Free-Speech Hypocrisy in Europe
Tablet’s James Kirchick examines German artist Thomas Kilpper’s recent exhibition, Pavilion for Revolutionary Free Speech. Kilpper criticized Kurt Westergaard’s 2005 cartoon, which depicted the Prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, arguing that freedom of speech does not equal “the right to insult.” Kirchick writes that Klipper’s exhibition “encapsulates the divergent American and European attitudes to free speech, with the former tending to view it as an absolute and the latter as a relative value that must be weighed against the ‘right’ not to be offended.”