T. Belman. Israel is a repressive state for Jews. In addition to having a law against offending sensitivities, it also has a law against insulting officials. It outlawed Kahane’s Kach Party and is considering outlawing Lehava, the anti-assimilation organization, and even to label it a terrorist group. But it allows the Arabs to get away with murder, literally and figuratively.
In France, freedom of speech is considered a universal right, an Israeli law bans ‘offending religious sensibilities.’
Georges Wolinski, the leading caricaturist at Charlie Hebdo, was among those murdered in the terror attacks in Paris last week. He was one of my cultural heroes when I was starting out.
Neither Superman, Charlie Brown, Asterix nor “The Adventures of Tintin”spoke to me the way Wolinski’s black-and-white sketches did — with his distorted, exaggerated figures openly revealing their dark urges. This half-Polish, half-Tunisian Jew possessed an anarchist spirit that left no sacred cow standing.
Every community was insulted by his brush. His position toward readers was this: Does it bother you? So don’t read it! And if you want to ridicule me back, I won’t sue you.”
After the terrible massacre at Charlie Hebdo and the murders that followed at the Jewish market, concerned people have spoken out over the fate of France’s Jews. Don’t they see the time has come to move to Israel, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them after the murder at the Toulouse school?
And the sooner the better! But if Wolinski had moved to Israel and opened a Charlie weekly here, he would have had a problem.
In France, freedom of speech is considered a universal right, while in Israel such a weekly would not be able to exist because of the Israeli law that bans “offending religious sensibilities.” During my years as a cartoonist I have had to become familiar with the laws restricting the Israeli press.
But note that the law against offending religious sensibilities is not a law against racism, smut or slander (there are other laws for that). This is a very specific draconian law, a real anti-Wolinski law. The law prohibits illustrating Moses, Jesus or Mohammed in a way that would hurt the feelings of believers.
When I first started out I didn’t know there was such a law in Israel. Once, as a hungry beginning illustrator one cold Parisian winter, I approached Wolinski with a proposal for a comic in Charlie. He wanted something about the Middle East, Israelis and Arabs, and I suggested a hostage-taking terror attack in which Palestinian terrorists take over a kibbutz. The incident turns into an orgy with the women kibbutz members and volunteers; extremist clerics also take part.
He was enthusiastic about the idea. When I returned to Israel, I didn’t show the draft to anyone because there was no one to show it to, but I didn’t think it was prohibited.
I found out about the law only years later, when my caricature in a well-known newspaper that criticized the cruel pre-Yom Kippur custom of kaparot — swinging a chicken over one’s head to atone for sin — was brought up for discussion in the Knesset. (And there weren’t even any boobs in the picture!)
From the rostrum, the police minister compared my work to the caricatures in the Nazis’ Der Stürmer, and on the minister’s instructions my editor and I were summoned for questioning. Sometime later I was cut from the paper’s staff.
Since learning about the law, I’ve noticed court decisions based on it. In 1997, Tatiana Soskin was sentenced to prison for drawing her famous “pig poster” in Hebron. In 2006, a campaign ad for the Shinui party was banned because of offense to religious sensibilities.
“Only in Israel are there laws against bad taste,” an American attorney once told me. This seemed strange to him because freedom of the press is part of his country’s constitution. To the French, this also seems strange because laws limiting freedom of speech were taken off the books at the end of the 18th century.
In Israel, as we know, there is no constitution to protect freedom of speech. The religious parties opposed such a constitution in 1948, but the Israeli law against offending religious sensibilities is a legacy of the British Mandate. The law was imported by the British colonialists from another colony – India – in 1936 to prevent a recurrence of religious and racial riots like those here in 1929.
Were the 1929 riots a one-time event? And therefore might it be possible to abolish the emergency laws? If any American, French or British person thought so, reality slapped him in the face when in 1994 another massacre happened in that same city, Hebron.
So were the British right in their legislation? When various groups live cheek by jowl in a small area, should expression be censored? Should consideration for our neighbors be more sacred than freedom of speech?
And what about our livelihood as illustrators? Well, I long ago stopped making a living from print media. Haven’t you heard? It died a long time ago.
Ido Amin is an illustrator and animator.
@ yamit82:
Wrong. I am a true conservative; that makes me NOT a ‘libertarian,’ but, among other things, a civil libertarian.
No.
No; but free speech — the free flow of ideas, information & opinion — is essential to an informed citizenry, and therefore essential to orderly change as well. One man’s right to spout bullshit is another man’s right to CALL it “bullshit” — it is the same right.
— Take it away from one, and you take it away from BOTH.
So free speech is fundamental. There’s a REASON that it was included in the 1st Amendment; it wasn’t a accident. (Nor was it an coincidence that the right to keep & bear arms went into the very NEXT Amendment after that.)
Not so. You confuse conservatives w/ right-wing statists. This notion of playing off “values” against “freedoms” is really a tortured & convoluted pretext for statism.
Liberty presumes responsibility. Responsibility includes the exercise of freedoms to secure & protect values.
The truth is that in an informed & engaged citizenry, values and freedoms buttress & defend each other — and anybody who presumes to separate them or play them off against each other is ill to be trusted.
@ bernard ross:
Actually that’s YOUR department.
@ yamit82:
Not what you meant to say.
If you were a Jew, you wouldn’t would wish that on anybody.
No; what I’ve shown is that my OWN comment about his transparency is just as applicable to yours.
Fits him like a glove; tailor-made.
Temerity NOR chutzpa needed for the assessment.
20/20 vision is all that was required.
Hardly. I’d never lay a hand (or anything else) on somebody I wasn’t married to at the time — let alone, fantasize over the proposition.
Is that what the man-in-the-mirror said to you this morning?
— Or was that what you said to him?
dweller Said:
Not what I meant mr. obtuse I was thinking along the lines of self administered Hemlock for you.
But you have just proved Bernard ‘s comment about you as like:
You have the temerity and chutzpa to call anyone “slime bag” 😛
Green Monster got ya by the cajones? Oh I forgot you are a Pauline Eunuch!!! You sick piece of shit!!!!!
@ yamit82:
Yes: a roll in the hay with the bone thrower. . . .
@ bernard ross:
No ‘secret’ about yours, slimebag.
Easy to read as this morning’s headlines.
@ yamit82:
@ bernard ross:
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxoooooooooo
dweller Said:
looks like J pandera is back to “brilliantly” reveal everyones “secret sins”
dweller Said:
I am sure that will not prevent you from returning to suck more out of it
You’re no conservative but a librul Libertarian.
In any event I will ans all of your tripe as follows.
You elevate free speech to be a value even a supreme value. Is freedom to be your value? But freedom is the absence of restraints, while values are restraints. Freedom is the opposite of values. Societies that venerate freedoms over all else abrogate values, and then abandon responsibility. They become quasi-socialist welfare states.
Conservatives place values over freedoms those values are restraints on many freedoms in-order to protect their values.
@ dweller:
You’re no conservative but a librul Libertarian.
In any event I will ans all of your tripe as follows.
You elevate free speech to be a value even a supreme value. Is freedom to be your value? But freedom is the absence of restraints, while values are restraints. Freedom is the opposite of values. Societies that venerate freedoms over all else abrogate values, and then abandon responsibility. They become quasi-socialist welfare states.
Conservatives place values over freedoms those values are restraints on many freedoms in-order to protect their values.
dweller Said:
That you felt compulsion to reply and you didn’t have to proves your OCD. You bit and you fetched despite your stupid denial.
dweller Said:
I have no intentions w-r-t-y only a wish and a hope. You know what that is!!
dweller Said:
No sale!!!!! ROTHFLMAOAH!!!!
@ yamit82:
No compulsion. No denial. No fetching. It’s a lot less intricate than that.
Your problem, however (one in a crowded field), is that you simply assume that everybody posts for the same reasons that you do. So you wind up projecting your intentions onto me here. You’re much mistaken, however.
But then, that’s why it was YOU who did the actual fetching here.
dweller Said:
That you felt compelled to respond contradicts what you said. Apparently you can’t resist fetching and then denying. 😉
@ yamit82:
@ dweller:
The Dicha of Deborah: “Speech is free as long as one says only that which is acceptable”.
@ honeybee:
[Yawn.] That bone’s been chewed so silly, there’s no marrow left, and the flavor’s all gone.
@ yamit82:
Protection of civil liberties protects EVERYBODY — the wicked and the just. Every true conservative (as distinct from a right-wing statist) is a classical liberal.
But that is NOT the same thing as tolerance for free speech.
Quite so; and the right to hear, and be heard, is ONE of them.
The People could’ve USED their right to free speech to contest that. They didn’t.
That’s NOT because of the presence of free speech. QTC, that’s because of human cowardice.
Tolerance most surely has NOT won the day. The homosexuals have made it harder all the time to challenge them. The free speech of their opposition is increasingly under attack. Tolerance toward TRADITIONALISTS has been shredded.
In states where ballot initiatives are permitted, values DO determine elections.
In purely candidacy elections, values may not be determinant as to the issues campaigned on. But depending on the public perception of the candidates’ values, they do determine who turns out on Election Day.
“Abject tolerance” is an oxymoron, a contradiction-in-terms. If it’s tolerance, then it isn’t ‘abject’ but firm & well-muscled. If it IS ‘abject,’ as distinct from strong & principled, then it isn’t tolerance
— it’s chickenshit, candy-assed cowardice.
If the uncorrupted have the same liberties that the degenerates have — and don’t actively exercise them, as the degenerates do — then it is THEY who are responsible for the decline; not the liberties they failed to exercise.
For some, apparently.
Not for dictators & demagogues there wasn’t freedom. For the People, however, there was.
Quite true. And the end product of this is, of course, an outcry ofor “a man on horseback”: dictatorship. (Lickin’ your chops, are ya, Capt Huff’n’puff?)
Hardly. Free speech doesn’t ‘CAUSE’ societal decline. It may accompany it if only the degenerate avail themselves of it. But that doesn’t mean it ’causes’ it.
Of course, dictators would certainly LOVE to make one believe that it does; just as they’d love to make one believe that the ’cause’ of social violence is “too many guns on the street.” Just get rid of all the guns, and all will be Jim Dandy. . . .”
So in the name of taking firearms from the bad guys, they take ’em from everybody
— which, of course, just guarantees that the only ones NOT to have firearms will be the good guys, since they obey the law, and the bad ones don’t govern their lives by what’s lawful anyway. Net effect: good guys disarmed, bad guys emboldened. Smart.
And as with the 2nd Amendment, so with the 1st.
There are two sides to human nature. I take BOTH sides into consideration; you, OTOH, take only one
— that’s YOUR flaw.
Thank you, Monsieur Talleyrand, but I’m not a Bourbon — I was born at night
— but not last night.
dweller Said:
Hasn’t worked where you’re concerned.
Reply to dweller in moderation for almost 2 hrs????
dweller Said:
Long litany of liberal canards. Seems you are a closeted librul in conservatives sheeps clothing.
Unbridled tolerance for the other for the deviant for the anti traditionalist is the root cause. Societies who do not protect their core values will lose them period.
When the courts ruled that pornography is protected under free speech they opened the door for everything else. All that 30-50 years was not tolerated is today in an ever increasing trend. Not only have your churches caved under the pressure they have wholeheartedly adopted all those norms and religious tenets that they have always been agai9nst and which had always been part of their ecclesiastical principles especially the mainline Protestant churches. Seems only the RCC is holding the line but Just!!! There are many cracks in their long held Armouras well.
‘Light of day’? my ass. Liberalism and tolerance have won the day and every poll and every national election proves the point. Values never are determinant in elections but mundane things like taxes, jobs security carry the day every time.
Of course it is because it allows people freedom of choice in the marketplace of ideas and ethics where abject tolerance always wins.
Meaningless concept!!!!
Cut the silly euphemisms, there was never real freedom in America nor anywhere else. Where there was, there was lawlessness until people demanded security and protection and began restrictive actions to protect property and themselves. Each law and each restriction put additional limits on freedoms. In every case in every society people willingly forfeit personal freedoms for security, order and basic individual well being.
Everybody knows except those like you that in the final analysis democracy and absolute values you ascribe to if followed are suicidal for any culture and society and you seem to advocate societal and cultural suicide in the name of idealism that does not take human nature into account and that’s your flaw. You are a blind brain impaired idealist who had learned nothing forgot nothing.
@ yamit82:
Hogwash. Tolerance for those degeneracies is a different issue ALTOGETHER from free speech.
Those problems are the result NOT of an ‘excess’ of free speech, but rather a FAILURE to exercise it — in opposition — on the part of those who saw thru the bogus appeal and were afraid of being seen as ‘gauche.’ So they kept mum. They were cowards.
Freedom isn’t free.
It comes with a price tag
— called “eternal vigilance.”
You don’t get to just lie back & be cool simply because your liberties have been structured into the country’s governing documents. If you aren’t prepared to exercise those freedoms to fight for what’s right, then YOU may not lose those liberties
— but your grandkids will, and they’ll never know it had ever been otherwise.
Free speech isn’t the cause of degeneracy. The best cure for manure is sunlight; once it’s done its work, it makes it possible for the flowers to grow. When the plants are strong, THEY will themselves choke off the weeds.
So certain laws of the land are antisemitic!!!!
That said, there are no absolutes wrt any freedoms. American liberal interpretations of free speech have lead to first tolerance then acceptance of Homosexuality, pornography, same sex or gender marriages and a whole litany of social and moral deviation from traditional values and norms in America and in Europe. Each society should afford individual rights according to the traditions and ethos of the majority when executed in a democracy.
The unrestricted value and legal protection of speech in the West has led to multiculturalism and breakdown of moral and ethical traditions long held in favor of deviants and deviant behavior which is rapidly becoming not the exception but the rule.
Note: Many of the restrictive laws in ISRAEL ABRIDGING SPEECH were carry overs from the British Mandatory government in Palestine never repealed because all Israeli governments believed they could be useful in protecting themselves, (Ironic)
Note: My main opposition to restrictions on speech in Israel is less with the laws but in how they are applied.. They are not applied and executed with regards to what individuals and groups are selected to be charged and prosecuted under these existing laws. Some of our Pigs seem to be more equal under our statutes than other pigs.
It is long past due for articles like this one, as well as your comment, to be seen in the Americas. I don’t think Canadians or Americans are aware of the situation in Israel WRT freedom of expression. They don’t think about it, as it never occurs to them.