Thursday, January 15, 2015

Free Speech for Some

Charlie Hebdo attacks being seen as an attack on free speech, and while it is, it is also not.  I wrote about France's history in a few recent posts (hereherehere).  I now cross-post over at WordPress just so that I have a backup of my posts, in case I ever accidentally delete one again, or another problem emerges in the future.  WordPress has a nice feature where you can search to see what other people are writing about based on hashtags, and I found this posted by Stop Making Sense.

But as the Unity March in France was correctly identified by some as a great hypocrisy, I have yet to see a prominent example of free speech being mentioned.

Al Jazeera staff in Egypt who have just passed one year in prison.  Amal Clooney is one of their lawyers, but even she did not mention that, instead saying "Je Suis Charlie" instead of "Je suis l'avocat de Mohamed Fahmy" at the Golden Globes (from the coverage I saw).

There is also the case of Obama and why he didn't go, as well as speculation about Netanyahu (and Abbas), where Marcy Wheeler notes that while Netanyahu was not initially invited, and Abbas was only invited after Netanyahu was coming, Obama may not have snubbed the march but may not have been invited either.

Obama can be included in the list of hypocrites (by Daniel Wickham) when it comes to those calling for free speech because of his actions against whistleblowers and the Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye as Jeremy Scahill pointed out again on Monday.

Examples of Obama's war on journalism

Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning

Barrett Brown who will be sentenced on January 22

James Risen and the trial of Jeffrey Sterling

There is also the connection between the Charlie Hebdo attackers and Al Qaeda in Yemen, where Anwar al-Awlaki was based, the American citizen cleric killed in a drone strike in 2011

From pages 20-21
Anwar Al-Aulaqi has communicated with the outside world on numerous occasions, participating in AQAP video interviews and publishing online articles in the AQAP magazine Inspire. Anwar Al-Aulaqi has continued to use his personal website to convey messages to readers worldwide, a July 2010 online article written by Anwar Al-Aulaqi advises readers that they "may contact Shayk [Anwar] Al-Aulaqi through any of the emails listed on the contact page." Needless to say, Anwar Al-Aulaqi's access to e-mail renders the circumstances of his existing, self-made "confinement" far different than the confinement of the detainees in Padilla and Hamdi.
as Jason Leopold points to Samir Khan





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