Back in the mists of time I wrote this:

In a city there’s a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily.

One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner.

This happens day after day.

Gradually the people who used to enoy the park start to steer clear of that corner. An unspoken sense of subtle anxiety develops among them.

Who are those people, and what are their intentions? Are we safe there any longer? And do we need the hassle in our lives of having to worry about it? Why not go elsewhere for a walk?

… The point is that whereas the municipality/public own the park, the arrival of the nasty gang on a regular basis means that the psychological ownership of the park quickly starts to shift.

Like an evil miasma, the gang’s sneeringly malign influence spreads across that space, the more so for being ostensibly aimless and unfocused.

The legal owners of the park (here in the form of the police) have to decide. Do they compel the aggressive new element to leave the park? Not easy. The gang members are committing no clear offence worth all the hassle of going to court; they may not go quietly; and above all the problem is not a Priority Target for government resource-allocation purposes.

Thus inch by inch the values of the more aggressive element come to prevail in the minds of all concerned. And if the gang hang around for long enough and erect a temporary structure unchallenged, the formal legal ownership of the park itself will start to mutate into something less clear.

Even if the gang leaves and goes somewhere else, the underlying anxiety within the public will linger – maybe they’ll come back one day.

One way or the other, the gang wins. The public ‘retreats’.

And so to Paris and the horrendous murder of those journalists. This outlandish event seems to transcend all know categories of analysis. A clash of civilisations? An attack on civilisation? How to respond? What does it really mean?

The Internet is clogged with the pictures drawn by cartoonists in supposed defiance responses to these murders (Note: not ‘executions’). What do these pictures such as this one really tell us?

Embedded image permalink

Who in fact is being wiped out? What if decent values and decent methods are just not strong enough to prevail against highly motivated tiny numbers of heavily armed fanatics, who swim quietly in immigrant communities who have made themselves susceptible to any assertion of micro-aggressive ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘racism’? Do the rest of us merely heave a sigh and accept defeat?

Many newspapers in continental Europe have responded by posting plenty of example of Charlie Hebdo images. A vivid selection here. This magazine has been going out of its way to swipe  at pretty much everything and anyone that many people might hold dear, in a scurrilous, French pseudo-anarchic ultra-democratic and (let’s be honest) mainly unfunny way. Muslims, Jews, Catholics, politicians, French actors – nothing was spared:

What does that magazine represent? In the great scheme of things, not much in itself. A small minority of French people read it. However, just as Islamist killers are at one end of a spectrum of Islamic fanaticism and important accordingly, so are magazines and websites like Charlie Hebdo one radical example of the free speech principle and important accordingly

This point is not lost on ‘world leaders’. On different occasions world leaders have intoned that the publication has gone too far:

We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the Prophet Muhammad, and obviously, we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this.  We know that these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.  But we’ve spoken repeatedly about the importance of upholding the freedom of expression that is enshrined in our Constitution.

In other words, we don’t question the right of something like this to be published; we just question the judgment behind the decision to publish it.  And I think that that’s our view about the video that was produced in this country and has caused so much offense in the Muslim world.

Now, it has to be said, and I’ll say it again, that no matter how offensive something like this is, it is not in any way justification for violence — not in any way justification for violence.

Not, it seems, how the extreme Islamist tendency see things. They think that what we regard as marginally amusing and essentially piffling ‘satire’ is the best possible reason for killing. In fact killing to deal with this menace is obligatory.

So, if you think that all religions are old-fashioned and objectionable and make your views known in blunt/crude terms, are you showing poor judgement? Seems so, according to Tony Barber at the FT (££) in a piece written with those French journalists’ blood scarcely cooled that has achieved instantaneous infame:

… some common sense would be useful at publications such as Charlie Hebdo, and Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten, which purport to strike a blow for freedom when they provoke Muslims.

Common sense. Hmmm. What if the real problem in fact is that Western societies increasingly can’t be sure about what values including ‘sense’ are in fact ‘common’?

Under multiculturalism what precisely unites us? The Monarchy? Sneer – white privilege and oppression. The Law? Sneer – rich man’s justice. British history? Sneer – written by imperialist winners. British economic success? Sneer – just the rich getting richer at the expense of the poor. The British public? Sneer – bring in more immigrants and let them stay in ghettos not learning English. British democracy or even democracy itself? Sneer – a tool of oppression and false consciousness. British literature? Sneer – too many dead white men. Family values? Sneer – repressed middle-class neurosis. Separating Right from Wrong? Sneer – oppressive class-based value judgements. And so on.

And isn’t the Barber Message that if you decide not to bow to the uncertain rigours of ‘common sense’ defined by Islamist killers that somehow you have brought massacres by those killers down on your own head?

Consider rape. Self-defense classes, roofie-detecting nail polish, even anti-rape-culture rallies are branded as “victim blaming” because they supposedly imply that a woman can bear some moral culpability for her own victimization.

But when it comes to Islamic terror attacks, it seems that victim-blaming is entirely permissible. Sure, the attackers were “hate-filled.” But wasn’t that hate — and the attackers’ murderous decision — driven by racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, “Islamophobic antics”?

… In the case of attacks like the one on Charlie Hebdo, upholding that principle would require saying that the moral value of a magazine’s publication is not the government’s concern. It has the right to publish what might offend, plain and simple, and the government will uphold that. As for those who would react violently — who would offend against the pact upholding free speech — they, and they alone, are responsible for their actions.

But Western governments are increasingly unwilling to defend this principle, convinced that they can negotiate away, to the satisfaction of their enemies, the offending elements. What they do not realize is that, by doing so, they are negotiating away, too, the open, liberal society that has prevailed for three centuries, and that has, better than any arrangement of persons yet conceived, best assured the security and prosperity of persons.

If it does not remain so, there will be no one to blame but ourselves.

As for our nervous leaders, scrambling for their Thesaurus’s to find new adjectives to describe these outrages: please just stop lying to us. Stop telling us that you are determined (or whatever word you use) to ‘uphold our freedom of speech‘ when that is JUST NOT TRUE:

Please be aware  that we will continue to monitor comments on social media & any offensive comments (sic) will be investigated

Imagine a parallel universe in which PoliceScotland put out a Tweet saying Of course we are NOT monitoring social media and will NOT investigate any offensive comment. Scottish citizens are free

Yup. That’s not where we live any more.

And so it all just gets worse.