You have to hand it to our government and media: they have conditioned Americans to not even smell the stench of blatant hypocrisy when it comes to “us” and our “allies.”  Even as Senator Lindsay Graham takes to the airwaves to rally the tribe here in the U.S. to put on our combat boots because we are in a “religious war” by people he claims are motivated by a religion that “require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted” . . . our good friends and allies, the Saudis, who are allegedly helping us fight these radicals in Syria “before they come back home and kill us all” . . .well, these good friends are beating their own citizens for offending their conservative brand of Islam.

A Saudi man named Raif Badawi was publicly beaten last week by a Saudi Interior Ministry official after being found guilty of insulting Islam, because of a website he started called “Free Saudi Liberals.”  He received 50 lashes by cane, and is sentenced to receive 50 a week until he fulfils his flogging part of the sentence: 1000 lashes.  Then, he is to serve a 10 year prison term.

While the Obama Administration was criticized here in the U.S. for not sending a higher ranking U.S. official to participate in the march of solidarity in Paris for freedom of speech and expression following the terrorist attack on the French paper Charlie Hebdo,  Saudi Arabia sent an ambassador to march with them in solidarity.  They were marching to show “solidarity” with the right to offend with free speech, even though the offending speech had been cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad, considered blasphemous by many Muslims.  They did this, after carrying out the first of 20 scheduled beatings of one of its own citizens for expressing differing views on the country’s conservative interpretation of Islam.

How is it possible that with a straight face, they can send a government official to march in France for “freedom of speech” when it brutalizes and imprisons its own citizenry for the practice of less offensive speech regarding Islam?

I guess their government officials are as good at lying or practicing obvious hypocrisy as Western government politicians are.

As I politely pointed out last week on this blog, France and other European countries don’t have the same kind of “free speech” we have here in the United States.  Specifically, they ban what they call “hate speech.”  As French officials proudly marched with proclaimed bravery for freedom of speech and expression, the French government also instructed its prosecutors to aggressively make arrests for people violating their laws on speech.  As a result, a popular Anti-Semitic comic in France named  Dieudonné M’bala M’bala was arrested and charged with “condoning terrorism.”  The New York Times reports that the comic had been arrested in France previously, nearly 40 times “on suspicion of violating antihate laws, for statements usually directed at Jews.”  Now he faces 7 years in prison for a Facebook post that the French are claiming condones terrorism.

(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/world/europe/french-rein-in-speech-backing-acts-of-terror.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&pgtype=article)

If there is any way to reinforce the perception among Muslims living in France that discrimination against Islam is in the national DNA, then surely jailing a comic for insulting Jews after marching to protect the lives of those who insult Muslims, is the way to go.  Good Job, France.

While CNN has reported on Saudi Arabia’s flogging of a blogger, and other U.S. media outlets have also reported it, it is a safe assumption that the story is still unknown to the majority of Americans.  This is part of the U.S. government and mainstream media’s sophisticated propaganda apparatus, which gives the appearance of a free press, while controlling the narrative that keeps most hypocrisy of the U.S. government and its allies invisible to the average American.

As I’ve pointed out before, U.S. officials regularly sell war on the grounds of “humanitarian” and “moral” obligations to protect the freedom of others suffering under foreign dictators – when they are not selling the war on lies about “weapons of mass destruction” or the desire of ISIS to enslave Americans or come back here and “kill us all.”  U.S. officials do this all the time, with rarely a challenge from the press about the U.S. government’s long and ongoing history of supporting brutal dictatorships world wide.

A screaming example immediately comes to mind:  The often repeated phrase about Saddam Hussein at the time Bush II administration officials were selling us a war based on lies to invade Iraq.  “He is a man who gassed his own people!” they told the American public.  They did this without telling the American public that when  Saddam gassed his own people, he did so with U.S. military aid, including the chemical weapons that were given to him by the U.S. to use against the Iranians.  The U.S. blocked United Nations efforts at the time to hold Hussein accountable.  Because at the time the “Butcher of Baghdad” was one of our guys.

Saudi Arabia has horrible human rights abuses, many towards women.  They are not often spoken of by U.S. officials, but when the U.S, government wants to continue the never ending war in Afghanistan, stories are retold in the U.S. press about how the Taliban doesn’t want to educate women.  It is not told along side stories about how women in the Saudi “Kingdom” are not allowed to drive automobiles.

Senator Lindsay Graham does not explain how “radical Islam” in Saudi Arabia that beats its own citizens and oppresses them politically, is different from the “radical Islam” he claims we are at war with.  To do so would make it hard to justify the billions of dollars in aid, much of military weaponry, that he supports giving to Middle Eastern dictators in Bahrain, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.

I suspect that in the coming months, France will pass more restricting legislation that resembles the United States’ cynically titled “Patriot Act,” which has allowed our freedom loving government to assassinate by drone strikes, U.S. citizens abroad deemed terrorists, and the unconstitutional, massive electronic surveillance being carried out by the NSA, as Edward Snowden revealed.  While we still have free speech in the United States, it is being carefully monitored by our government through the unlawful collection of our private emails, texts, and phone calls.  Mr. Snowden is now ironically trapped in Russia, because his whistleblowing “free speech” that exposed our government’s domestic spying program, is deemed “espionage.”  France is already off to a good start, jailing comics for “supporting terrorism.”

Welcome to the new age of fear and Orwellian government.  It’s stench is almost undetectable, and its hypocrisy nearly invisible.

 

 

 

 

The tragic murder of twelve people in France over the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons offensive to Islam, and the dramatic unfolding of the killing of the suspects by French authorities today, has set off lively debates across the media spectrum, and attracted the usual fear mongering suspects of American politicians eager to exploit this latest act of terrorism.

I believe free speech and freedom of the press to be one of the most important rights we have in the United States, and the murder of journalists, writers, cartoonists, editors, and others, rightfully causes outrage among anyone supportive of this fundamental pillar of free societies.  Various U.S. media outlets have debated whether or not to re-publish the cartoons that inspired the terrorist attack, rightfully concerned over the wisdom and safety of doing so.  There are many people  claiming that the media has an obligation to re-publish the cartoons, as an act of defiance against intimidation by those who wield violence to silence opposing viewpoints.  This position has merit, and I salute those who have the courage to re-publish cartoons that have the potential to provoke more violence.  However, I also respect the restraint shown by news organizations choosing not to show the offensive cartoons.  While speech should never be criminalized, it is also not necessary to deliberately pour fuel to the fire to prove one’s right to do so in the first place.  I understand and support both viewpoints and decisions.

It is worth noting though, that when a small time Florida preacher planned a Koran burning a few years back, the Obama administration made a quiet appeal for him to not do so, for fear of “endangering the troops abroad,” and most U.S. news organizations were in agreement of not “promoting” this Florida jackass to fame, should his actions lead to violence or riots.  I don’t recall the enthusiasm and call to bravery in support of free speech by the masses to support his Koran burning, to prove how much we love free speech.

It is also worth noting that in the United States, “free speech” is actually much more free than it is in our European counterpart nations.  “Hate speech,” as it is called, is banned throughout many Western European countries, France included.  In the United States, the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, has provided lawyers to protect the hate speech of white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan in the past.  Undoubtedly, many Muslim bashers will point to the terrorist attack on the French newspaper as proof of Islam’s “intolerance” towards Western values, conveniently omitting the hypocrisy of French tolerance towards speech within its borders that the mainstream consider offensive.  In an opinion piece in Politico.com, author Judah Grunstein, who has lived in France for the past fourteen years, points out this distinction between American ideas about free speech, and France’s, writing:

“Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all speech that can be considered an incitement to hate. That is something that very few Americans understand—or approve of.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-free-speech-offensive-114078.html#ixzz3OMIRtFGI

Among politicians in the United States, fear pedaling war monger, Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, wasted no time racing to the microphone to cast the incident as proof of a “religious war.”  Senator Graham, who has recently been sounding the panic horn about how the U.S. must send troops to Iraq and Syria to fight to keep ISIS from “coming back home and killing us all,” had this to say on Wednesday after the attack in Paris:

“We’re in a religious war. These are not terrorists. They’re radical Islamists who are trying to replace our way of life with their way of life. Their way of life is motivated by religious teachings that require me and you to be killed, or enslaved, or converted.”

Mr. Graham’s motivations to portray this and other conflicts in the Middle East as religious wars, with our freedom and safety in the U.S. threatened by a barbaric form of religion unmotivated by actual U.S. foreign policy, is just a continuation of overall U.S. government efforts to rally the tribe to continue to fight an endless “war on terror,” and keep us afraid enough to continue to allow the U.S. government to erode our freedom and civil liberties in the name of, ironically, “protecting freedom.”

Even as Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia to avoid being thrown in jail forever by the U.S. government, for revealing the truth about Washington’s unconstitutional, Orwellian, massive surveillance program being conducted by the N.S.A, former C.I.A. director Michael Hayden went on NBC’s the “Today” show and characterized the Paris attack as “the high end of the new genre of attacks” composed of “increased sophistication.”   This is following the very popular propaganda flowing from Washington that describes ISIS as “something like nothing we have ever seen before” and as a terrorist group so radical and  violent that “even Al Qaeda rejected them.”

If by sophisticated, Mr. Hayden means using guns to go on a shooting rampage to kill a bunch of innocent people, then it would appear that America has been full of sophisticated home grown terrorists for years.  Mass shootings and murders of innocent civilians are a regular event in the U.S., with the “soft targets” often being school children.  Despite the regularly occurring massacres at the hands of heavily armed gunmen, and despite polls showing that around 90 percent of Americans support a simple law requiring background  checks for all gun purchases – Congress has failed to act.  But when a crazed gunman is a Muslim in another country, we are warned of the “sophistication” of terrorist who threaten our way of life.

So, still no universal background checks to see if a criminal is attempting to purchase an AK-47 at a gunshow, but your emails, phone calls, texts, and other private information are still being collected by the federal government without search warrants to allegedly protect our “freedom”  from the sophisticated threat of Muslim terrorists with guns.  This is worth remembering in the days to come in which other war mongers in Congress will take to the airwaves to exploit the tragedy in Paris to call for more blood, treasure and sacrifice to fight the never ending war on terrorism, and conversation about our own government’s illegal eavesdropping on our free speech, is quietly overlooked.