Last time I mentioned a Sally Kohn tweet, it was CHARLIE HEBDO Shootings Inspire DAILY BEAST’s Sally Kohn To Claim Right Wingers More Dangerous Than Muslims.
This is along the same lines:
Thoughtful piece on #CharlieHebdo context, incl how French Catholics once violently protested a defamatory film http://t.co/IYrfUAQQxU
— Sally Kohn (@sallykohn) January 12, 2015
This is a surprisingly moronic attempt at moral equivalence by both Sally Kohn, and the WSJ.
To save you a click, the time French Catholics "violently protested" a movie was the opening of Luis Bunuel's "L'Age D'Or"—in 1930. The protests included throwing tear gas bombs in the theater and beating up some of the audience.
French anticlericalism is a tradition going back to Voltaire, and was a major factor in the Reign of Terror after 1789.In a French shooting gallery in the 1930s, the targets might include not only little metal rabbits, but little metal figures of priests...and of policemen.
What the WSJ should mention, talking about the protests against Bunuel's movie—which was blasphemous, it was based on the works of the Marquis De Sade—was that in in 1930, the anticlericals were in power.
In 1929, Hilaire Belloc wrote of the power of French anticlericalism that
French government has been opposed to Catholicism for fifty years. There have been moments when the opposition has been more intense, there have been moments when it has been relaxed, but government upon the whole favorable to Catholic influence has not been present in the Republic since the fall of MacMahon in 1877.
You might say that the anticlericals are still in power—the French concept of "laïcité" is stronger than America's "Separation of Church And State."
But as I say, it's ridiculous to compare a protest in 1930s by Frenchmen against other Frenchmen with this interracial mass murder by Muslim immigrants.
