The free speech issues raised by Wednesday's terrorist attack in Paris on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has drawn comparisons to last year's outcry by North Korea over The Interview.
"It's an interesting comparison because in that film, Kim Jong-un is attacked," says Rebecca Cruise, a comparative politics expert and regular World Views contributor. "He, in North Korea, is considered a deity."
The idea of satirizing certain tenets of religion, even in a way deemed very offensive by strict adherents of Islam, is nothing new. In 2004 Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was killed by a Dutch-Moroccan national upset about his short film Submission that criticized certain Muslims' treatment of women.
In 2005 a Danish newspaper was also targeted for publishing 12 cartoons of the prophet Mohammed.
"It's a very democratic ideal, that we should be able to say things, print things, publish things that others don't like," Cruise says. "And that should be respected in some form."
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