Edit: Damn, did not expect this to turn into today’s struggle sesh.
Here’s my both sides/both sides take. Should people be executed for drawing, publishing or showing hateful cartoons? Probably not.
What grosses me out is how Enlightened Secular France has spent centuries colonizing and brutalizing muslims and continues to oppress them with discriminatory laws while acting like the entire point of Free Speech TM is the right to degrade a profoundly marginalized minority.
As someone brought up in this thread, the whole Mohammad cartoon controversy reminds me of the perennial debate “why would a black person get violent if you call them the n-word, it’s just a word.” Context matters, when you purposely provoke an oppressed minority by shoving the thing they find most offensive in their face, you may get a violent reaction.
I don’t think this guy deserves to die at all, but Charlie Hebdo is very racist and it’s gross how people rally around it like it’s this bastion of free speech.
That said, death to A Wyatt Mann. Inshallah.
No one deserved to die but all the peaceful Muslims don't deserve this display as a response to what this one murderer did either.
Yeah I guess.
I do think they should be shown, not all of them perhaps, but I think it's important. Government shouldn't do it.
Yes. Herein lies the problem.
Government is essentially encouraging something that bothers all muslims on account of the murderers. The result of this? Will be more murdering, but also the complete alienation of the peaceful muslims that might help. That alienation and lack of willingness to help will be noticed by other people and will turn into anti-muslim racism. That anti-muslim racism will create more sympathisers and extremists.
The result here is an incredibly divisive action that throws all muslims under the bus for the sake of stirring nationalist rhetoric and dividing the left between the people who are able to rationally work through why this is bad and the people who are having a reactionary emotion of "fuck them I support making this grand stand against it".
I am actually deeply suspicious that this is an op. It doesn't feel right.
They shouldn't be shown. These are quite frankly terrible. They won't convince anyone, they won't deracidalise or convert anyone. They're crude jokes, not part of a constructive dialogue.
If you shows these to innocent people you thing may be offended by it, you're an asshole. Laugh at them if you like, but once you start displaying them publically you're only making people's lives slightly worse.
Should it be illegal? No, but it ranges from insulting at best to racist and homophobic at worst.