France Shoot-Out

[Rhyfelwyr]

What is absolutely horrifying to see is the lengths to which people go to -- despite everything that has happened -- to still blame Charlie Hebdo for all this. It's the intellectual equivalent of saying "well when you wear skirts of that length, don't be surprised that you ended up raped". It's victim-blaming and it's horrific. To spin it into a pseudo-intellectual debate concerning the limitations of freedom of speech is pretty much just insulting.

Nobody has said that Charlie Hebdo deserved what happened to them, or that they should be blamed for the attack. Not one person in this thread has ever said that, despite some people accusing others of it often enough.

And it is you who is conflating things, by confusing A) morally blaming victims for what happens to them (as is implied in your mini-skirt example - the unacceptable attitude in the past being that women who dressed provocatively deserved what happened to them), and B) suggesting that people take basic precautions to avoid attracting unwanted criminal attention, without placing responsibility for crimes on the victim.

For example, if a person has been burgled twice in a month because they leave their door unlocked and the front windows open, a policeman might suggest that they start locking the door and closing the windows, without in any way excusing the burglars or laying ultimate blame at the victims feet.

Personally, I'm getting tired of the people that try to take some kind of moral "high road" when it comes to these events, because we're not on the same wavelength.

This is a debate about morality - you believe that it is morally wrong to deny free speech, do you not?

Self-censorship would mean that the terrorists won, to use an expression

Similarly, abandoning our traditional Western laws on offensive material purely as a knee-jerk reaction to the terrorists also means that the terrorists win. Just because they are at one extreme doesn't mean we have to be at the other.