As a US citizen I am ambivalent about developments in France

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Not an organized thesis, just some thoughts.

1.) I wasn't aware of any constitutional threat to the right of free speech in France.
2.) The people who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices were common criminals. Why consider their motivation?
3.) When the building in Oklahoma City was blown up in 1995, nobody cared why. The perpetrators were tried on the basis of their actions, not their justification, and were convicted.
4.) The people who were killed at Hyper Cacher were not trying to exercise free speech. They were just trying to buy brisket.
5.) Some of what was published in Charlie Hebdo would be considered offensive in the US. In principle, I support their right to publish that, but I can't consider them heroes anymore than I would consider John F. Kennedy a hero just because he was assassinated.
6.) If France had the same statutory penalties for terrorism as in the US, the Charlie Hebdo attackers would have been sitting in prison that day rather than attacking Charlie Hebdo.
7.) The French public think(s) the US has overreacted to the threat of terrorism so our laws against terrorism are unreasonable. Yet for the last 15 years they have been largely effective.
8.) As I see it, the US does not have the same degree of problems regarding the Muslim and Jewish populations. There is nobody remotely like the LePen family in the US. I am not saying this to suggest the US is better than France, just that they are two very different countries, so it is not that easy for me to relate to what is happening in France.
9.) In the US we have our own problems and we're quite busy dealing with them.

"...nobody remotely like the LePen family..." You have the Bush family don't you? As I see it, the US has worse problems than France does, and more of them (I was thinking of providing a very, very long list here of those very problems, but I don't wan't to be cruel by rubbing it in).

They may have been common criminals, but what they did was hardly a common criminal act. It was an act of terrorism. They didn't do it out of their own greed but to destroy that which they didn't like and to make others afraid of doing the same thing. That is terrorism.



They were convicted for blowing up the building, but to say that nobody cared why is far from correct. People did care why they did it so that they learn what to watch for in the future.



Why would that matter? They didn't make the decision to be killed. Are you claiming that what determines an act to be one of terrorism depends on what the victims were doing?

Baloney.

That's like claiming that the 9/11 attack wasn't terrorism because the victims were going along with their ordinary lives.

@eric76 I will try to explain my thoughts which were disorganized as I said. I never said what these people did wasn't terrorism but on the other hand, calling something "terrorism" elevates the the act to a higher level of importance which is exactly what those people want. So I think they deserve to be called common criminals and dealt with accordingly.

As for saying that "nobody cared" why the building in OK City was blown up, I only meant with regard to how justice was dispensed. Those people wanted to "send a message" and the legal system properly ignored that message and punished them for their acts. Of course the FBI cared to the extent that it helped prevent future such acts of violence.

So it seems to me that public pronouncements following the Charlie Hebdo attacks were all about "freedom of speech", my point being that the victims at Hyper Cacher were not famous satirists they were killed just for being Jewish. So it seems their deaths were devalued in comparison. My point is that mass murder is equally repugnant no matter what the justification.

Of course when you consider that some people have been arrested in France because stuff they posted might be considered "provocative" or hate speech, I am ambivalent about that as well and I don't know if I completely agree with everything the French government did, but as a US citizen I don't know what my opinion ought to be.

What I can say is that the French government didn't have to give these guys such a light sentence when they were previously convicted of terrorism, otherwise they would have not been able to do what they did. Now with all these arrests, they may be trying to compensate for prior imcompetence.

In other words, we should prefer a lie over the truth?

The attacks had nothing in common with common criminal acts. The victims were singled out precisely as a result of the attacker's misguided religious beliefs. It wasn't some random shooting at all, but a religious assassination in retaliation for the victim's publications.



Of course they were charged for the individual crimes. That does not mean that it wasn't terrorism. In fact, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 was passed as a result of the attack.



That hardly keeps it from being terrorism. But you are right that all mass murder is equally repugnant.



I have no idea why they were treated as lightly as they were. Even in the US, the government has declined to prosecute terrorists in the past. In the first case of biological terrorism in the US in Oregon in 1984, the leader of the group who ordered the attack was merely deported. I don't think that anyone involved in the attack is still being held in prison.