'Je suis confused': Jon Stewart knocks France for cracking down on offensive speech

(Image credit: The Daily Show)

A few days after more than a million people marched through Paris in support of Charlie Hebdo and the right of free speech, France arrested a controversial, anti-Semitic comedian named Dieudonné for allegedly supporting the Paris terrorist attackers in a Facebook post. "Je suis confused," Jon Stewart said on Wednesday night's Daily Show.

Sure, the U.S. censors naked breasts, but "generally we express our political outrage at objectionable ideas not through arrests, certainly not through murder, but through the purchasing or not purchasing of certain litmus-test sandwiches," Stewart explained — though if France followed America's Chick-fil-A model, "God knows you'd have diabetes in a week." Ultimately, Stewart decided that the best way to express France's free-speech dilemma was through a mock-French film starring two pencils and Le Pen (get it? If not, Stewart explains). --Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.