Offense for Offense’s Sake

Our courts and our universities are full of people who have devoted some or all of their careers to free speech and free expression. The history of the idea, its justifications, its forms and its limits have been investigated, scrutinized and criticized countless times.

At some very general level, everyone is for it, of course. The devil – or, rather, the complexity – is in the details.

Those details didn’t seem to matter in the immediate aftermath of the assault on the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris.

That atrocity brought millions into the streets — in support of free speech and in solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims and the people killed in a nearly simultaneous assault on a kosher grocery store by the Porte de Vincennes.

It was a remarkable display: so many people, demonstrating forcefully and passionately – in behalf of a philosophical doctrine associated historically and conceptually with liberalism, arguably the wisest, but certainly the most soporific, ideology on the face of the earth.

Mass demonstrations in favor of good causes are always inspiring; the January 11 demonstration in Paris was particularly moving, if only for its size and the earnestness of its participants.

Although it was organized by the French government, not by opponents of the regime, it recalled a demonstration held in Paris during the student-worker uprisings of May 68.

Prompted by the deportation of the charismatic Danny the Red, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, people then took to the streets chanting: “Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands (we are all German Jews).” The slogan this time, as everybody knows, was: “Je suis Charlie.”

Evidently, before the onset of the neoliberal era, “nous (we),” not “je (I)” came more easily to mind. Mais quand même, solidarity is solidarity; the Paris demonstration was about as good as it gets these days.

Many of the world leaders who came to Paris for the event were among the world’s worst violators of the principles the masses of demonstrators were there to defend.   But even their hypocrisy, revolting as it was, could not deflect the demonstration’s positive impact.

Neither could the realization that equal or great atrocities are perpetrated regularly around the world – on non-European peoples.

There is Boko Haram, of course; but there is also the terrifying reality of American and European drones. They have become a fact of life for “insurgents” and civilians alike — from Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Syria and Iraq, to Yemen, and throughout East Africa.

And there is what Israel does to Gaza, acutely every two years or so and chronically all the time. The situation Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories face, from both the settlers and the Israeli army, is hardly better.

By nearly any measure, these crimes and others like them are more ghastly than...