Last Thursday, on Jan. 15, Jerry Reddick, a Haligonian hotdog vendor known as the “Dawgfather,” caused a stir when he issued a string of anti-Semitic tweets.
“Hitler asked his people, ‘How do you like your Jews’? Well done with a bagel and a kosher pickle. Freedom of speech goes both ways,” one read. Another said, “What do you call a Jew sitting in one of Hitler’s ovens? Toast, because they’re cooked. Freedom of speech goes both ways!” There were more, including callous references to the victims of the 9/11 attack in New York City, and by the end of the day police in Halifax were investigating the Dawgfather for hate speech (see page 24).
In Paris a day earlier, police detained Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, the French comedian infamous for propagating the quenelle, a hand gesture that evokes the Nazi salute and has been adopted by anti-Semites around the world. Dieudonné was charged with inciting hatred after writing on Facebook, “Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly” (“I’m feeling like Charlie Coulibaly”), a riff on the “Je suis Charlie” expression popularized in the wake of the deadly attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, but with a sinister message: Ahmedy Coulibaly was one of two terrorists who killed four at a kosher supermarket in Paris on Jan. 9.
Both the Dawgfather and Dieudonné have since removed their provocative posts from the web and offered apologies of a sort. It remains to be seen whether that will be enough to assuage law enforcement agencies in Canada and France, since in both cases there is reason to believe that hate-speech laws have been contravened.
But many are nonetheless wondering whether these men are being treated unfairly. Why is Charlie Hebdo, which routinely and graphically mocks Islam, held up as a beacon of free speech, while the likes of Dieudonné and the Dawgfather are derided, perhaps even punished, for mocking their own chosen targets?
In the weeks since the Charlie Hebdo attack, many of us have been pondering the meaning of freedom of expression. “Je suis Charlie” has come to define much more than solidarity with those gunned down inside the magazine’s office. For some, it has turned into a rallying cry for the notion that all of us must be allowed to say what we want, no matter who or what might be offended. Others, including Pope Francis and any number of media outlets who opted not to reprint Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons after the attack, have argued just the opposite – that the lesson here is we must be careful what we say, even if we have the right to say it.
Free speech represents the true essence of democracy, but it is undeniably discomforting at the same time. It’s easy enough to extol the virtues of unfettered expression when we aren’t the ones being offended. But when the very ethos that underpinned the work of Charlie Hebdo is invoked in a way that makes us uncomfortable or angry or even scared we may be tempted to respond differently. In those moments, we face an existential predicament: do we affirm free speech or shut it down? If there’s a middle ground, it’s hard to see it. — YONI
