Please, if you weren’t Charlie Hebdo before this week, don’t start pretending now

National Post

Rex Murphy: The solidarity with freedom of speech would have been a lot more impressive, more persuasive, some time before this week’s mass butchery

Following the butchery at the Paris magazine Charlie Hebdo, we are in the middle of another blizzard of post-facto hash-tag bravery. All over the Internet there are whole mobs holding up little signs: “I am Charlie Hebdo,” “We are Charlie Hebdo.” The idea, I presume, is to broadcast their commitment to the Western idea of freedom of speech and the press. Let’s put it plainly: The solidarity would have been a lot more impressive, more persuasive, some time beforethis week’s mass butchery.

Indeed, at our universities, newspapers and broadcasters, we have seen an ever-shrinking defence of free speech, a timid reluctance to take on those who claim special privilege to shut down those they simply don’t like. The great institutions of the West, the press and the universities, have been at best complicit and at worst cowardly when it comes up to defending freedom of speech — not from threats of Islamist fanatics with guns, but in much less demanding circumstances.