Freedom of Speech

"After a terrible year in 2014, it's a terrible start for press freedom in the world."
"It is journalistic entities that challenge power structures in their societies that are attacked. [Wednesday's Charlie Hebdo shooting] conforms to that form of attack, but in this case it happened in Paris, so it was shocking."
Vincent Peyregne, chief executive officer, World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, Paris

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo will go to print next week, in defiance of Wednesday's Islamist attack

International journalism has suffered even more than usual in the year just passed. Countries like Russia and Turkey are well recognized as news-suppressors and journalist-oppressors. The news is usually published to conform to the expectations of autocratic and dictatorial regimes. And in countries like Syria, at war within itself in a sectarian struggle of hellish dimensions, news gathering is not only hideously difficult, it is extremely dangerous.

Journalists have been infamously beheaded by the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham, just as Daniel Pearl was years previously when al-Qaeda was making its full entrance as an Islamofascist jihadist movement. Faced with the malignant threat that Islamist terrorists represent it is a hugely determined journalist who will report the unvarnished truth of what occurs in those cesspools of degraded human action.

Only when journalists left Gaza during the Israel-Hamas wars did some courageous journalists report the truth about Hamas's manipulation of Palestinians as propaganda fodder. Informing a rather disinterested world of Hamas firing off rockets from within civilian enclaves, then weeping crocodile tears when the IDF responded as planned, gifting Hamas with the propaganda tools it craves to give the world reason to condemn Israel.

The few journalists who have entered the confines of the Islamic State Caliphate have viewed a cleansed version of life under the Sunni Islamists, writing their exposes in a conflicted accounting that veers back and forth between condemnation and expiation. Those who present as useful fools will have their lives preserved; those who intend to write their perception of unvarnished reality are used as propaganda devices of horror.

Ian Hislop who edits Private Eye, Britain's satirical magazine of note, has condemned the "murderous attack on free speech in the heart of Europe", mourning the "very high price for exercising their comic liberty" exacted by fanatical jihadists on the staff of Charlie Hebdo. But he and his colleagues will without doubt now tone down their satirical commentary in hopes of fending off any rage directed their way as offenders of Islam.

Already CNN and The New York Times and others have exercised their options to protect themselves from anything resembling the carnage that hit Paris on Wednesday, opting not to publish anything so reckless as the cartoons that the slaughtered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists like Stephane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski, Bernard Maris, Bernard Verhac and Jean Cabut among others created that so infuriates the Islamists.

But they remain, needless to say, champions of freedom of speech.

Six of the Charlie Hebdo journalists and staff members killed in Wednesday's attack are pictured together in this photo, taken in 2000. Circled top from left is Philippe Honore, Georges Wolinski, Bernard Maris and Jean Cabut. Below them on the stairs, from left, is editor Stephane Charbonnier and cartoonist Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac