Kelly’s Eye

IT’S instructive how swift was the change in tone of the narrative about the Charlie Hebdo atrocity five years ago this month.A dozen people were massacred in and around the Paris office of the satirical magazine of that name by two brothers claiming to represent an Islamic terror group.

Their victims were murdered because the magazine had the temerity to poke fun at Islam.The world was outraged and everyone took up the rallying cry of “Je suis Charlie” to show their solidarity with the principle of free speech.

But it didn’t last. Siren voices soon suggested that the magazine had brought the massacre upon itself by being irresponsible, and somehow abusing free speech.

Such claims, in effect, were little different from that of a radical Islamic preacher who gloated after the attack: “If you want to enjoy freedom of speech with no limits, expect others to exercise freedom of action.” Never mind that the magazine regularly ridiculed the Catholic Church, Judaism and pretty much everyone in French authority.

Today there are new orthodoxies on issues ranging from race to gender to climate change which are policed with religious zeal. Careers are destroyed and debate silenced for any transgression against them. The right not to be offended by a different opinion now takes precedence.

No wonder that an editorial in a special edition of Charlie Hebdo this month was moved to declare: “We thought only religions desired to impose on us their dogmas.We were wrong.Today the politically correct impose on us their gender spelling, discourage the use of words deemed to be upsetting... all in our interests, obviously.”

The best answer to the encroaching censorship remains that of another satirist, the 20th-century American writer HL Mencken, who wrote: “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”