Since the brutal assassination of French schoolteacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded on the street by an Islamist for showing his students a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, the ABC has distinguished itself by publishing one piece after the other that pins the blame for the French terrorist attacks not on the fanatics and their murderous ideology but — you guessed it — on France.
The ABC’s own news analysis, issued some two weeks after Paty’s murder, set the pace. Although presented as coolly factual, more than two-thirds of the piece was taken up with criticisms of Charlie Hebdo’s caricatures. Adding to the bias, the only expert interviewed for that piece — a long-time critic of the caricatures — was allowed to get away with claims that are frankly astonishing.
According to that hand-picked expert, there is a stark contrast between France, which defended Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish the caricatures as falling within the country’s constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression, and the “responsible” approach adopted by “other European nations”.
But almost all of those countries treated the caricatures exactly as France has; and far from affecting France alone, Islamist protests about caricatures of the prophet have, targeted Denmark, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK, among many others.
Read the article by Henry Ergas in The Australian.