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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
On Trial for Blasphemy in Merry Old Europe
Natalie Solent points out something we ought bash into the skulls of all the Europhiles wandering our fair continent: Thanks to an EU-wide arrest warrent, an Austrian author is being charged with blasphemy by Greek authorities. His crime? A comic book mocking Jesus Christ.
Now, blasphemers are not at the top of my list of sympathetic causes, but... being a bit of a hack myself, I worry when other hacks are catching hell.
The book, for the record, was written and first distributed in Austria. It's legal there. But when the publisher released it in Greece, authorities detected xenophobia (you didn't think it would be a real heresy charge, did you?) and put out AE-APB (all-Europe all-points-bulletin), lest some thin-skinned Christian somewhere find himself put out by the thing.
So, there you go. That's what Old Europe has to offer: A member country gets its dander up and the whole EU suddenly has an idiotic law on the books if the most tangential national connection can be made.
Glad I live in the good old USA, where "banned in Boston" says nothing about Silicon Valley.
Be sure though to suggest to your Europhile friends that they have an opportunity to participate in the evolution of the Union they so laud: Help them publish a work obscene to the Greeks, send them on a book tour in Spain and see if they demand for themselves the treatment offered real Europeans.
posted by gbarto at 4:43 PM
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