The French Government Uses Free Speech as Pretext to Suppress Free Speech

At the Ron Paul Institute, Daniel McAdams comments that the French government has used the Charlie Hebdo incident as a convenient excuse to crack down on Free speech (“After Free Speech Rally, France Cracks Down on Free Speech”)

Well that didn't take long. Just three days after the French government hosted dozens of foreign leaders in a "unity rally" to defend free speech in the wake of last week's shooting at the Charlie Hebdo magazine, France has begun arresting its citizens for actually exercising free speech.

According to news reports, more than 50 French citizens were arrested today and charged with offensive speech — the same kind of speech that was the trademark of of the Charlie Hebdo publication. 

None of those arrested were charged with links to terrorism or any real crime. Instead, they are facing up to seven years in prison for making statements the French authorities claim are supportive of the shootings or are anti-Semitic.

New directives from the French Justice Ministry provided the legal basis for arresting those deemed "supportive" of the attacks or who express anti-Semitic or racist sentiment. Anti-Muslim sentiment was not included in the government's new arrest orders, despite a dramatic spike in actual attacks on French Muslims since the shootings. The justice ministry claimed the new anti-speech measures were necessary to protect freedom of expression.

Among those arrested is controversial French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, charged with being "an apologist for terrorism" and facing jail time over a Facebook post making fun of Sunday's "unity rally." Exercising free speech by making fun of the French government as it celebrates free speech is apparently a crime.

The French government has long banned Dieudonné's comedy performances over his controversial jokes, even as French authorities celebrate Charlie Hebdo's controversial jokes.

Those arrested for exercising free speech in France will be charged under "special measures" put into place after the shooting, which provide for immediate sentencing of the accused. Some 130,000 military and security forces have been deployed on the streets of France and ordered to keep a particular eye on incidents that could bring violence against the police.

Unreported in the US, Charlie Hebdo has long ties with the French Communist Party and after the shooting has moved its headquarters to the offices of Libération, a French newspaper with roots in the Communist Party-inspired unrest of May, 1968. One of most famous Charlie Hebdo cartoonists,Stéphane Charbonnier ("Charb"), was a long-time member of the French Communist Party. Currently the newspaper is considered "left wing" and is controlled by Edouard de Rothschild of the international banking family, which should provide some additional fodder for the conspiracy-minded.

France and Europe chokes under the noxious cloud of hypocrisy.

Judge Andrew Napolitano at the LewRockwell.com sees the same (bold mine)

The French government has prohibited speech it considers to be hateful and even made it criminal. When the predecessor magazine to Charlie Hebdo once mocked the death of Charles de Gaulle, the French government shut it down — permanently.

The theory of anti-hate speech laws is that hate speech often leads to violence, and violence demands police and thus the expenditure of public resources, and so the government can make it illegal to spout hatred in order to conserve its resources. This attitude presumes, as Wilson did when he prosecuted folks for publicly singing German songs during World War I, that the government is the origin of free speech and can lawfully limit the speech it hates and fears. It also presumes that all ideas are equal, and none is worthy of hatred.

When the massacres occurred last week in Paris, all three of the murderers knew that the police would be unarmed and so would be their victims. It was as if they were shooting fish in a barrel. Why is that? The answer lies in the same mentality that believes it can eradicate hate by regulating speech. That mentality demands that government have a monopoly on violence, even violence against evil.

So, to those who embrace this dreadful theory, the great loss in Paris last week was not human life, which is a gift from God; it was free speech, which is a gift from the state. Hence the French government, which seems not to care about innocent life, instead of addressing these massacres as crimes against innocent people, proclaimed the massacres crimes against the freedom of speech. Would the French government have reacted similarly if the murderers had killed workers at an ammunition factory, instead of at a satirical magazine?

And how hypocritical was it of the French government to claim it defends free speech! In France, you can go to jail if you publicly express hatred for a group whose members may be defined generally by characteristics of birth, such as gender, age, race, place of origin or religion.

You can also go to jail for using speech to defy the government. This past weekend, millions of folks in France wore buttons and headbands that proclaimed in French: “I am Charlie Hebdo.” Those whose buttons proclaimed “I am not Charlie Hebdo” were asked by the police to remove them. Those who wore buttons that proclaimed, either satirically or hatefully, “I am Kouachi” were arrested. Arrested for speech at a march in support of free speech? Yes.

What’s going on here? What’s going on in France, and what might be the future in America, is the government defending the speech with which it agrees and punishing the speech with which it disagrees. What’s going on is the assault by some in radical Islam not on speech, but on vulnerable innocents in their everyday lives in order to intimidate their governments. What’s going on is the deployment of 90,000 French troops to catch and kill three murderers because the government does not trust the local police to use guns to keep the streets safe or private persons to use guns to defend their own lives.

Meanwhile former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal Paul Craig Roberts deems that the unfortunate Charlie Hebdo incident was instead a false flag