In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, some people taking up the cause of the publication would, before the massacre, have been its ideal prime targets — like Marine Le Pen, or, in this case, Pamela Geller and the American Freedom Defense Initiative. AFDI held a “Draw the Prophet” Cartoon Contest in the Curtis…
When I heard that the writers Deborah Eisenberg, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Rachael Kushner and Taiye Salasi had publically withdrawn from their roles as table hosts for PEN America’s annual gala in protest over the organization’s decision to award Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage Award, my first reaction was to cringe…
What started out as an unusual debate on primetime television between French president Francois Hollande and five teenagers about to vote for the first time, took an even stranger turn when they argued for several minutes whether or not it’s OK to laugh at the Holocaust. The round-table discussion took place Sunday, during the and…
Carlos Latuff – Second place winner at the 2006 International Holocaust Cartoon Contest Let’s face it: When Iran announced it would be holding its second International Holocaust Cartoon Contest in May, it was nothing but cheap provocation. That’s it. You don’t have to be a cartoonist — as I am — to take issue with this…
● Soumission By Michel Houellebecq French and European Publications Inc, 320 pages, $49.95 Though it pretends to be about France’s near future, Michel Houellebecq’s controversial “Soumission” is also about its recent past. Set in the year 2022, the novel portrays a country riven by conflicting ideologies and worldviews, teetering on the edge of civil war….
President Obama may have a fine plan in the works for combating what he calls “violent extremism,” but he doesn’t do the cause any good by tiptoeing around the problem. There are many sources of violent extremism in the world, but there’s basically just one that’s terrorizing vast sections of humanity right now, and that’s…
Je Suis Copenhagen meme via Twitter The worst part of this weekend’s horrifying terrorist attack in Copenhagen is, of course, that it happened at all, and resulted in the deaths of a young man guarding a synagogue and a film director attending a free-speech event. The second-worst part is that there is no reason it…
A teacher who taught at a French private high school for Muslims resigned because of rampant anti-Semitism and radicalism among his pupils. Soufiane Zitouni, a former teacher of philosophy at the Averroes high school in the city of Lille in northern France, revealed his reasons for quitting five months after beginning to teach there in…
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