Google's homepage isn't a satire magazine, and this would affect users who had no hand in these events. I don't think an escalation of adversity like that would be productive.

The right to free speech doesn't justify bad manners.

> The right to free speech doesn't justify bad manners.

Yet it protects your rights to have bad manners.

> Yet it protects your rights to have bad manners.

Absolutely.

Here's my idle thoughts, more broadly: I'm not a Muslim. I'm very wary of a breakdown in empathy towards Muslims. There's 1.5 billion of them on our planet, and any outcome other than figuring out how to continue to live together on it seems bleak and undesirable. It's easier to have a dialog with someone (even to the point of changing their minds) if you can be bothered to think a little about how their upbringing and the parameters of their situation affect them, and how those find expression in their lives - what drives their decisions, how they wind up ranking and navigating the same basic human desires we share.

Putting that cartoon on Google's homepage, to me, would be giving up on that, being lazy and picking sides. It's admitting defeat by deciding the world is simpler to act in if we don't bother to understand it.

It also makes it harder for people in bridging positions to function as a channel for this dialog. The bilinguals, the overseas students, that interact with friends and family, that try to explain but end up having to justify cold shoulders.

Check out some indie student music from Arabic countries some time. There's some on YouTube with English translations. Notice all the grappling with their own religion they do, or with gender roles in their society. These aren't dumb, unaware people.

Heck, they're even capable and appreciative of good satire.

Great response. It takes a strong person to be empathetic and rational in these situations and not just seek out revenge by whatever (even non-violent) means.

But I guess people will always look to the easy and emotional options. Which explains a lot of the 'how' in the 'how we got to this point' question - on both sides.

I've read two responses to these events that nicely cover this question from what amount to opposite sides, although the distance between them is small:

1) Ross Douthat in the NYT, saying "In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s the Obama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial Times and (God help us) the Catholic League today, they’ve criticized the paper for provoking violence by being needlessly offensive and 'inflammatory' (Jay Carney’s phrase), when the reality is that it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content." http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we...

2) This piece by Juan Cole: "Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination." http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-sa...

While I appreciate what Cole is saying, I come down on Douthat's side. When people are being murdered for having an opinion the question of whether or not that opinion is in good taste or presented in a well-mannered way is... secondary.

So I personally think that "escalating" by making more fun of murderous nutjobs is a pretty good move to make, even if it will be offensive to some less murderous people, because making fun of and belittling hateful murderers is more important to me just now than not giving offense: http://www.tjradcliffe.com/?p=1704

That said, I'm just as happy for Google to stay on the side of good taste. There are sound business reasons for doing so, and they have absolutely no obligation to piss off 20% of the world's population, even granted that almost 100% of that 20% are as peaceful as anyone else. It shouldn't be fear that stops them, but good business sense.

“When people are being murdered for having an opinion the question of whether or not that opinion is in good taste or presented in a well-mannered way is... secondary.”

Of course that is secondary. That much is obvious. It is a pointless distraction to even argue about that and it’s very questionable to even put the murder and the content even into the same context. That just does not compute. Those are emphatically and obviously not two sides of some issue or some bullshit like that.

However, I personally would make the editorial decision to not republish the cartoons because I find them to be in bad taste and quite racist and that’s that (that’s my quick and dirty assessment of them – I do not have to make those editorial decisions so I didn’t research this issue exhaustively and I could very well be wrong; please take this as my provisional opinion and just run with the hypothetical here). That would be the reason for me personally to decide that way, definitely not the murder.

How is free speech defended by me publishing something I do not like? That’s just a very confusing stance on this.

If a cartoon puts Google employees in a position where they could be targeted by threats or violence, it would be an awful move.

Agree. Charlie Hebdo was a small shop. Everyone understood what was happening and had visibility into what was going to be done. Charlie Hebdo could take risks with its team because they were so close to each other. Google's senior management taking that decision on behalf of its vast and global team may be less tenable.

There's already an Isis message published to their followers to find and kill staff of another Silicon Valley tech giant for percieved slights. So the threat wouldn't be new, but taking a stand publicly would.

It would be a bad idea for reasons mentioned upthread. It would not be a bad idea because of the reasons you mention.

You are saying "Let's give in to violence and intimidation". You are suggesting that free speech should not be exercised if there is any threat or violence. That is not free speech.

> You are saying "Let's give in to violence and intimidation".

It's not "giving in" when you would never do something like that in the first place (without the threat of violence). It's just continuing to not do it.

Free speech doesn't require antagonizing anyone. I don't advocate censoring ourselves out of fear, but I wouldn't defend sticking our tongues out at a bully, even if we're on the moral high ground. We would be better served by expressing ourselves in ways that promote understanding other cultures, not widening the divide between them.