It’s a Charlie Hebdo world—a place where “free speech” means the freedom to depict the Pope in drag with the caption “Ready for anything in order to win some clients?” Where “liberty” means crude drawings, of the sort one might see on a men’s room wall, showing the Holy Trinity in a series of sexual positions. Where the image of Muhammad—venerated by over a billion people the world over—is regularly degraded in a series of crudely sexualized images designed not only to offend but to provoke violence. No wonder one of the magazine’s cofounders remarked that the late editor of Charlie Hebdo had “dragged the team to its death.”
Imagine if an American magazine were to print a cartoon of MLK’s sexual adventures, real and imagined, and the Black Guerilla Family bombed their editorial office and wiped out the staff. Would tens of thousands of people, egged on by the international media, be marching in the streets shouting, “Je suis David Duke”? Don’t make me laugh.
Immediately after the March of the Hypocrites—with some of the worst rights abusers on earth leading the parade—the Frenchies cracked down and arrested 54 people for speech “crimes.” Among the detainees was the clownish Dieudonné, a comedian who remarked he didn’t...