UK GENTECH LABS

Is this the thread? http://forums.steroid.com/anabolic-...5-my-dnp-vitamin-supplements-your-review.html

They seem to have a problem with you using cut and paste and passing it off as your own. Were you posting articles without attribution again, DD? I told you that was a big no-no. Some might even call it intellectual dishonesty. You listen to me next time, DD. I'll keep you out of trouble.


Uggghhhhhh. You're making me turn on my app to change my IP address. Gimme a minute and I'll check if that's the thread
 
Is this the thread? http://forums.steroid.com/anabolic-...5-my-dnp-vitamin-supplements-your-review.html

They seem to have a problem with you using cut and paste and passing it off as your own. Were you posting articles without attribution again, DD? I told you that was a big no-no. Some might even call it intellectual dishonesty. You listen to me next time, DD. I'll keep you out of trouble.

No, the issue wasn't with plagiarism. The issue in general was their anecdotal data should always refute scientific data or studies. Hell you know what that feels like with GMan and IM don't you ;). Apparently scientific data is trumped by fairy take story telling or personal anecdote EVERY TIME.

Edit* yes that's the thread
 
You actually made me laugh :) Man I definitely understand all of that I do. All I'm trying to prove is there is a false sense of security with some of the new guys. They might think it's actually a clean room with lab quality machines. I think brewing for yourself it's up to you to decide the process. But when you're giving it to possibly a hundred plus ppl at least I would take more steps to be sterile.
I'm also jealous about that bedtime treat.

There is a false sense of security sure and I wouldn't argue against that. To be honest, making something sterile is the easy part, well the easiest is mixing the solution. It's keeping it sterile once you've sterilized something that's the hard part.

Glad you got a laugh and if you're so inclined and not far from the northeast you are more than welcome to stop by and join in with treat time. I have plenty and to me it's about sharing with people and good company.
 
There is a false sense of security sure and I wouldn't argue against that. To be honest, making something sterile is the easy part, well the easiest is mixing the solution. It's keeping it sterile once you've sterilized something that's the hard part.

Glad you got a laugh and if you're so inclined and not far from the northeast you are more than welcome to stop by and join in with treat time. I have plenty and to me it's about sharing with people and good company.
Northeast is my neck of the woods ;) Might hafta take you up on that someday.
 
Northeast is my neck of the woods ;) Might hafta take you up on that someday.

Roger that. Tri state to be more specific.

I've met quite a few ppl off the boards, not this one, but the guys I've met have been some of the coolest ppl I've ever met. Going to meet more this weekend as there's a powerlifting meet in upstate NY and gotta go to support a member and fellow lifter from my other board.
 
You hit the nail on the head.
That's cool as hell. Goin to support your brother. It would definitely be great meeting some of the ppl you talk to basically everyday. Put a face to the personality :) Hell I know some of these guys better then my friends offline lol
 
No, the issue wasn't with plagiarism. The issue in general was their anecdotal data should always refute scientific data or studies. Hell you know what that feels like with GMan and IM don't you ;). Apparently scientific data is trumped by fairy take story telling or personal anecdote EVERY TIME.

Edit* yes that's the thread

I know all about Gman and that inbred clown IM. I didn't care for the way steroid.com members/mods tried to argue their case vis-à-vis DNP. Differentiating drugs and poisons as though they're mutually exclusive entities is nonsense. The mods sure don't like you, though. You must have really pissed them off somewhere.
 
I know all about Gman and that inbred clown IM. I didn't care for the way steroid.com members/mods tried to argue their case vis-à-vis DNP. Differentiating drugs and poisons as though they're mutually exclusive entities is nonsense. The mods sure don't like you, though. You must have really pissed them off somewhere.

I'd stake money you checked most of my post history there. You'll notice it's 2 in particular not all of them....well if you count monitors as mods too. They make arguments and cases in the exact way you and I despise.... Such and such works bc I'm bigger than you or you don't know anything bc I'm bigger than you. One in particular was very stupid and would stroke his ego by saying things like: when you carry as much muscle mass as I do..... Lol. Anyway yes I pissed them off bc I challenged them to back up their BS on numerous subjects which always resorted to who's bigger. I have it on good authority that the admin of that site basically gives them a free hand to do anything they want bc he doesn't want to be bothered with having to police them and they've been in the positions for so long. Enjoy the reading, I'd say the problems started at least 6-7months back maybe more.
 
Johnny can you answer me a question??

Why are you and every other wkm's and awesome member so dedicated to fuck the shit out of this source??
Just answer that question because it's clear that it's no worse than any other source, but you pay more interest in showing how bad it is.

I don't know where I have acted smarter than anyone else just joining in on the debate... Witch is what forums are for no?

I don't have a deal Johnny ballz but it seems like you have the deal with me...

This is what I cant get also.
 
From everything I have heard and read about Oxy's/Anadrol I should have perhaps felt a little something after say 3 days? Even on previous courses of Dbol ive felt something after 1 day or so, BUT, those previous courses were oral only and this time round I already have Test400 and EQ in my system, could this be the cause of say a delayed reaction? Gary has been decent in sending gear out even before payment etc, I have no reason to disbelieve him and all our correspondence has been decent etc, Could it just be me?? could I be the problem? I know all cycles are different etc, I have been totally honest in my experience AND MY EXPERIENCE ALONE to the orals I have tried from Gentech, I mentioned also the I have BALL shrinkage as soon as I upped the dose from 50mg to 100mg Anadrol.... this remains the case and I am continuing to take the Anadrol at 100mg, ive had no side effects at all. (Ball shrinkage could be the Test400 and EQ, then again it could be the Anadrol) sorry folks...
 
Willie Willie you were given some great info last night about layin low. You are apparently here just for a source and not to be a member of the community. You think we're bashing because it's in our nature but if you only knew what members like me have went through. I joined and MESO actually had a source that had made it 2 yrs here and he actually had good reviews. I jumped on it and got jacked for half my cash and the half that he sent me was bunk. I then saw that a source that had been in the game for 10 yrs was on Meso and was gonna jump on that, but then his gear test extremely low and had cum floating in his vials. I was desperate like you are now and jumped on a brand new source.

Your not wasting your time with this post it's a good one odie...we got there in the end :)

I don't know if I come off disparate but I'm not, that's why I haven't ordered a thing yet, maybe it's just me wanting this lab to do well as it's in my neck of the woods. But I won't be ordering just yet from anywhere I'm still floating about comparing the bloods people have done and reading cycle logs.

Thats shit about getting scammed that many times and I do understand that this is why you do what you do.

I'm not here just looking for a source I contribute where I can but with the little knowledge I have on most subjects there's not much I can add.

This thing about lying low is that if I have a question or an opinion I will be putting it, if someone doesn't agree with it I am happy for them to say, it's a forum debates happen and people learn things from them.
 
What agenda? If you have something to say, be man enough to say it.

I don't need to "let it play out" to learn the answer because I already know what going to happen: they're going to fail. 24K is also going to fail and will be gone within 6 months. So will Gentech. If you had been on Meso for more than 2 weeks, you would know that.

Like I already told you, you're naive. Spend your time reading rather than giving opinions you're not qualified to give.

I tell you what cbs I will leave it there..this shit isn't going to benefit any of us not now the insults are starting to flow... And Even tho you came at me AGAIN
 
@WILL.E.NAYLER lol dont take offense to his insults bro. He does it to everyone. Thats the only thing he knows how to do. If he doesnt agree with something he just insults that person because he doesnt know how to have an intellectual debate. Lol
 
@WILL.E.NAYLER lol dont take offense to his insults bro. He does it to everyone. Thats the only thing he knows how to do. If he doesnt agree with something he just insults that person because he doesnt know how to have an intellectual debate. Lol

I've seen your idea of an "intellectual debate." Your response when asked to support your statements with evidence was to post a screenshot of a tweet. LMFAO If I were you, I sure wouldn't be questioning anyone else's debating skills.

What's the deal with the skank in your avi? You think we all haven't seen pussy before? It's getting old, dude.
 
Last edited:
The following are copied and pasted, pun intended :), from one of your threads CBS. The one about Charlie Hebdo to be precise. These quotes were taken off 3 pages of a 10+ pg thread. My wizardry pales in comparison to your copy and paste powers my ill begotten lad. I mean what you did in one thread would take me several threads across multiple boards to accomplish. You sir are the king of copying and pasting and we all bow down to your intellectual copying and pasting powers :p




Sam Harris: Liberals like Greenwald and Aslan support the ‘thuggish ultimatum’ of radical Islam

3438.png

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/author/kaufman/
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/22/

Sam-Harris-800x430.jpg

Neuroscientist Sam Harris speaking at TED2010 (Steve Jurvetson/Flickr)
Don't miss stories. Follow Raw Story!

Noted atheist Sam Harris blamed the media for the “recent atrocities in Paris” in his http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/after-charlie-hebdo-and-other-thoughts.

“It’s astonishing the media can’t do the one thing to keep it and everyone else safe. It can’t do the one thing that would have kept the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists safe — which is to publish, en masse, all of these cartoons to present a united front against this creeping theocracy,” he began.

Harris claimed that he would have spoken up sooner, but “it’s become toxic for me to say over and over again that which should go without saying, then be vilified for it. It’s no fun working on this topic — although I am writing a short book with Maajid Nawaz, the working title of which is Islam and the Future of Tolerance.”


“The response of liberals — and it’s so depressing to have to use ‘liberal’ in a pejorative way, but liberalism has completely lost its moorings on the topic of Islam,” he continued. “Needless to say, we have all the usual suspects — Glenn Greewald, Reza Aslan, Chris Hedges, Karen Armstrong — and as unreadable as these people have become, you can’t help but notice the stupid things they say about Islam even in the aftermath of an atrocity like this.”

“As will come as no surprise, they will tell you this has nothing to do with Islam or heartfelt religious convictions, but that it has everything to do with capitalism and oppression and minorities and the racism of white people in Europe, and the racism of cartoonists at a magazine like Charlie Hebdo.”

That is the cause of this behavior,” Harris said. “That is what will cause someone to pick up an AK-47 and murder 12 cartoonists and scream ‘Allahu Akbar!’ in the streets.”

“That is an absolutely insane analysis. If you grant everything that’s completely wrong with capitalism and the history of colonialism, you should not be able to deny that these religious maniacs are motivated by concerns about blasphemy and the depiction of Muhammad and consider their behavior entirely ethical in light of specific religious doctrines.”

Those “liberal” commentators are demonstrating the kind of “masochism, moral cowardice, and lack of intelligence at this point, that is allowing [them] to deny this fact.”

“Then there is the understandable matter of self-censorship, which is entirely based on fear. And the reason it’s ‘understandable’ is that it’s quite rational, if you’re the only news organization printing pictures of the prophet Muhammad.”

“This is why,” Harris said, “every news organization should have chosen to print the latest Charlie Hebdo cover immediately on the same day and spread the risk.”

“We hear everyday about this false trade-off between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as if there’s some balance to be struck here,” he continued. “There is none — freedom of speech never infringes upon freedom of religion. There’s nothing I can say in this podcast about religion, generally, or Islam in particular, that would infringe upon someone’s freedom to practice his or her religion.”

“If your freedom of religion entails forcing those people who do not share it to conform to it, then that’s not freedom of religion — that’s theocracy.”

“This ‘respect’ we’re all urged to show for ‘religious sensitivity,’ is actually a demand that the blasphemy laws of Islam be followed by non-Muslims and secular liberals in the West are defending this thuggish ultimatum,” he said.

They are “putting the lives of cartoonists, journalists, free thinkers, and public intellectuals in jeopardy day after day. We’re only harming ourselves at this point. The Muslim world has simply got to get used to free speech winning, and we should make no apologies for this.”

“People have been murdered over cartoons,” he said, “end of moral analysis.”


Harris did add that he disagrees with laws in France and Germany criminalizing Holocaust denial. “A person should be absolutely free,” he said, “to deny the Holocaust and destroy his reputation. Others should be free to ridicule him and boycott his business. But there shouldn’t be a law against this kind of idiocy.”

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/sam-harris-liberals-like-greenwald-aslan-support-thuggish-ultimatum-of-islamic-terrorists/

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/after-charlie-hebdo-and-other-thoughts

Wiltshire police officer asked newsagent for Charlie Hebdo buyers' details after Paris attacks

v2-charlie-hebdo-6.jpg


The force has apologised for the error and said details would be 'permanently disposed of'


http://www.independent.co.uk/biography/paul-peachey
plus.png
, http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionUniqueName=search&publicationName=ind&pageLength=5&startDay=1&startMonth=1&startYear=2010&useSectionFilter=true&useHideArticle=true&searchString=byline_text:%28%22%20James%20Phillips%22%29&displaySearchString=%20James%20Phillips

A police force was forced to apologise today after one of its officers told a newsagent to hand over the names of four people in the name of community cohesion, after they bought a commemorative edition of the Charlie Hebdo magazine.

Wiltshire police confirmed that it had deleted the names of the buyers from its system, which were collected after officers toured shops warning newsagents to be vigilant during an “assessment of community tensions” in the sleepy market town following the attacks in the French capital in January.

One of the customers, a 77-year-old retired ward sister, described the officer as a “jobsworth” and said that she found the whole situation so unlikely that she thought it was a hoax. “At the time I was a bit miffed,” Anne Keat told The Independent. “I thought that’s a bit rich, two days after I got my copy, haven’t they got better things to do?

“They always talk about the pressure on the resources they have got to put into these things. No wonder they’re short of cash.”

Mrs Keat, a self-confessed news junkie, ordered the magazine from a local newsagent in Corsham, Wiltshire, a week after the 7 January attacks in Paris. Two days after she bought her magazine, she learned that an officer had been back to ask for the names of the buyers.

The names and addresses of the buyers were added to an intelligence note and fed into a police crime and intelligence system, police confirmed. The force deleted the note after details of the visit came to light in a letter that Mrs Keat wrote to The Guardian and warned of the potential ramifications after seeing an advert for Je Suis Charlie badges.

She said that she was never contacted by police, and was not aware of the identities of the other three buyers of the magazine. The newsagent and post office where she bought the magazine, Hawthorn Stores, declined to comment.

Emma Carr, director of Big Brother Watch, said: “The Charlie Hebdo attack brought millions of people worldwide together to condemn those who seek to silence free speech through threats of intimidation and violence.

“We therefore have to hope that this is the result of an overzealous police officer, rather than a campaign of intimidation by Wiltshire Police.”

Residents expressed mystification at the police attention following the Paris attacks on the town with its “lovely high street” where lots went on, but only within its active community groups. “Life plods on but not very exciting things happen,” said Corsham councillor Anne Lock.

Police said that policing teams had visited businesses, and particularly newsagents distributing the Charlie Hebdo magazine, to consider if they were vulnerable as part of a wider assessment of community tensions after the Paris attacks. There was no specific threat nationally and nothing to suggest newsagents would be vulnerable, the force said in a statement.

“Wiltshire Police would like to apologise to the members of public who may be affected by this. Information relating to this specific incident has been permanently and securely disposed of,” it said.

No formal complaint has been made against the officer who will receive “words of advice” but is unlikely to face any disciplinary proceedings.

“Wiltshire Police are confident that the police officer’s intention was purely around enhancing public safety and ensuring that the newsagent was advised appropriately.”

Seventeen people were killed in three days of violence in Paris that began with two gunmen bursting into the magazine’s Paris offices and opening fire in revenge for its publication of satirical images of the prophet.

The killings sparked worldwide revulsion and a campaign that brought thousands on to the streets brandishing pens and candles in support of free speech.

Five million copies of the magazine – which has a usual print run of around 60,000 – were published in a special edition, with about 2,000 of them distributed in the UK, according to reports.

More than 1,000 British Muslims protested in central London at the weekend at what they called “insulting depictions” of the Prophet Mohammed by Charlie Hebdo.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/u...ers-details-after-paris-attacks-10034327.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/search/simple.do?destinationSectionUniqueName=search&publicationName=ind&pageLength=5&startDay=1&startMonth=1&startYear=2010&useSectionFilter=true&useHideArticle=true&searchString=byline_text:%28%22%20James%20Phillips%22%29&displaySearchString=%20James%20Phillips

CHARLIE’S FALSE FRIENDS
1, February 6, 2015 by jonathanturley


dxbsb2fkcy9tywdhemluzv9pbwfnzxmvmddmzjq2ywqxztfinjg1otq4njy1m2u3nwvmode4ngnizdzjymq5ys5qcgc-238-600-1-1-70.jpg


I had the pleasure this month of writing a piece on free speech in the leading policy magazine in Switzerland, “Schweizer Monat.” The piece is published in German (Charlies falsche Freunde or Charlie’s False Friends), which is particularly cool for my son Benjamin who is taking German at McLean High School in Virginia. The German version can be found here. Germany is currently our fifth highest supplier of readers with Switzerland close behind. Ironically, Harvard Professor Cass Sunstein also wrote a piece in the same issue this month. The translated column is below:


It was one of the largest and most moving marches in the history of Paris. There in front of millions mourning the massacre of journalists at the magazine Charlie Hebdo were Western leaders joined French President Francois Hollande arm in arm proclaiming solidarity to show support for free speech. Everyone wanted to proclaim “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) but a few of the surviving writers could be forgiven for feeling a bit confused. After all, the victims at the magazine were threatened for years with prosecution. Indeed, one surviving editor said that the displays of solidarity with the magazine made him want to “vomit.” For civil libertarians, it is clear that when leaders insist that they “Stand with Charlie” it does not mean actually standing with free speech. To the contrary, the greatest threat facing free speech today is found in Western governments, which have increasingly criminalized and prosecuted speech, particularly anti-religious speech. Once the defining right of Western Civilization, free speech is dying in the West and few world leaders truly mourn its passing.

Around the world, speech is under attack under an array of hate speech and anti-discrimination laws. It is irony of a new liberalism that the one thing that the West will not tolerate is intolerance. In the name of pluralism and tolerance, speech is being curtailed that insults or degrades individuals on the basis of religion, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and other characteristics. The result is a growing, if not insatiable, appetite for speech regulation that only increases after violent responses to controversial publications.




The most recent tragedy in France follows an all too familiar pattern from publication to prosecution. Consider what happened in 2005 with the publication of the Danish cartoons and the global riots leading to the murder of non-Muslims and burning of churches and homes. The West rallied around the right of free speech, but then quietly ramped up prosecutions of speech. It happened again in 2012 when a low-budget trailer of a low-grade movie was put on YouTube. The “Innocence of Muslims” trailer was deemed insulting to Mohammad and Islam and led to another global spasm of murder and arson by irate Muslims. Again, Western leaders professed support for free speech while cracking down further on anti-religious speech. Even in the United States, President Obama insisted that the filmmaker Nakoula Basseley Nakoula had every right to make the film. However, the next image that the world saw after that speech was filmmaker being thrown into a police car in handcuffs for technical violations of a probation on unrelated charges. The Obama Administration clearly wanted the world to see that he was arrested. It was the perfect solution: free speech defended and free speech deterred.

This pattern continued this year in France. After President Hollande led the march in support of free speech, French prosecutors launched a nationwide crackdown on unpopular speakers. Some 54 people have been arrested since the Paris terror attacks. One of those detained was Dieudonne, who has been prosecuted for anti-Semitic jokes in the past. He ran afoul of the laws by posing a Facebook statement that he felt like “Charlie Coulibaly” — merging the names of Charlie Hebdo and Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who killed four hostages at a Jewish deli.

Not surprisingly, cartoonists and comedians seem especially vulnerable under new speech codes. For example, comedian Sabina Guzzanti was put under criminal investigation for joking at a rally that “in 20 years, the pope will be where he ought to be — in hell, tormented by great big poofter (gay) devils, and very active ones.”

Western leaders have increasingly spoken out against the dangers of free speech. For politicians, free speech an abstraction, the consequences of free speech tend to be more tangible in the form of riots and murders. Of course, we would not need free speech protections for popular speech. It is in the protection of unpopular speech that defines a nation. While much of that speech can be hateful, it can also be transformative and illuminating on subjects of orthodoxy or the government itself. It is no accident that the vast majority of violent incidents are reactions to criticism of religion. Silencing these voices does not resolve any divisions. It creates the false appearance of agreement as those divisions remain and fester under the surface. Yet, forced silence is still appealing to many in government. After the 2012 murders, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon warned that “when some people use this freedom of expression to provoke or humiliate some others’ values and beliefs, then this cannot be protected.” Likewise, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard told the United Nations, “Our tolerance must never extend to tolerating religious hatred.” President Obama told the body that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

For free speech advocates that future looks pretty bleak. Even when comments are themselves an expression of religious faith, Western government have cracked down on the speakers. For example, in Poland, Catholic magazine Gosc Niedzielny was fined $11,000 for inciting “contempt, hostility and malice” by comparing the abortion of a woman to the medical experiments at Auschwitz. Likewise, a legislator in Austria, a publisher in India and a city councilman in Finland were prosecuted for calling Mohammed a “pedophile” because of his marriage to 6-year-old Aisha (which was consummated when she was 9).

Some countries are now leading the West in the regulation of speech to deter people from publishing insulting or disparaging comments. Consider a few such examples.

France

• French court found fashion designer John Galliano guilty of making discriminatory comments in a Paris bar, where he got into a cursing match with a couple using sexist and anti-Semitic terms.

• France made the denial of the Turkish genocide of Armenians a crime but in 2012 a French court struck down the law. However, it remains a crime to deny that the Holocaust occurred.

• Famed actress Brigitte Bardot was convicted for saying in 2006 that Muslims were ruining France in a letter to then-Interior Minister (and now President) Nicolas Sarkozy.

• In 2008, leading French author Pierre Péan, was put on trial (he was later acquitted) for racial hatred for derogatory things said about Tutsis in a book about Rwandan genocide. The case was based on four pages of the books in which Péan described Tutsis as having a culture of lies and deceit.

• In 2013, a mother was convicted of “glorifying a crime” after she named her son “Jihad” and then dressed the three-year-old in a sweater with the words “Je suis une bombe – I am a bomb” on the front, along with his name and ‘Born on September 11th’ on the back. He son was born on September 11, 2009.

England

• In Britain, for instance, a 15-year-old girl was arrested two years ago for burning a Koran.

• A 15-year-old boy was detained for holding up a sign outside a Scientology building declaring, “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.”

• An aide to British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was arrested for “inciting religious hatred” at his gym by shouting obscenities about Jews while watching news reports of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

• A Baptist street preacher, Dale McAlpine was charged with causing “harassment, alarm or distress” after a homosexual police community support officer overheard him stating that he viewed homosexuality to be a sin.

• Barry Thew, 39, was convicted after he wore a handmade tee shirt with offensive anti-police words saying“One Less PiG Perfect Justice” and “KiLL A COP 4 Fun.co.uk HA, haaa?”

• In 2013, Sandwich shop owner Neil Phillips, 44, was arrested, his computer seized, and questioned for hours because he merely made a joke about Nelson Mandela clinging to life. Phillips was writing about his problems with his computer online when he quipped “My PC takes so long to shut down I’ve decided to call it Nelson Mandela.”

Canada

• Comedian Guy Earle was found guilty of violating the human rights of a lesbian couple after he got into a trash-talking session with a group of women during an open-mike night at a nightclub.

• Marc Lemire, the webmaster of a far-right political site, was punished for allowing third parties to leave insulting comments about homosexuals and blacks on the site. Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that “the minimal harm caused . . . to freedom of expression is far outweighed by the benefit it provides to vulnerable groups and to the promotion of equality.”

• “The Rev. Stephen Boission and the Concerned Christian Coalition for anti-gay speech, censured future speech that the commission deemed inappropriate.” While the Human Right Commission found “no direct victim . . . has come forward,” it still ordered damages paid to a college professor to brought the complaint and ordered the defendants to stop any future such “disparaging remarks.”

• In 2008, right-wing publisher Ezra Levant investigated by a tribunal for his publication of the Danish Mohammed cartoons for “advocating hatemongering cartoons in the media” and allegations from a Muslim that he was “defaming me and my family because we follow and are related to Prophet Mohammed.”

• In 2008, Maclean Magazine was charged with hate speech for publishing an article written by Mark Steyn entitled Why the Future Belongs to Islam. The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, demanded answers on why a few pages of the book were viewed as derogatory by complaining Muslims.

These cases represent more than a lack of support for free speech. They represent a comprehensive assault on free speech. Indeed, one of the world leaders proudly proclaiming support for free speech in Paris was banned the publication of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Yalcin Akdogan called the use of the prophet’s image on the magazine an act of “sedition and provocation.”
While the United States has fared better under First Amendment jurisprudence, the voices of speech regulation have been heard here as well. Recently, after a rodeo clown wore an Obama mask, there were calls for a hate crime investigation. There have also been efforts to ban advertisements criticizing Israel in subways, which were overturned by the courts. More worrisome was the support of the Obama Administration of a United Nations resolution that affirmed the right of countries to criminalize anti-religious speech to avoid “incitement.” The law was widely denounced as a new type of blasphemy law drafted by Muslim nations allied with the United States. Muslim countries have long sought to convince the West that speech is an act of incitement – a premise that runs against the very grain of free speech. Resolution 16/18 succeeded in allying the United States and other Western countries with the notion of speech as a form of violence – an alternative definition for what remain blasphemy prosecutions.

The greatest tragedy in the aftermath of the Paris massacre is that few are truly “standing with Charlie” in the Western world. It was a moving moment to see millions gather under the famous statue depicting Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. However, the terrible truth is that when you sacrifice liberty in the name of equality and fraternity, you inevitably end up with none of the three.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University and the host of http://www.jonathanturley.org, a leading free speech blog.

http://jonathanturley.org/2015/02/06/charlies-false-friends/

Here we go again. Writers, cartoonists and Jews are attacked and killed, this time in Copenhagen. Shooter was heard shouting Alahu Akbar which we all know is Arabic for no Islam to see here.


Copenhagen shootings: two people dead after gun assaults at synagogue and cafe – rolling report

http://www.theguardian.com/world/li...ogue-follows-shootings-at-cafe-rolling-report

Living History
by Mark Steyn
Steyn on the World
February 18, 2015


1176.jpg

In the Libyan desert, Islamic State officials burn "un-Islamic" drum kits.


Even the Obammyboppers of an otherwise adoring media seem to understand his big conference on "countering violent extremism" is a bit of a joke.

Undeterred, President Obama has unveiled the summit's bumper sticker: "Religions Don't Kill People. People Killed People." It got him through to the next round in the middle-school debate-team county quarter-finals, so who knows the impact it will have on the Islamic State. I'm thrilled to discover that my tax dollars are now going to fund something called the http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-wp-blm-news-bc-terror-summit-comment18-20150218-story.html. Seriously. It's in Abu Dhabi. But perhaps we can open a branch office in Mosul, and Derna, and Sana'a and Kandahar and Copenhagen. One is reminded of the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence. Indeed, given the style and production values that the Islamic State have brought to Islamic snuff videos, perhaps this conference could prevail on the Oscars to introduce an Academy Award for Outstanding Excellence in the Field of Extremism.

Marie Harf, meanwhile, assures CNN that her argument is "http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/02/18/state-department-spokeswoman-call-for-using-jobs-to-combat-terror-too-nuanced/" for you rubes to appreciate, with its exciting plans for community-college retraining programs in al-Baghdadi and midnight basketball in Raqaa. Sure, they don't have enough basketballs, so they have to use severed heads. But c'mon, it's a start...

If you want the difference between the worldview that sets up an International Center for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Extremism and the real world distilled to a single Tweet, consider this contribution from senior pajama boy at Vox.com, Max Fisher:

People who think Christian sectarian militias are the solution to Iraq's problems could stand to read a history of the Lebanese civil war.

Richard Fernandez does a pretty good job analyzing the particular defects of this comparison, but give Mr Fisher credit: when it comes to preening, condescending analogy-deployment, at least, unlike the President, he's come up with one that's within living memory.

Rather than the substance of his "argument", it's the near perfect metaphorical selfie-stick of preening attitudinal pose I find most interesting. As it happens, being an old-school imperialist, I read a lot of history. No doubt I "could stand to read" more, as Fisher advises. Before the civil war, Beirut was known as "the Paris of the east". Then things got worse. As worse and worser as they got, however, it was not in-your-face genocidal, with regular global broadcasts of mass beheadings and live immolations. In that sense, the salient difference between Lebanon then and ISIS now is the mainstreaming of depravity. Which is why the analogies don't apply. We are moving into a world of horrors beyond analogy.

A lot of things have gotten worse. If Beirut is no longer the Paris of the east, Paris is looking a lot like the Beirut of the west - with regular, violent, murderous sectarian attacks accepted as a feature of daily life. In such a world, we could all "stand to read" a little more history. But in Nigeria, when you're in the middle of history class, Boko Haram kick the door down, seize you and your fellow schoolgirls and sell you into sex slavery. Boko Haram "could stand to read" a little history, but their very name comes from a corruption of the word "book" - as in "books are forbidden", reading is forbidden, learning is forbidden, history is forbidden.

Well, Nigeria... Wild and crazy country, right? Oh, I don't know. A half-century ago, it lived under English Common Law, more or less. In 1960 Chief Nnamdi Azikiwe, second Governor-General of an independent Nigeria, was the first Nigerian to be appointed to the Queen's Privy Council. It wasn't Surrey, but it wasn't savagery.

Like Lebanon, Nigeria got worse, and it's getting worser. That's true of a lot of places. In the Middle East, once functioning states - whether dictatorial or reasonably benign - are imploding. In Yemen, the US has just abandoned its third embassy in the region. According to the President of Tunisia, one third of the population of Libya has fled to Tunisia. That's two million people. According to the UN, just shy of four million Syrians have fled to Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and beyond. In Iraq, Christians and other minorities are forming militias because they don't have anywhere to flee (Syria? Saudia Arabia?) and their menfolk are facing extermination and their women gang-rapes and slavery.

These people "could stand to read" a little history, too. But they don't have time to read history because they're too busy living it: the disintegration of post-World War Two Libya; the erasure of the Anglo-French Arabian carve-up; the extinction of some of the oldest Christian communities on earth; the metastasizing of a new, very 21st-century evil combining some of the oldest barbarisms with a cutting-edge social-media search-engine optimization strategy.

These are Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, citizens of some of the most unlovely polities of the planet. But they had lives - homes, possessions, cars, children in schools, favorite restaurants... Twelve years ago, I drove through al-Baghdadi, now seized by the Islamic State and where 45 people were apparently burned alive by ISIS the other day. It was a dump but it had streets and stores. I bought some warm, sugary soda from the local market and had a reasonably pleasant social interaction, and then motored on down the Euphrates.

When you're living history as opposed to reading it, the trick is knowing when to head for the exit. One of the things I appreciate about, say, Mittel Europeans of a certain age is that, when you meet them in their grand Paris apartments or rambling house on the edge of Hampstead Heath, somewhere deep inside is the memory of the 3am knock on the door or a little boy crouched under the eaves in the attic. A couple of years back, at a very agreeable cocktail party, I found myself talking to a Hungarian Jew about the last days of the war in Budapest. The jig was up but the German puppet regime had figured they might as well kill as many Jews as they could. No time for niceties any more - for trains and camps and paperwork. There was a shortage of ammunition, so they tied the Jews together in a line, dragged them out into the Danube, and then shot the ones at each end. Everyone in between drowned. Aware of what was happening, a family took in my friend and hid him. He now enjoys a prosperous and comfortable life in the United States, but in his core, deep down within, he remembers his teenage self living day to day and never knowing whether the next morning would be his turn to be roped out in the river.

Much of the world thinks it's beyond all that stuff. Ukraine has a border with the European Union, and many of its citizens assumed that their future lay westward - eventual EU membership, and a Ukrainian flag at tedious Euro-summits listening to Brussels commissioners discoursing on beefed-up regulations on the curvature of cucumbers. Now in southern and eastern Ukraine a little short of a million people have fled. Like the Libyans and Syrians, they have reached that moment when you leave behind everything in your life except what's necessary for the journey and a couple of treasured photographs.

Why should that stop at the EU border? Laura Rosen Cohen is forceful and impassioned about those Europeans who object to Netanyahu's call for Continental Jews to leave for Israel. In the most basic sense, she is right: Jews have no future in Europe - because the actions necessary to restore normality to Jewish community life on the Continent will never be taken by its ruling elites. But incremental evil is not as instantly clarifying as ISIS riding into Benghazi and running their black flag up the pole outside City Hall. Jews cannot safely ride the Paris metro with identifying marks of their faith, or walk the streets of Amsterdam, or send their children to school in Toulouse, or attend a bat mitzvah in Copenhagen. As much as those Nigerians and Libyans and Yemenis and Ukrainians, Europe's Jews are living history rather than reading it. They are living through a strange, freakish coda to the final solution that, quietly and remorselessly, is finishing the job: the total extinction of Jewish life in Europe - and not at the hands of baying nationalist Aryans but a malign alliance of post-national Eutopians and Islamic imperialists. Sure, it'd be nice to read a book - maybe Obama could recommend one on the Crusades. But you've got to be careful: in France, in 2015, you can be beaten up for being seen with the wrong kind of book on public transportation. As Max Fisher says, we could all stand to read a little history, and the Jewish Museum in Brussels has a pretty good bookstore, but, if you swing by, try not to pick one of the days when they're shooting visitors.

This is Europe now, 2015. What will 2016 bring, and 2020, 2025? And yet France or Denmark is all you've ever known; you own a house, you've got a business, a pension plan, savings accounts... How much of all that are you going to be able to get out with? These are the same questions the Continent's most integrated Jews - in Germany - faced 80 years ago. Do you sell your home in a hurry and take a loss? Or maybe in a couple of years it'll all blow over. Or maybe it won't, and in five years the house price will be irrelevant because you'll be scramming with a suitcase. Or maybe in ten years you won't be able to get out at all - like the Yazidi or those Copts.

If you're living history as opposed to reading it in a sophomoric chatroom with metrosexual eunuch trustiefundies, these are the calculations you make - in Mosul, in Raqaa, in Sirte, in Sana'a, in Donetsk, in Malmö, Rotterdam, Paris...

In my book After America (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available for the Boko Haram warlord in your family), I write:

For all the economic growth since World War Two, much of the world had gone backwards – almost the whole of West Africa, and Central Africa, and Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Bosnia. Yet none of the elite asked themselves a simple question: What's to stop that spreading? In a world after America, the reprimitivization of the map would accelerate: The new Jew-hating Sweden… The French banlieues where the state's writ ceased to run… Clapton, East London, where Shayna Bharuchi cut out her four-year old daughter's heart while listening to an MP3 of the Koran…

We could all stand to read some history. Alas...

Reprimitivized man lives in an eternal present tense, in the dystopia of the moment.

History is written by the victors, and from West Africa to the Hindu Kush the victors are illiterate.

And in the halls of power the "leader of the free world" gives exclusive interviews to favored nuancy boys in which they can backslap each other about the sophisticated rationale behind their inertia. Boko Haram hate books, so it probably wouldn't help to carpet-bomb them with the latest Fareed Zakaria opus. The Islamic State is destroying musical instruments, so parachuting in James Taylor is unlikely to work - because, although his cheery rendition of "You've Got A Friend" can light up a room, in Ramadi the room would light up him. So the global hyperpower has been reduced to convening a symposium on whether they need to open up more community-college scholarships at the new Center for Outstanding Achievement in Analogies of Extremism.

http://www.steynonline.com/6818/living-history

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions (Opinions)
Crusaders and appeasers
Was8902198.jpg

US President Barack Obama speaks before signing the Clay Hunt Suicide Prevention for American Veterans Act, H.R. 203, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, February 12, 2015. (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/charles-krauthammer (<div class="bbImageWrapper js-lbImage" title="imrs.php" data-src="/community/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-apps%2Fimrs.php%3Fsrc%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.theblaze.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F11%2FCharles-Krauthammer.jpg%26h%3D80%26w%3D80&amp;hash=1ec841581ff4481f1bfd9b10f24f366d" data-lb-sidebar-href="" data-lb-caption-extra-html="" data-single-image="1"> <img src="/community/proxy.php?image=http%3A%2F%2Fimg.washingtonpost.com%2Fwp-apps%2Fimrs.php%3Fsrc%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.theblaze.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2013%2F11%2FCharles-Krauthammer.jpg%26h%3D80%26w%3D80&amp;hash=1ec841581ff4481f1bfd9b10f24f366d" data-url="http://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=http://www.theblaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Charles-Krauthammer.jpg&amp;h=80&amp;w=80" class="bbImage" data-zoom-target="1" style="" alt="imrs.php" title="" width="" height="" loading="lazy" /> </div>)
By http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/charles-krauthammer (Charles Krauthammer) Opinion writer February 12


His secretary of defense says, “The world is exploding all over.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/15/christopher-lee-cornell-the-man-who-allegedly-plotted-to-attack-u-s-capitol-fulfilling-the-directives-of-violent-jihadists/ (His attorney general says) that the threat of terror “keeps me up at night.” The world bears them out. On Tuesday, American hostage Kayla Mueller is confirmed dead. On Wednesday, the U.S. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/british-embassy-in-yemen-closes-evacuates-staff-amid-chaos/2015/02/11/68952550-b1ae-11e4-bf39-5560f3918d4b_story.html (evacuates its embassy in Yemen), a country cited by President Obama last September as an American success in fighting terrorism.

Yet Obama’s reaction to, shall we say, turmoil abroad has been one of alarming lassitude and passivity.

Not to worry, http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-national-security-strategy-stresses-alliances-american-values/2015/02/06/fa69c174-ad8b-11e4-abe8-e1ef60ca26de_story.html (says his national security adviser): This is not World War II. As if one should be reassured because the current chaos has yet to achieve the level of the most devastating conflict in human history. Indeed, insists the president, the real source of our metastasizing anxiety is . . . the news media.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/day-before-crucial-ukrainian-peace-summit-heavy-fighting-in-nations-east/2015/02/10/59570e34-b12f-11e4-bf39-5560f3918d4b_story.html (Russia pushes) deep into eastern Ukraine. The Islamic State burns to death a Jordanian pilot. Iran extends its hegemony over four Arab capitals — Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/yemen-rebels-shut-parliament-as-forces-close-grip-on-leadership/2015/02/06/862d91fa-ae17-11e4-8876-460b1144cbc1_story.html (and now Sanaa).

And America watches. Obama calls the policy “http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2015_national_security_strategy.pdf.” That’s a synonym for “inaction,” made to sound profoundly “strategic.”

Take Russia. The only news out of Obama’s one-hour news conference with Angela Merkel this week was that he still can’t make up his mind whether to supply Ukraine with defensive weapons. The Russians have sent in T-80 tanks and Grad rocket launchers. We’ve sent in humanitarian aid that includes blankets, MREs and psychological counselors.

How complementary: The counselors do grief therapy for those on the receiving end of the T-80 tank fire. “I think the Ukrainian people can feel confident that we have stood by them,” said Obama at the news conference.

Indeed. And don’t forget the blankets. America was once the arsenal of democracy, notes Elliott Abrams. We are now its linen closet.

Why no antitank and other defensive weapons? Because we are afraid that arming the victim of aggression will anger the aggressor.

Such on-the-ground appeasement goes well with the linguistic appeasement whereby Obama dares not call radical Islam by name. And whereby both the White House and State Department spend much of a day insisting that the attack on the kosher grocery in Paris had nothing to do with Jews. It was just, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/white-house-struggles-with-obama-comment-on-paris-attack/2015/02/10/2aace718-b17d-11e4-bf39-5560f3918d4b_story.html (as the president said), someone “randomly shoot[ing] a bunch of folks in a deli.” (By the end of the day, the administration backed off this idiocy. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/02/10/does-obama-believe-the-threat-of-terrorism-is-overstated/ (By tweet).)

This passivity — strategic, syntactical, ideological — is more than just a reaction to the perceived overreach of the Bush years. Or a fear of failure. Or bowing to the domestic left. It is, above all, rooted in Obama’s deep belief that we — America, Christians, the West — lack the moral authority to engage, to project, i.e., to lead.

Before we condemn the atrocities of others, http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obamas-speech-at-prayer-breakfast-called-offensive-to-christians/2015/02/05/6a15a240-ad50-11e4-ad71-7b9eba0f87d6_story.html (intoned Obama at the National Prayer Breakfast), we shouldn’t “get on our high horse.” We should acknowledge having authored the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, etc. “in the name of Christ.”

In a rare rhetorical feat, Obama managed to combine the banal and the repulsive. After all, is it really a revelation that all religions have transgressed, that man is fallen? To the adolescent Columbia undergrad, that’s a profundity. To a roomful of faith leaders, that’s an insult to one’s intelligence.

And in deeply bad taste. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/slain-pilots-father-expect-us-jordan-to-take-revenge-on-islamic-state-militants/2015/02/04/b5c96b50-abe7-11e4-9c91-e9d2f9fde644_story.html (A coalition POW is burned alive) and the reaction of the alliance leader barely 48 hours later is essentially: “Hey, but what about Joan of Arc?”

The conclusion to this patronizing little riff — http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/02/06/obamas-remarks-on-religious-intolerance-in-india-provoke-outrage/ (a gratuitous and bizarre attack on India) as an example of religious intolerance — received less attention than it merited. India? Our largest and most strategically promising democratic ally — and the most successful multiethnic, multilingual, multiconfessional country on the planet? (Compare India to, oh, its colonial twin, Pakistan.)

There is, however, nothing really new in Obama’s selective condemnation of America and its democratic allies. It is just a reprise of the theme of his post-inauguration 2009 confessional world tour. From Strasbourg to Cairo and the U.N. General Assembly, he indicted his own country, http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/017/056lfnpr.asp?nopager=1 (as I chronicled at the time), “for arrogance, for dismissiveness and derisiveness (toward Europe), for maltreatment of natives, for torture, for Hiroshima, for Guantánamo, for unilateralism, and for insufficient respect for the Muslim world.”

The purpose and the effect of such an indictment is to undermine any moral claim to American world leadership. The line between the Washington prayer breakfast and the Ukrainian grief counselors is direct and causal. Once you’ve discounted your own moral authority, once you’ve undermined your own country’s moral self-confidence, you cannot lead.

If, during the very week Islamic supremacists achieve “peak barbarism” with the immolation of a helpless prisoner, you cannot take them on without apologizing for sins committed a thousand years ago, you have prepared the ground for strategic paralysis.

All that’s left is to call it strategic patience.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-is-the-president-in-a-time-of-conflict/2015/02/12/c0c6d0ba-b2ea-11e4-827f-93f454140e2b_story.html

Charlie Hebdo's dead editor in posthumous attack on left-wing French intellectuals

Unity in wake of Charlie Hebdo attack put to test as slain editor publishes book from beyond the grave attacking France's intellectuals as "disgusting" for suggesting he should tone down satirical cartoons


Stephane-Charbonni_3268932b.jpg

French cartoonist Charb who was the publishing director of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo Photo: Jacky Naegelen/Reuters


By Henry Samuel, Paris

7:06PM BST 15 Apr 2015



Left-wing intellectuals in France who leapt to Charlie Hebdo's defence after the Paris terror attacks are guilty of "disgusting paternalism", the satirical weekly's slain editor claims in a posthumous book.

Stéphane Charbonnier's message from beyond the grave will rock the sense of national unity in the wake of the attacks in and around the French capital, which saw three terrorists gun down 17 people before being killed.

Charb, as he was known, finished Lettre Ouverte aux Escrocs de l'Islamophobie qui Font le Jeu des Racistes (Open Letter to the Fraudsters of Islamophobia who Play into Racists' Hands) just two days before he was among 12 killed in the first attack by Islamist extremists to "avenge" the publication of drawings of the Prophet.

The book accuses the media of fomenting hatred against the magazine and the former Right-wing French president Nicolas Sarkozy of "freeing up" racism in France.

It slams Islamists who apply the Koran to the letter as if they were "putting up Ikea shelves", and are ready to "cut the infidel's throats along the dotted line otherwise God will deprive me of Club Med in the afterlife".

But it saves its heaviest salvos for Left-leaning intellectuals, described as "ridiculous demagogues" for accusing Charlie Hebdo of going too far by publishing drawings of Mohammad. Many then joined mass street demonstrations after his death under the 'Je Suis Charlie' banner.

"The suggestion that you can laugh at everything, except certain aspects of Islam, because Muslims are much more susceptible that the rest of the population, what is that, if not discrimination?," it asks.

"It's time to finish with this disgusting paternalism of the white, left-wing bourgeois intellectual seeking to prove himself among the 'poor unfortunate undereducated'," it goes on.


Seeking to explain what he saw as intellectuals' condescension masquerading as solidarity, Charb writes: "Since I am educated, I understand that Charlie Hebdo is using humour. But out of respect for you [Muslims], since you haven't yet discovered second-degree humour, I will denounce these Islamophobic drawings that I pretend not to understand. I will put myself at your level to show that I love you.

"These ridiculous demagogues just have a huge need to be the centre of attention and want to satisfy their formidable fantasy to dominate others."

Charb's book, extracts of which are to appear in L'Obs, the weekly magazine on Thursday, risks adding fuel to an already fraught debate over the treatment of Islam and secularism in France. The magazine conceded that the late editor's stance was "both ultra brave but sometimes very bloody minded".

Charlie Hebdo defends the right to mock all religions, Islam included, but insists it targets Islamists rather than Islam as a whole.

Critics argue its drawings exacerbate discrimination against Muslims at a time when they already feel under attack from the rise of the far-Right Front National.

Charb insists that victims of racism in France will remain so whatever religion they choose to believe in.

He writes: "Those who accuse Charlie Hebdo's cartoonist of Islamophobia every time a figure in them has a beard are not only showing dishonesty or gratuitous bad faith, they are displaying support for so-called radical Islam."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/wor...attack-on-left-wing-French-intellectuals.html

Charlie Hebdo attack
Belfast ‘shamed’ after university cancels Charlie Hebdo conference


Northern Irish author Robert McLiam Wilson criticises Queen’s University Belfast after it calls off discussion of the killings in Paris for security reasons


Flowers and pens in Paris commemorate the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in January, in which 12 people were killed. Queen’s University Belfast has cancelled a conference on the shootings, over security fears. Photograph: Michael Bunel/Michael Bunel/NurPhoto/Corbis

Henry McDonald
Wednesday 22 April 2015 13.24 BST Last modified on Thursday 23 April 2015 00.27 BST



An award-winning novelist has said he is ashamed of his native city because of the decision by Queen’s University Belfast to cancel an academic conference on the Charlie Hebdo massacre for security reasons.

Robert McLiam Wilson, the Paris-based author of Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street, described the cancellation of the event in the face of an unspecified security threat as “not cowardice or surrender. It is part of a long defeat in an unfought war.”

McLiam Wilson, who writes for the French satirical magazine, said he could not believe that a city like Belfast that had endured decades of violence would call off the conference.

Speaking from his home in Paris, the author, who was born in west Belfast, said: “I am feeling a touch of shame today. Cancelling such an event in the face of putative menace in a city that endured a 30-year torture of self-immolation seems worse than pusillanimous. Belfast? Seriously? This is not the city I remember. This cancellation says, with trumpeting clarity, that there is no debate because there can be no debate. There is a big boat that can’t be rocked.”

He added: “Charlie Hebdo is anti plenty of things. But it is not anti-Arab or anti-Israeli or anti-immigrant. No one gets more grief than Front National leader Marine Le Pen and loopy rightwinger Nicolas Sarkozy. If you speak French, it’s pretty hard to deny what Charlie really is. It is, monotonously, rigorously and sometimes unamusingly anti-arsehole. I am beyond proud to write for Charlie. And not, today, so proud of the city of my birth.”

The novelist has been living in Paris for more than a decade and has written three books in English. Eureka Street was adapted for BBC television in 1999 and is partly set in the Holylands district close to Queen’s University. McLiam Wilson has also written a television documentary on paramilitary punishment attacks in Belfast and recently recorded an essay for Radio 4 about his love for Paris in the aftermath of the attack by two gunmen on the Charlie Hebdo offices in January, in which 12 people were killed.

A conference to discuss the implications of the attack on the magazine involving academics, novelists, journalists and commentators was due to take place at the Queen’s University institute for collaborative research in the humanities in June.

The institute claimed that the university’s vice-chancellor, Patrick Johnston, had cancelled the event because of the security risk and concerns for the university’s reputation.

An email circulated by the institute this week said: “The vice-chancellor at Queen’s University Belfast has made the decision just this morning that he does not wish our symposium to go ahead.

“He is concerned about the security risk for delegates and about the reputation of the university.”

On Wednesday, Queen’s University denied that the cancellation of the conference had anything to do with academic freedom.

A spokesperson said: “As part of managing the health and safety of the institution it is a requirement for all major events to have a full risk assessment completed prior to them going ahead on the campus. Unfortunately, the proposed symposium organised by the institute for collaborative research in the humanities did not have a completed risk assessment and as a result the institute has cancelled the event.

“This issue is not related to academic freedom and Queen’s continues to uphold the importance of academic freedom in a world-class institution and has demonstrated this over many years.”

However, locally based writers have joined McLiam Wilson in condemning the cancellation.

The Irish poet and playwright Damian Gorman, who has taught at Queen’s University, said: “While I’d like to, I don’t believe in the absolute freedom to do or say whatever you want to wherever you want. I wouldn’t, for example, defend someone’s right to light up in an oil refinery – literally or metaphorically.

“But, in saying that, I just don’t understand why Queen’s won’t have a conference looking at the Charlie Hebdo attacks in the round. Is that not the sort of thing universities are for?”

The award-winning Belfast-based Irish blogger Alan Meban accused the university of being influenced by commercial considerations.

“QUB has outposts internationally and perhaps there are fears for the security of staff and students. However, QUB’s reference to ‘reputation’ in their cancellation implies a worry about their ability to attract funding from overseas investors, particularly international students who pay premium fees.

“We need our universities to stand up for learning, reflection and free speech, rather than being bound up by bursars and budgets,” said the author of the Alan in Belfast blog.
 

Sponsors

Latest posts

Back
Top