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January 10, 2015|10:39 am

An employee of the Council of Europe holds a placard which read "I am Charlie" and a pen, during a minute of silence in front of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, January 9, 2015, two days after gunmen stormed weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. The two main suspects in the weekly satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo killings were sighted on Friday in the northern French town of Dammartin-en-Goele where at least one person had been taken hostage, a police source said.

Liberals are hypocrites and cowards, some conservatives (and Bill Maher) are saying, for (among other things) claiming to be defenders of the freedom to engage in offensive speech in light of the Islamic extremist attack on Charlie Hebdo while continually seeking to censor speech they consider offensive.

Liberals have exalted Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French newspaper, after the attack at the paper's headquarters that left 12 dead. "Je Suis Charlie," (French for "I am Charlie") was a common refrain and hashtag from many quarters.

Even as liberal news outlets argued for the freedom of speech, they ironically continued to self-censor Charlie Hebdo. Many decided not to show audiences the images that led radical Muslims to kill those who offended them. When some of those outlets claimed the decision was done out of respect for religion, conservatives were quick to point out the double standard.

After Associated Press said it did not want to publish "deliberately provocative images," Washington Examiner's Timothy Carney pointed outthat the AP website showed and sold copies of "Piss Christ," an artwork that was deliberately designed to provoke Christians. (It has since been removed.)

After the executive editor of The New York Times said his paper did not run the cartoons due to its policy of not publishing images that "gratuitously offend," several conservatives pointed out that the policy did not seem to apply to Christians or Jews.

When the New York Daily news published a Charlie Hebdo cartoon, it pixilated out the offensive image of Mohammed, but left the offensive image of a Jewish rabbi in place.

So, it must not be out of a deference to religious sensibilities in general that the media is not publishing the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. The only explanation for this hypocrisy, Mollie Hemingway argued for The Federalist, is that the media is comprised of cowards.

"The story in the self-censorship is that global news organizations won't publish these cartoons out of fear," she wrote. "We should not be told the self-censoring is a matter of principle when it's a matter of abject and degrading fear."

See the original post here:
Are Liberals Hypocrites in Their Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Massacre?