BloguesRichard Martineau

Respirez par le nez – une réflexion

Arrêtons de nous excuser chaque fois que des Musulmans extrémistes s'excitent, et défendons la liberté d'expression, bordel!!!!

Une réflexion intéressante – et rafraîchissante ! – d'une journaliste du Washington Post sur la dernière crise d'hystérie des Islamistes…

Western politicians, writers, thinkers and speakers should stop apologizing — and start uniting.

By this, I don't mean that we all need to rush to defend or to analyze the Pope's sermon; I leave that to experts on Byzantine theology. But we can all unite in our support for freedom of speech — surely the pope is allowed to quote from medieval texts — and of the press. And we can also unite, loudly, in our condemnation of violent, unprovoked attacks on churches, embassies and elderly nuns.

By "we" I mean here the White House, the Vatican, the German Greens, the French Foreign Ministry, NATO, Greenpeace, Le Monde and Fox News — Western institutions of the left, the right and everything in between.

True, these principles sound pretty elementary — "we're pro-free speech and anti-gratuitous violence" — but in the days since the pope's sermon, I don't feel that I've heard them defended in anything like a unanimous chorus. A lot more time has been spent analyzing what the pontiff meant to say, or should have said, or might have said if he had been given better advice.