Only the
Independent
targeted the mix of defiance and puerility that combined in Charlie Hebdo's
fatal art. That paper's front page illustrated a middle finger lifted from out
of Hebdo's yellow background, its own bold frame ready to be dramatized by an
inker's touch. That touch died, digit extended, surrounded by blood spilled into
or as if red ink.
The
New York Times refused to reprint Charlie Hebdo's often juvenile, if
sometimes clever in startling or unsettling ways, determinedly satirical
cartoons that led to the murders of eight artists, three police (one of
Algerian descent), two more dead, and two days later, four Jewish hostages. A
Yale UP book on the 2006 Danish cartoons did not dare to include those
depictions. With such hesitancy by publications purporting to critically
investigate this issue, I fear this leads too much to caution. While
understandable, this failure of nerve lest nervousness grow may erode our
liberty due to too much tolerance. Inviting discussion, as I sort through
journalism, memes, and commentary I've compiled, in ‘Je Suis Charlie depuis
deux jours’, (‘I Was Charlie for Two Days’), I share here an array of
perspectives as I watched and participated in the spirited discussion and
debate. The whole episode spanned two-plus days, but it warped rapidly online.
Jonathan
Freedland at the
Guardian also asserted that his paper should not
reprint the images. From what I can gather, neither the
Irish Times nor
the
Telegraph printed any of them as well. More on that as this essay
continues. For now, at least Freedland also covered what in the aftermath of
the attacks remains to me tellingly an under-reported aspect. Freedland asks
why innocent Jews at a kosher supermarket should be held as if guilty of crimes
in Gaza by the IDF. This reductionist ‘blaming the victims’ was also being
marshaled to spin the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists' fate. This direction, as far
as I could follow, emerged soon after the initial shock many testified to on
hearing about the attacks.
First, I noticed my FB feeds and profile photos or friends fill with ‘Je Suis
Charlie’ and fellow cartoonists' responses in solidarity. But, a few hours
later (at least in the time lag given my ability to call up coverage and my own
delay keeping up with the media blitz, for at work I had not even learned of
the incident--indicative of my multicultural milieu, for better or worse,
avoiding any such discussions), I found another twist. This asserted that while
of course we do not justify violence, we feel sorry for those who found the
caricatures offensive and racist and despicable, and we deplore their promotion,
just as we would any which once darkened the pages of
Der Stürmer or a
tabloid.
Jay
Michaelson issued a progressive's call for ‘maintaining composure in the face
of anger. We should not deny the rage we feel at Jews being targeted in a
kosher grocery store while they buy wine for Shabbat. That would only make the
anger worse. But we should channel it into effective responses with cold, clear
reason.’ This is how I first learned of the hostages taken, as this aside. I
found no other posts on it, and when I scoured the
NYT and
LA Times
websites, ‘grocery store’ in the latter led the sub-heading. After the sad
standoff was over, three killers gained their martyrdom. Four Jewish shoppers
had died for the sin of being caught in an ordinary business doing ordinary
things hated by those who captured them; nobody else remarked on this directly
in media or FB that I saw.
Christopher
Hitchens took a nuanced turn on what is not found in a kosher market, and
how we live with competing impulses between control and abandon. Back in 2006,
he discussed the reaction to ‘the Danish cartoons’ and the refusal of most
media to risk sharing them: ‘The innate human revulsion against desecration is
much older than any monotheism: Its most powerful expression is in the
Antigone
of Sophocles. It belongs to civilization. I am not asking for the right to
slaughter a pig in a synagogue or mosque or to relieve myself on a “holy” book.
But I will not be told I can't eat pork, and I will not respect those who burn
books on a regular basis. I, too, have strong convictions and beliefs and value
the Enlightenment above any priesthood or any sacred fetish-object.’ Wise
words.
Giles
Fraser, speaking of sacred fetishes, linked the terrorists to the
cartoonists: both as iconoclasts. As for the Enlightenment values, two days
before the attacks, the
cover
star of that week's CH issue,
Michel
Houellebecq was interviewed about his new novel (released the day of the
attacks and at #1 already), which dramatises the buildup to an election in 2022
France when ‘Mohammed Ben Abbes handily beats Marine Le Pen with support from
both socialists and the right.’ He claims that those ideals are lost amidst
dead consumerism and capitalism, as Islam rises and perhaps Catholicism might
join forces with it against secularism. It has lost its appeal as a counter to
the fundamentalist upsurge.
Houellebecq goes on to tell
The Paris Review: ‘My book describes the
destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer
makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is
doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and
Muslims is possible. We’ve seen it happen before, it could happen again.’ And,
‘Islam is an image of the future. Why has the idea of the Nation stalled out?
Because it’s been abused too long.’ No stranger to frank satire, I hope he
is safer
in
Ireland than in his native land these intolerant days.
Jeff
Sparrow in Australia considered a satirical cartoon published and then
apologized for there during last year's Israeli incursion into Gaza. He asked
how many would cheer its anti-semitic stereotypes. He distinguished defense of
free speech from condoning the dissemination of such imagery: ‘you don't have
to like the project of Charlie Hebdo to defend its artists from murder, just as
you can uphold media workers' right to safety without endorsing the imagery
they produce’.
Nigel
Duara explained that this imagery reveled in a rather sophomoric intent to
rankle and irritate, but being French and secular, it tried to raise
everybody's hackles. In 2012,
The New Yorker’s cartoon editor,
Robert
Mankoff, offered what was the only inoffensive cartoon possible. ‘”Please
enjoy this culturally, ethnically, religiously and politically correct cartoon
responsibly.” It was four black lines. An empty box.' When spaces are
illustrated, how much do readers and publishers collude in doing harm by
stereotype? In Irish,
NÓS recalled
the precedents of the Third Reich and of
Punch in Victorian England in
spreading depictions that we acknowledge as worthy not of satire but contempt.
The
Electronic
Freedom Foundation balanced the tradition of Swift and Voltaire with a
caution about the restriction of rights online and off. The speed of
dissemination of the cartoons complicates the role of the press, as no censors
or filters can shield journalists in a ‘global field’ where they are now
vulnerable.
Buzzfeed
showed how many British and American press outlets have cropped or blurred CH
covers, while others, as noted above, refused to reproduce them.
Michael Deacon at the
Telegraph
suggested the terrorists did not care about the cartoons themselves, but were using
this as ‘bait’ to tempt counter-measures in turn guaranteed to stoke more
support for Islamic extremism.
Juan
Cole popularised a similar thesis that the attacks were part of a canny
agenda: “'Sharpening the contradictions' is the strategy of sociopaths and
totalitarians, aimed at unmooring people from their ordinary insouciance and
preying on them, mobilizing their energies and wealth for the perverted
purposes of a self-styled great leader.’ In passing I must testify that some on
the fringes of the media had accused Israel [and the U.S.] of responsibility
under a ‘false flag’ operation smacking of the Reichstag Fire, as the attacks
followed France MPs seeking national recognition of Palestine. I wonder if this
accusation persisted after Jewish hostages were executed.
Naomi Wolf on social media urged restraint. She shifted blame back at Western
hegemony for the anger expressed against CH. Others castigated ‘white privilege’
as indulging in unwise cruelty, goading on Muslims who then lashed back out of
pride and solidarity. Others wondered why American policy was not held
culpable, and the pro-Israel lobby. These retorts seemed to convince many
progressives. For, once the sense of what the cartoons conveyed had been (if
briefly) spread on the net (if less so in much of the mainstream press), the
insistence that the freedom to publish provocation was weighed against--and
found wanting by many on the left--fears of impending crackdown on Muslims by
Europeans beholden to NATO and the U.S.
Wolf’s rhetoric and rush of words transmitted expresses this counter-narrative:
‘So now Hollande [thanks, typo corrected] is saying “France is at war with
Terror” and this exactly echoes the “global war on terror” and “we are in a war
footing” language that let Bush and Obama strip an open civil society at peace
of every liberty and launder billions into untraceable “War” black holes. Worst
of all is the way the open peacefulness of Europe is going to be shifted into
constant terror hype fearmongering and militarization with continual attacks on
civil society from the state. Beware beware France you have a far worse threat
facing you than terror attacks!’
Oireachtas
Retort listed a litany of ‘recent curtailments of freedom of expression’ in
Ireland by the media and the government, exemplifying how nations less directly
involved in the struggle between Islamism and secularism also encourage
compliance to the norm as imposed by censorship and ignorance. For me, having
the ability to seek out offensive content is as important as having the option
to choose not to seek it out. I want to decide for myself, not thanks to a
mullah or mogul.
Socialist
Worker issued a SWP statement: ‘The media present Charlie Hebdo as simply a
“satirical magazine”. But it is not the French equivalent of Private Eye as
some commentators have suggested. It may have been once, but it has become a
specialist in presenting provocative and racist attacks on Islam. That does not
justify the killings, but it is essential background.’ This summed up another
line of counter-attack, placing the Parisian crimes within a wider
geopolitical, and right-wing dimension and equating Islam with a ‘race’-based
polity. This to me feels at odds with what Malcolm X saw on his hajj to Mecca,
when he witnessed blue-eyed and fair-skinned pilgrims join those of many
ethnicities to fulfill their Islamic duty, I note in passing.
Simon
Schama reminded readers of the history of satire against potentates,
pontiffs, and princes as part of European progress. After all, the liberating
dimension aligning humanist opposition and secular confrontations against those
who rule in the name of gods from above or of the market also merits mention.
‘The horrifying carnage at
Charlie Hebdo
is a reminder, if ever we needed it, that irreverence is the lifeblood of
freedom. I suppose it is some sort of backhanded compliment that the monsters
behind the slaughter are so fearful of the lance of mirth that the only voice
they have to muffle it is the sound of bullets.’ He upholds a ‘right to
ridicule’, against those who send in clowns.
Joe
Sacco began by mourning his fellow cartoonists. Then he reflected on their
foolhardiness. This caught the double-take of many like him in the media, a day
or so after the attacks, when initial ‘Je Suis Charlie’ posts and candlelit
rallies with ‘Not Afraid’ blended with the second opinions of those who
realised that the responses of Muslims angered by the cartoons might be taken
more seriously than those of a more privileged, and therefore suspect, class of
intellectuals and humanists, and those on the right who sought any opportunity
to stoke anti-Islamic slogans and actions, from the Western ‘white’ world. This
did, however, tend to polarise responses, as if none in the Muslim world,
wherever that spans, objected to the murders and celebrated dissent.
Andy Borowitz tweeted: ‘I guess one part of their plan that the terrorists
didn't think through is now Charlie Hebdo's cartoons are being seen by millions
around the world instead of a few thousand in Paris.’ While this tweet was
shared by those pleased by this, others reacted that mockery had met with
revenge. And some of these did not seem overly displeased by this, even as they
averred that the cartoonists did not merit death for art. Their riposte echoed:
what right does the colonial have to ridicule the colonist?
David
Brooks at the NYT may differ from that paper's editors. He chided a double
standard. ‘Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish
cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to
campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.’ I made this same point
before I read Brooks. I also wonder: many Irish a fortnight ago were angry at
the BBC proposing a comedy about the Famine. How far can we push the limits of
what we may find funny, but not others? Americans usually have fewer legal
restrictions than elsewhere but socially, pressure continues to discourage many
‘offenses’. In Britain, ‘incitement’ is illegal for speech deemed leading to
racial hatred; also, laws applying to all must be distinguished from codes
applying, fairly or not, on a campus that tries to police itself apart from
rest of society.
Ross
Douthat takes up a defense of blasphemy. Although he and Brooks are the
conservative minority at the
New York Times,
their stance encouraging opinions and depictions with which they disagree
sustains a type of principle many liberals back away from taking to its
uncomfortable limits, in a time when tolerance and sensitivity are urged, and
when everyone is jittery about spreading hate. Yet, for reasons of public order
and concomitant discretion in diplomatic rhetoric, this divergence from frank talk
can echo when our politicians decry in Paris ‘terrorism’ without naming its
context more specifically. This is another way we dance around the suppression
of freedoms in the Islamic heartland. There is a ‘squeamishness,’ as Douthat's
article links to in other journalism, about how many react. Part of the problem
is that culture, religion, identity are all wrapped up into a massive package
labelled ‘Islam’ differently than much of the secular realm, where many of us
try to set religion into a category apart.
Here we turn to those not from Europe but from the Islamic world who have
protested its ideology. While I raised this in exchanges with those on the left
who took the ‘CH had it coming’ side, my claims that those in Islamic regimes
also faced incarceration, torture, and death met with no reply other than that
free speech used in such excess unwisely egged on those who, outraged, lashed
back. I also challenged those sympathetic to Islamism to account for the
crackdowns on those from Islamic nations who expressed opinions similar to CH.
Could they be denigrated as ‘racist’ or ‘imperialist’? The pro-Islam, and
somewhat anti-secular response, from those who some on the left supported is
typified by this blog post, shared from
Al
Javieera: ‘One can condemn violence
and at the same time
sustain a critical stance against Charlie Hebdo. One can condemn the
“asymmetric warfare” of masked gunmen
and also reject racism,
tyranny, and hate. One can denounce cold-blooded massacres while also
unsubscribe from the horrible, orientalist titillation of Charlie Hebdo
cartoons and the mental passivity of liberalism.’
Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, who knows firsthand the price paid by those who provoke Islamist
power, fled her Somali homeland and then from the retaliation she faced after
Theo Van Gogh was murdered and she went into hiding in her adopted Holland.
Therefore, she feared capitulation once more. She urged the media to reprint
the cartoons. It was our duty to stand up against forces sympathetic to
jihadists: ‘The more we appease, the more we indulge, the more emboldened
the enemies of freedom become.’
Salman Rushdie, who escaped a sentence of death, invoked as if in Islam's name,
concurred in his statement. ‘Religion, a mediaeval form of unreason, when
combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This
religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam
and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today. I stand with Charlie Hebdo,
as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for
liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. “Respect for religion”
has become a code phrase meaning “fear of religion.” Religions, like all other
ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.’
Maryam
Namazie agreed. She cites
Raif
Badawi's flogging with the first round of 1000 lashes in Saudi Arabia as
one of many abuses and threats against those in Islamic heartlands who speak
out. ‘With the focus now on Charlie Hebdo and the crucial need and right to
criticise Islam and religion, though, let us not forget the many across the
globe who face execution or imprisonment for “insulting the prophet” and
criticising Islam. Below you will find some examples which include Muslims,
believers and atheists; the charges aim not to protect “Muslim sensibilities”
as we so often hear in the west but to protect the status quo and the political
power of Islamists’-- As an Iranian activist now in London, this data verifying
oppression may counter the ‘racist’ or ‘imperialist’ charges brought by some on
the left who decry the Charlie Hebdo content as akin to Nazi, Klan, or
orientalist caricatures.
And at least some outlets like the
Huffington
Post printed enough of the cartoons to let us judge, rather than editors or
activists or clerics, about what we could reflect upon, laugh at, or cringe
from.
The
Daily Banter went further, showing some other outlets would not due to
explicit content.
The
Onion, as true satire, merits a reprint of their 2012 sketch: ‘No One
Murdered Because of This Image.’ Still I note that that satirical site did not
include the Prophet in their send-up of holy images desecrated gleefully.
Finally, the staff at Charlie
Hebdo issued this simple remark: ‘Les caricaturistes sont morts dans l'exercice
de leur métier et pour notre liberté. Leur plume était leur arme.’ (‘The
cartoonists are dead in the course of their trade and for our freedom. Their
pen was their weapon.’) May peace prevail.
The Pensive Quill Jan. 12th 2015. Thanks to
Anthony McIntyre and Carrie Twomey for publication.
P.S. Inevitably, more to share: Nick Cohen emphasises the necessary awareness to
battle self-censorship: ‘European liberals ought to have stopped, as the lash
fell on Badawi’s shoulders, and wondered about their queasiness at criticising
the religions of the “powerless” and “marginalized”. The Saudi Arabian monarchy
is all too powerful, as are the other dictatorships of the Middle East. Power
depends on where you stand and who stands below you. The unemployed man with
the gun is more powerful than the Parisian journalist. The marginal cleric may
have a hard life, but if he sits in a sharia court imposing misogynist rules on
British Muslim women he is to be feared’.
Olivier
Tonneau offers a valuable insight into CH’s mission and equal-opportunity
satire from its French contexts: 'A wave of compassion followed but apparently
died shortly afterward and all sorts of criticism started pouring down the web
against Charlie Hebdo, who was described as islamophobic, racist and even
sexist. Countless other comments stated that Muslims were being ostracized and
finger-pointed. In the background lurked a view of France founded upon the
"myth" of
laïcité, defined as the strict restriction of
religion to the private sphere, but rampantly islamophobic - with passing
reference to the law banning the integral veil. One friend even mentioned a
division of the French left on a presumed "Muslim question".
As a
Frenchman and a radical left militant at home and here in UK, I was puzzled and
even shocked by these comments and would like, therefore, to give you a clear
exposition of what my left-wing French position is on these matters'….Tonneau's
whole
Mediapart essay merits reflection, as does this presentation,
Le Monde journalist
Nabil Wakim's explanation 'to my American friends'.
Max
Fisher at
Vox continued their critique of what they chide as
Islamophobia, and also pointed out as does Tonneau the double layers at work,
for better or worse, in the CH satire and 'news-mixing'. The
Understanding Charlie Hebdo
site places various cartoons in this perspective, as a corrective. Meanwhile,
Olivier
Cyran, a former staff member, confronts CH: '''Muslim bashing" dressed
up as “intransigent defence of freedom of expression” has become your
front-window showcase, which you take care to replenish regularly.' This stance
'allowing you to occupy a non-negligible segment of shameless Islamophobic
opinion on the left.' Cyran, in a long letter documenting many cartoons,
concludes: 'The machine for refining crude racism isn't just profitable, but
also extremely fragile'.
Daily
Kos shared a few of Cabu's CH cartoons, targeting French reactionary and
state icons. See also at DK '
On
not understanding 'Charlie": Why many smart people are getting it wrong.'
About the sneering that replaced sympathy rapidly among some critics on the
Anglophone left,
Leigh
Phillips at the Canadian site
Ricochet takes on the standard
reproach voiced as I noted above within a day or two: 'Of course the killing of
journalists is a bad thing, so the argument goes, but come on, Charlie Hebdo is
"a racist publication." So what do you expect? is the implicit,
victim-blaming conclusion.'
Kenan
Malik at the Marxist site
Redline avers to the past two decades,
when many leftists may promote 'a moral commitment to censorship, a belief that
because we live in a plural society, so we must police public discourse about
different cultures and beliefs, and constrain speech so as not to give
offence'.
David Riley at the Buddhist blog
The Endless Further frames this
hesitation for free speech within that system's fundamental aspiration to right
speech: 'Where do we go from here? Do we encourage journalists to censor
themselves? And if so, is it an act of tolerance, or is it just doing what the
terrorists want us to do? Or, perhaps, the outrage, the defiance, the
condemnation is exactly they want to see. Are we only displaying our wounds for
their pleasure?' Out of another definition of the right to pleasure and to
autonomy rather than conformity,
Suzanne
Moore takes a feminist stance. She retorts: 'don’t ask me to have respect
for these kinds of fundamentalism that have none for me'.
My wife and I differ. She insists that if the cartoons targeted Jews, it'd be a
very different matter, and besides, try as she might to reconcile the need for
free expression with the magazine's images, she does not find them funny. For
now, let's let survivors at CH have the last word, or pictures saying more than
my past four-thousand or so words above, in their
new
issue (summed up in English).
I have been contemplating, often as I drive listening the past month or so to forty hours of Donna Tartt's novel The Goldfinch, read wonderfully on audio by David Pittu, about its themes of how evil can produce good, and bad intentions may be construed ethically as justifiable. At least in hindsight by its main actors.
