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I feel strongly about the right to offend and to mock as an artist (and as a human being). That right should be absolute.

The Angry Arab News Service/وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Notes on the shooting in Paris

2) Muslims do need to lighten up, and should feel secure enough to stomach mockery and satire against their religion. And they should not allow their enemies (even the bigots among them) to provoke them so easily.

3) No, the magazine in question did not “equally” mock Muslims and Jews and others. This is like the way Islam is mocked by Bill Maher and others in the US: they don’t hold the same standards. They reserve a special bitter and vicious streak against Islam and Muslims, and remember that France is not a country of absolute freedom of speech. You can go to jail in France and pay a fine if you offend Jewish people by mocking, say, the Holocaust..

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If you think it through, actually, when a zebra is being eaten alive by a lion, that’s one of the worst experiences that you could possibly have. And if we are compassionate toward our pets and our kids, and we see a squirrel suffering in our backyard and we try to help it, why wouldn’t we actually want to help the zebra?” We could genetically engineer lions into herbivores, he suggested, or drone-drop in-vitro meat whenever arificial intelligence detects a carnivore’s hunger, or reengineer “ecosystems from the ground up, so that all the evolutionarily stable equilibriums that happen within an ecosystem are actually things that we consider ethical.