A right to offend does not imply a duty to offend

You've got to feel sorry for the Berliner Zeitung, the German newspaper that last week decided to express its solidarity with the murdered journalists of Charlie Hebdo by reproducing some of the magazine's covers on its front page. The images mocked various religions and two showed Mohammed while another depicted Pope Benedict. What the newspaper failed to notice was that one of the covers, featuring an orthodox Jew was a fake.

There were a number of clues, including the fact that the masthead read Charlo Hebdo instead of Charlie Hebdo, and the barcode at the bottom of the page carried the figure 6,000,000, the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust. This week, the paper issued a statement saying it was "deeply sorry for any offence caused" by the fake cartoon, explaining that the mistake arose because it failed to translate the caption.

The confusion is understandable, not least because the Jew pictured in the fake cartoon had exactly the same features as the real Charlie Hebdo's Mohammed, complete with a large, hooked nose and an open, lascivious mouth. But it was also emblematic of a more widespread confusion about free speech and solidarity that followed last week's massacre in Paris.

Most of the millions who tweeted #JeSuisCharlie understood that they were using the familiar rhetorical device that expresses solidarity through identity. Examples of this include the headline in Le Monde after the 9/11 attacks declaring "Nous sommes tous Américains" and John F Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" in 1963. Some, however, seemed to interpret the phrase literally, arguing that the only legitimate expression of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo was to imitate it by republishing its Mohammed cartoons.

News organisations were divided over the issue of publication and many, including The New York Times and the BBC, struggled with the decision before coming down on one side or the other – the former didn't publish, the BBC did, and then changed its mind. At The Irish Times, we decided not to publish the images because we believed they would cause gratuitous offence to some Muslims and that reproducing them would not advance the argument in favour of freedom of expression.

The Charlie Hebdo cartoons belong within a venerable Parisian genre of humour known as "la gouaille parisienne" that is deliberately insolent, provocative and offensive. We are unequivocal in our support for Charlie Hebdo's right to offend and we don't believe any individual or group has a right not to be offended, but that does not imply an obligation to cause gratuitous offence ourselves.

The confusion over free speech is not confined to the media. Days after world leaders marched in Paris to affirm their commitment to freedom of expression, the French justice ministry told prosecutors to pursue “words or acts of hatred” with utmost vigour. The prosecutors need little encouragement, however, as they have already targeted dozens of people under a law introduced last November that toughens sanctions against those who express support for terrorism.

The most high-profile case is against the comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala, who was arrested on Wednesday for condoning terrorism after he posted a message on Facebook that read "Tonight, as far as I'm concerned, I feel like Charlie Coulibaly". It was a reference to Amedy Coulibaly, who murdered four Jews in a kosher supermarket where he was holding hostages last Friday until he was killed when police stormed the building.

Dieudonné is notorious for his anti-Semitic provocations, most famously the quenelle, a half-formed Hitler salute, and the Front National's Jean-Marie Le Pen is godfather to one of his children. Still, his prosecution sits uncomfortably with the retrospective sanctification of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and strikes many Muslims in France as evidence of a double standard.

More broadly, the response of political leaders in France and elsewhere to last week’s events in Paris has been to pay lip service to freedom of expression while taking steps to limit it even further. Thus, French politicians are mulling a raft of measures that include isolating radical prisoners to prevent them from spreading their message in prison and extending electronic surveillance.

Interior ministers from 12 EU member-states who met in Paris on Sunday reaffirmed their "unfailing attachment to freedom of expression, to human rights, to pluralism, to democracy, to tolerance and to the rule of law." They then called on Internet service providers to report and remove material "that aims to incite hatred and terror" and sought to revive a plan to collect data on airline passengers that has been rejected by the European Parliament.

And in Washington yesterday, David Cameron was urging Barack Obama to help him to ban Internet services that refused to allow the government to monitor encrypted messages.

The numbers travelling from Europe to join jihadist groups in places like Yemen, Iraq and Syria are relatively few and those who return with the intention of carrying out terror attacks at home are fewer still. They represent a real threat, nonetheless, and European governments have a duty to protect their citizens and to ensure that particularly vulnerable minorities such as the Jewish community do not have to live in fear.

The danger is, however, that by tightening surveillance on entire societies and seeking to stifle expressions of support for terrorism, governments will feed radicalism rather than starving it. And further constrain the very freedoms that are under attack.

Denis Staunton is Deputy Editor