, its precarious state seen as self-induced. This is the fecklessness, the cultural self-loathing, and the soft bigotry of low expectations that induce Western opinion elites to forfeit such core liberties as free speech on the grounds that by dint of its incorrigibility, Muslim aggression has achieved entitlement status.
It is the mindset that whets radical Islam’s appetite.
On Sept. 11, 2012, jihadists stormed an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. The terrorists murdered the United States ambassador and three other American officials. Fraudulently, but in a manner entirely consistent with the conventional wisdom that trivial insults to Islam rationalize mass murder by Muslims, the Obama administration blamed the terrorist attack (or “protest,” as officials gingerly described it) on an obscure anti-Islamic video – a trailer for a prophet-mocking film called Innocence of Muslims that virtually no one on earth had actually seen.
Charbonnier was a steadfast champion of free expression. His was not a hollow, hashtag courage.
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