Posted on 03/21/2007 6:43:23 AM PDT by ILikeFriedman
Modern Blasphemy By PHILIPPE VAL March 21, 2007; Page A19
PARIS -- A French court is tomorrow expected to decide whether I and the newspaper I edit, Charlie Hebdo, committed a crime by publishing cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. If the court finds me guilty of "publicly abusing a group of people because of their religion," in effect racism, as the organizations of French Muslims that are plaintiffs in this case claim, I could be imprisoned for six months and fined thousands of euros. A great deal is at stake, for free speech in France and Europe, in the outcome of this trial.
(See link for full article)
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
France doesn't have a First Amendment.
It is supremely ironic that the secular Leftist Euros are trying this guy for what is essentially a charge of blasphemy. These are the same people who are convinced that America has become a fundamentalist Christian theocracy under Bush.
Apparently they don't have Separation of Mosque and State either.
Doesn't have a lick of sense either.
It is interesting how french religion evolved - at one time the pope was french and part of the government.
Hitler made any criticism of the Nazi party illegal and in dictatorships like Cuba and Zimbabwe criticism of the ruling party, revolution etc. is also a crime.
Wasn't that called the Babylonian Captivity?
the Avignon Papacy, where the papal court got caught up in French politics and removed to the town of Avignon, has been called that, according to
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.
The Avignon Papacy refers to a period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church from 1309 to 1378 when the seat of the Pope was moved from Rome to Avignon. The period has been called the "Babylonian Captivity" (or "Babylonish Captivity") of the Popes (or the Church), particularly by Martin Luther. This nick-name is polemical, in that it refers to the claim by critics that the fabulous prosperity of the church at this time was accompanied by a profound compromise of the Papacy's spiritual integrity, especially in the alleged subordination of the powers of the Church to the ambitions of the Frankish emperor. Coincidentally, the "captivity" of the popes at Avignon lasted around the same duration as the exile of the Jews in Babylon, making the analogy all the more convenient and rhetorically potent.
Yeah, I just remember it was in a book I read not too long ago. It was described more as the Pope being a pawn of the French Gov't of the time. It lasted about 70 years and was supposed to happen during the time the Templars we're being brought down. If I remember the book correctly of course.
Multiculti "nations" require a police state just to keep the peace, that's one of the big attractions of multiculturalism to those forces that built it.
bump
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