This has maybe been the most popular subject around the world for the last few days. After the shooting of 12 people in Paris, the subject of freedom of speech came up again. According to the organizers, about 1.6 million people including more than 40 leaders of several countries walked together to show their support to the victims and the freedom of speech. In addition to that, newspapers from all around the world printed the cover page of Charlie Hebdo on their newspaper with the well know slogan: ‘Je suis Charlie’. However, not everyone was having the same opinion regarding the matter. The pope for instance said there are limits to the freedom of speech. Yes, freedom of speech is one of the fundamental human rights, but according to the pope there should also be some limit when it comes to mocking or even insulting the faiths and beliefs of other human beings. Our group strongly beliefs that killing people is definitely not the right way to respond on the mocking of the Islam. However, although we think that violence is not the way to solve this, we also try to understand why this happened. While thinking about this, we found that the Islam for Muslims is more of an identity that ‘just’ a religion. They are not Spanish, Egyptian or Dutch. There are Muslim in the first place. Hence, when the Islam is insulted, not only the religion is spoken badly about, but also the person itself. Thus we could conclude that for Muslims is it very personal and sensitive. Not to say that this would be a reason for no one to criticize the faith or make jokes about it at all, but maybe this would help to explain the reaction of the shooters. This does definitely not mean that we agree with the killing. Another important point is that we should not make statements like: ‘all Muslims are bad people’. On the contrary, lots of Muslims have been supporting the victims of the crime and did not agree with the action. We can agree on the fact that this has been a sensitive subject for a lot of people. We believe that everyone has the right to have their own point of view and actions can be taken as long as they are within the rules of the law. As for the freedom of speech, we consider this to be a more ethical question. Of course everyone should be allowed to express their beliefs and opinions, but whilst considering the feelings of others. Because by expression and taking action on a very strong point of view against something, you might take away some of the freedom of others and we don’t think that this is the right way of exercising the freedom of speech.

Kim Sinnige

Marta Parra Arribas

Giraldo Galan Garcia

Hussein Dahir Mohammed