compared2what? wrote:No, not directly. But he's a diehard defender of Israel's right to take those actions, which he sees as fully justified and necessary, in much the same way that torturing Algerians was back when he was personally engaged in doing exactly that...
Yes, and if so, then that's his opinion, one among many of his shitty opinions, which he, like everyone else, should have the right to express, because as I mentioned before, free speech is a human right.
compared2what? wrote:The leader of the French far-right party National Front (FN) has been named by four Algerian liberation war veterans as one of the persons involved in torturing them. While Le Pen admitted to torturing forty years ago, he now denies the charges and is to sue the daily newspaper 'Le Monde', which quoted the veterans.
'Le Monde' quotes one of four Algerians, Mohamed Abdellaoui, as saying that Le Pen in 1957 personally administered electric shocks. He beat me we an electric stick on the shoulders and on the knees," Abdellaoui remembered the treatment. A second Algerian veteran recalled Le Pen had "sit down on my body and forced me to drink water from the water closet."
[...]
Shortly after the war, the issue was less taboo, as the hatred was still strong. Also Le Pen at this time admitted he had participated in the torture of Algerian liberation fighters. "I tortured because it had to be done," he told the 'Combat' newspaper in 1962. Le Pen served in the Franco-Algerian war as a lieutenant in the paratrooper regiment, also in charge of intelligence.
...if that counts for anything, according to your moral calculus.
According to my moral calculus, torturing people is NOT a human right, but a severe VIOLATION of human rights, for which he should have been prosecuted and if found guilty, penalized harshly. But when he was finally prosecuted and convicted, it wasn't for torturing people, was it?
compared2what? wrote:Yes. He has said exactly that about the Palestinians.
See above: free speech is a human right. If it can be denied to certain people whose opinion you don't like, then it's not a right, but a privilege that is granted at the discretion of those who wield the power. Today it's people whose opinions you don't like, tomorrow it'll be you.
compared2what? wrote:Nothing about Jean-Marie Le Pen gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling, and I don't regard his conviction as good news.
But I do regard him as a bad, bad man.
So?
"If you're not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing." - Malcolm X
