France’s hate-speech laws have been used to arrest people such as actress Brigitte Bardot, in her case for criticizing Islamic animal slaughter practices. But they didn’t stop public radio broadcaster France Inter from playing a song entitled “Jésus est pédé” (“Jesus Is a Faggot”). And while such charges are unlikely forthcoming, the station did apologize — to LGBT groups “offended” by the term “faggot.”
As Breitbart tells us:
The song, which was a parody of the song “Jesus is coming back” from the 1988 comedy film La vie est un long fleuve tranquille, was sung by comedic songwriter Frédéric Fromet, who sang, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus is a faggot LGBT member from the top of the cross, why did you nail him, why did you not f*ck him,” Le Parisien reports.
The LGBT activist group the IDAHO Committee slammed the broadcast, with its president Alexandre Marcel stating that the group had filed a complaint with the Paris Prosecutor’s Office on grounds of homophobia.
“Whether Jesus, Muhammad, or Buddha are homosexual, trans, bisexual, or queer does not bother us; that homophobic curses are used to talk about their sexual orientations bothers us and shocks us,” Marcel said.
Frédéric Fromet later apologised to the LGBT community for the song, saying: “I was so misunderstood that I even ran into an LGBT association. So it’s my fault. I readily admit it. I apologise to the people I have injured, while claiming my right to make mistakes in an exercise that remains very perilous.”
LGBT associations were not the only ones to be offended by the song, although it seems they were the only ones to receive a direct apology.
The reason for this was expressed by traditionalist French Mayor Robert Menard in a tweet reading (translated), “The ‘rebels’ of our time: cowards, submissive, without talent.” He added that the world’s Fromets target Christianity because they don’t dare “risk the burst of a Kalashnikov or being killed.”
And whether or not such people are responding to politically correct social pressure as much as to personal safety fears, they’re hardly the “brave” artists they claim to be.
For Christians are a soft target; thus have they been subjected to repeated mockery, such as the display of pictures of a crucifix immersed in a jar of urine and of a dung-smeared Virgin Mary.
In contrast, French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo announced six months after the 2015 jihadist attack on its offices, which killed 12, that it would no longer draw Mohammed cartoons. One cartoonist, Renald Luzier, said he’d “tired of it.”
“I’m not going to spend my life drawing them,” he proclaimed. Of course, his tiredness just happened to coincide with the realization that drawing them could end his life. Napoleon he ain’t.
In contrast again, anti-jihadist crusader Pamela Geller responded to the Hebdo massacre by organizing a “Draw Mohammed” contest that took place in May 2015 in Garland, Texas — and itself was attacked by two gun-wielding Muslim terrorists (who were shot dead. Video below).
Undaunted, a speaker from that event, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, held another “Draw Mohammed” contest in 2019. This was after canceling one the previous year due to jihadist threats. Wilders said that he didn’t want others to be hurt, which is believable since threats inspired by his anti-Islamism endeavors had already caused him to need around-the-clock protection.
So who are the brave ones, really?
In fairness, everyone has filters. But another difference here is that not everyone has the government doing the filtering for him. Not only has Wilders — along with French politician Marine Le Pen — faced hate-speech charges, but actress Brigitte Bardot has been arrested five times for expressing her serious animal-rights view that the Islamic method of slaughtering meat is “barbaric,” reported Reason in 2015.
Moreover, the “novelist Michel Houellebecq was hauled before the courts for describing Islam as ‘the most stupid religion,’ an entirely legitimate viewpoint,” the site adds.
So ours is the age of inverted morality, of values but few virtues, where blasphemy is applauded humor (unless it’s a “fashionable” religion’s version of blasphemy) and “offending” sexual devolutionaries is sacrilege.
Yet reporting on the double standard has been done to death. Seldom discussed, however, is why we have this double standard. To wit: “Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent,” asserted writer Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal in 2015.
“It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for shallow things, shallowly,” he continued. “Europeans believe in human rights, tolerance, openness, peace, progress, the environment, pleasure. These beliefs are all very nice, but they are also secondary.”
“What Europeans no longer believe in are the things from which their beliefs spring,” stated Stephens —mentioning Christianity. “What is Europe?” he rhetorically asked. “It is Greece not Persia; Rome not Carthage; Christendom not the caliphate.”
Or at least it was Christendom. For culture is like muscle: Use it or lose it. If a foreign force zealously advances its culture and faith while ennui- and effeteness-epitomized natives demean theirs, it’s not hard figuring out who’ll win the battle of civilizations.
Image: screenshot from YouTube video
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.