Despite Morocco’s strong Islamic history and heritage, the battle for individual freedoms in the country has been making great (if quiet) strides in the past decade.
In a new paper, Moroccan journalist and human rights activist Ahmed Benchemsi examines the roots of the Moroccan movement for individual freedoms, and addresses continuing challenges to its development and advancement.
“To score more successes—including changes at the legal and constitutional levels,” says Benchemsi, “the movement needs to unify, engage in marketing and communication efforts, and most importantly adopt a unified agenda and strategy.”
When terrorists opened fire in the Charlie Hebdo headquarters in Paris yesterday, the world changed forever. Suspected violent Islamists shot and killed twelve individuals, including the editor-in-chief and two policemen. The satirical French weekly newspaper had previously been firebombed in November 2011, a day after it had published a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed.
People around the world responded with an outpouring of support as the Twitter hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (“I am Charlie”) quickly became a global trend. A cartoon featuring a male Charlie Hebdo employee kissing a muslim man under the banner “l'amour plus fort que la haine,” (“love is stronger than hate”)—which had originally been published as the cover of the magazine six days after the 2011 attack—became in many ways a symbol of the Charlie Hebdo staff’s bravery in the face of terrorism.
Many news organizations, such as CNN, made the decision not to share any inflammatory images from Charlie Hebdo. The Associated Press—the world’s oldest newswire—is removing any potentially incendiary Charlie Hebdo images from its database. Others, such as the New York Daily News, UK Telegraph, and BBC, will be keeping the images but censoring them, in whole or in part. Still other news organizations—from the Huffington Post to Gawker, the Weekly Standard to Buzzfeed—are showcasing the very cartoons that are at the center of the controversy. In their own right, the remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo announced earlier today that they will be releasing the next week’s edition on schedule.
One thing is clear: the future of free speech is very much up for debate. In light of yesterday’s horrible tragedy, Cato scholars weigh in on the crucial role it plays in a free world.
With the tragedy at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, issues of self-censorship in the face of intimidation and the nature of free speech have rapidly moved again to the forefront of public debate. No one knows this debate better than Flemming Rose, the editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten who in 2005 published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, inciting a worldwide firestorm. In his new book, The Tyranny of Silence, published by the Cato Institute, Rose not only recounts that story, but takes a hard look at attempts to limit free speech….offering an extraordinarily authentic perspective that can be fully applied to the debate now raging over a motion picture, threats of violence, and what it means to live in a multireligious, culturally borderless world.
Target of hundreds of death threats and ally to political dissidents, Flemming Rose, Foreign Editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, has a unique perspective on the importance of freedom of speech in a world that is increasingly multicultural, multireligious, and multiethnic. In The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech, a new book published by the Cato Institute, Rose takes a hard look at the slippery slope of attempts to limit free speech, peppering his heady prose with powerful anecdotes of his work to preserve this inalienable right and the interesting people he has met along the way.
Since 9/11, the thrust of Western foreign and security policy toward the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has aimed at containing radical forms of Islam
The Arab Spring started a wave of revolutionary fervor, and over a three-year period starting in 2010, regimes throughout the MENA region fell. The electoral success of Islamist parties in many of these countries reinvigorated concerns. The recent kangaroo courts in Egypt and rise of ISIS in Iraq have further brought radical Islamism into the spotlight.
In a new study, Cato policy analyst Dalibor Rohac examines the roots of political Islam, the policy implications of its rise, and the longer term prospects for secular liberal democracy in the region. According to Rohac, the electoral successes of Islamists in Arab Spring countries have relatively little to do with religion but rather with the organizational characteristics of Islamic political groups.
“The electoral success of Islamists is a natural result of the political environment, which can be mitigated only by an increase in the credibility of alternative political groups,” writes Rohac. “The electoral advantage enjoyed by Islamic parties can be expected to dissipate…as competing political groups establish channels of communication, promise verification for their voters, and build reputation over time.”
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