CHARLIE WHO?
Regarding the issues surrounding Charlie Hebdo, and the murders that recently took place in France, many folks I know have quoted or linked to the same article. They highlight it as being one that’s on the mark, shedding critical light on these complex matters.
The author – a Mr Scott Long, who appears to be a Harvard-educated legal professional and blogger – certainly does all the right things to win fans. He defends freedom of speech, attacks racism, pokes fun at social media, mocks Richard Dawkins, and just generally makes his readers feel comfortable in their own beliefs. But, as far as I can tell, in his attempt to clarify and resolve, Long manages to take just about everything important out of context, causing him to miss the point almost entirely. (Which is actually quite remarkable given that he does so, decontextualizes everything, in the process of giving us a history lesson and a lecture on moral philosophy. Surely it’s only a PhD from Harvard who could pull that off.) I won’t go into every detail of his very long essay but there are a few key points that do need addressing and I think make my point.
The author argues that “Je suis Charlie” is ridiculous and offensive. (And most folks, it would seem, agree.) He says that “To abhor what was done to the victims ... is not the same as to become them.” (Right. A logical fact. No complaint here.) But he also asserts that tweeting #IAmCharlie is foolish and trite – a trivial act in the era and medium of triviality. He says doing so “shouldn’t be mistaken for a political act.” (Hold on right there, mister!) To the contrary, my good man, “I am Charlie” is very clearly a political act. And it is so even if we choose to ignore history and forget the role of social media in virtually all notable political consciousness raisings, and full-on revolutions, across the globe in recent years. “I Am Charlie” is a political act even if we ignore the fact that a mere tweet has been the violation cited as justification for the imprisonment and execution of journalists, activists, human rights and democracy campaigners, and secularists across the globe. No, as a simple statement of fact, all action or inaction, is a deeply political operation. Is there any doubt that, while more pointed activism of any kind (marching in the street with your union or blogging alone in your bedroom) may be a demand for change, inactivism (doing nothing at all) is an equally forceful insistence on the status quo? This seems obvious. But even ignoring this too, we can still see that a mere tweet is not the safe, private, purely emotional, or self-congratulatory pat on the back, as Long and others would have us believe. And it is most certainly not something that lasts “15 seconds” before vanishing as though it never existed. “I Am Charlie” is a loud public declaration, on a world stage no less; one that’s more timely, visible, potent, directed, and lasting than operations using more conventional tools. It’s more significant than an op-ed in your local paper, a peer-reviewed journal article, or even a book – and can have just as much or more impact. To think otherwise is not just to underestimate but to entirely misunderstand both the medium and the message (their scale and scope, indelibility, and reproducibility.)
Instead of being merely self-serving or ignorant, as the author would have us believe, “I am Charlie” paints a globally-visible target on one’s own back and says loud and clear, “if they’re a target then I too am a target.” It acknowledges what most commentators seem eager to ignore: the fact that those employed by Charlie Hebdo made themselves a target, and that in doing so they took the brunt of the attack, very clearly saving the lives of other would-be targets (children on a bus, or mourners at a funeral, or government officials sitting in parliament, or troops at a military base…) “Je suis Charlie” recognizes that the violence we saw in France was essentially an indiscriminate act: that the target was French society, and any person who happened to be in Paris on the day of the attack. “I am Charlie” acknowledges that cartoons are not what drove anyone to murder in France and that suggesting such is a sorry attempt at misdirection. And we know this because we now have the killer’s own recorded video statements as proof. The murderers, their supporters, and their alleged coordinators do not cite their having taken offence to a particular cartoon: they cite “infidels on Muslim land”, they cite the French “bombing of innocents”, and they cite scripture. So if you’re looking for motives these are them. But this truth is what religious moderates,apologists, and the confused, like Mr Long, seek to deny. But why?
Well, it’s for you to explain why Long and others would twist what the murderers actually tell us motivated them and superimpose their own theory, their own pop-psychology and mindreading. This is a strange kind of politically-correct, psycho(mis)analysis and history-correction that I simply do not understand. Recent bombings, beheadings, kidnappings, and shootings across the globe are, we are told by the actors themselves, carried out “in the name of Islam” and for the sake of uniquely Islamic ideas and ideals. And some of these ideas, like apostasy (leaving the faith) and blasphemy (insulting the faith) have significant numbers of subscribers all over the planet. Legitimate poll after poll, for decades, reveals this. (And not just in Saudi Arabia or Indonesia but in the West, in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well.) These polls show that many believers – likely hundreds of millions by any conservative count – feel that committing religious violations (like blasphemy or homosexuality) are not just punishable acts but ones that are rightly punishable by death. (And I can attest to this, having spent a fair bit of time in some of the countries with, polls tell us, the largest numbers of adherents to these terrible ideas.) So, counter to popular Western opinion, not everyone is a moderate nor is this violence obviously in direct opposition to the teachings of Islam.
However, it is obvious “I am Charlie” stands in direct in opposition to these terrible ideas. It states clearly that in a free and open society blasphemy and apostasy and homosexuality are not crimes, should not be crimes, and that murdering people for religious violations such as these will not ever be tolerated. “I Am Charlie” acknowledges that differences of opinion on such matters are not minor; that these incompatibilities are not neutralized or swept away by an appeal for tolerance and multiculturalism; that there is not, nor will there ever be, a special corner of society in which these ideas or acts are going to be acceptable. “I am Charlie” acknowledges that some ideas are not compatible and sometimes you have to make a choice; that cultural relativism has very clear and profound limits. Pretending otherwise, as Mr Long and others appear willing to do, is as foolish as it is dangerous.
Long reminds us that in order “to combat violence you must look unflinchingly at the concrete inequities and practices that breed it.” He says, “we lose our ability to imagine political solutions when we stop thinking critically, when we let emotional identifications sweep us into factitious substitutes for solidarity and action. We lose our ability to respond to atrocity when we start seeing people not as individuals, but as symbols.” I agree completely. Long wants to paint a co-ordinated group of violent actors (working with the declared support of other international groups, namely Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but quite possibly with the help of certain states also) as hapless lone gunmen and/or a few bad apples. I cannot imagine how Long thinks doing so is a sophisticated application of critical thinking. Is this a sober and unflinching look at all of the abundant data? Or is this an emotional identification and a fraudulent substitution?
Yes, Charlie Hebdo’s Mohammed cartoons were provocative, but at the same time they were a very legitimate and even logical response (from a group of satirists and cartoonists) to the murder of their Danish colleagues. (This response is as surprising and offensive as Elton John or Celine Dion writing a pop song about the murder of a fellow musician.) The cartoons were published directly in opposition to a violent and misogynistic set of ideas and to a deranged sub-set of people who feel murder a reasonable response to the printing of a cartoon. Apparently Mr Long and his supporters don’t think so. They would have us believe that the employees at Charlie Hebdo were, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the French President or the French ambassador to the United Nations. That their cartoons were tantamount to weapons of mass destruction launched into all of Islam’s holy sites around the world. This could not be further from the truth. And Long knows it. They did not take up arms. They did not commit violence or even threaten to do so. They turned the other cheek. They penned a cartoon. In fact, in this way, Charlie Hebdo serves as a powerful, moral, humanist model for us all. (I hope you’ll agree.) The world is an undeniably better place, when the response to violence and murder is not more violence and murder but instead a cartoon.
It’s essential to keep in mind that, before its staff was murdered, Charlie Hebdo was virtually unknown – even within France. At it peak, Charlie Hebdo had a printing of less than 100,000 copies, in a nation of 65 million people. This is a readership of, what, less than 0.2% of the population? For a Canadian equivalent of Hebdo’s readership and influence you’d have to look at, say, the Penticton Herald or the Timmins Daily Press. But even this comparison isn’t quite accurate because, of course, Charlie Hebdo is a satirical rag whose mission is largely to poke fun. It is by definition not the voice of an entire community. Hebdo was never trying to be politically correct, reflect popular opinion, remain neutral, or even always be taken seriously. And we cannot ignore the simple fact that Charlie Hebdo was only ever intended for a domestic audience. It was never distributed abroad or even published in Arabic or Farsi or in any other language.
“But it’s racist and offensive” we are told. To whom, I ask? Firstly, the cartoons, all of them, were in response to acts of fanatical, barbarous, murderers. They were a public statement and, as satire, a provocation to the French public for a more frank discussion about religious fundamentalism generally and terrorism and murder specifically, but also about French values and values such as freedom of speech. These drawings were not aimed at a race or at an individual. (Islam, Islamism, and Jihadism are neither of these.) If the Hebdo cartoons were racial hate speech, or even something like it, that would be one thing. They were not that. Lampooning Muhammad or the ideas behind elements, or even the whole, of Islam (or any authority or sanctity or set of ideas) is entirely legitimate and, I hope you notice, very different than attacking a person or community. (In this way, accusing Hebdo of racism is no different than accusing Idle No More or Black Lives Matter of racism for their opposition to and raising awareness of discrimination, violence, and murder.)
No, if you look at the cartoons within the context and history of the publication in which they were printed (a satirical political rag) then giving Islam the unwanted attention it did was not some form of special outrageous act. From this perspective the Hebdo cartoons can, in fact, be seen as the opposite. The cartoons treated Islam with exactly the same skepticism and contempt as every other authority within the French state. If you go beyond these few cartoons and look at the entire body of work they’ve produced you discover that their main target has been the far right-wing of the Front National (an intolerant, xenophobic, anti-immigration band of hyper-conservative, death penalty supporting, neo-Nazi sympathizing, French nationalists) and its founders and sponsors, the Le Pen family. They also spend a lot of their time attacking criminal bosses, bankers, and government officials and their terrible policies. Of course Charlie Hebdo also expressed opposition to religion, all religion. But this was not a novel, contemporary denial; instead, it follows the well-worn intellectual, socialist, anarchist, feminist, and freethinking traditions we expect from the French. It goes back at least to the idea of “Ni Dieu, ni maître” (“No Gods, no masters”) that emerged in the 1880s and to characters like Friedrich Nietzsche. As such, being the dominant religion in the country, the Catholic Church and its various Popes have suffered the brunt of Hebdo’s religious attacks over the years. But they’ve attacked (cartoon attacked, as in: “KA-POW!!!”) orthodox Jews and, more recently, Muslims with the same tenacity and veracity when they felt it was deserved. They simply are not a racist or anti-Muslim paper. They have been more critical than most French media in their opposition to Israel’s bombings of Gaza. They have also pledged their support for illegal immigrants – mostly North African and Muslim, being given permanent residency in France. For comparison, such ideas are unpopular among mainstream media outlets and political parties in France. So these simply are not the ideas and actions of an inherently racist organization, one that has a special hatred for Muslims – as many would naïvely paint Charlie Hebdo and its contributors.
As far as I can tell, these cartoons are “racist” and “offensive” if only you re-imagine the meaning of these words, re-frame the context in which the images were made, pretend that a religion was getting special attention when in fact was being treated with an unusual level of equality, and imagine that the cartoons were directed at an audience we know, for certain, they were not directed toward.
I have no doubt the discrimination and abuse experienced by Muslims in France is considerable. (We all know the French, at their best, to be terse, arrogant, and rude – even toward other Frenchmen.) Unfortunately, most immigrant populations in most places and at most times throughout history appear to have suffered discrimination. Today immigrants everywhere continue to receive an unreasonable amount of blame for any and all social problems: from employment and housing scarcity to the spread of disease and even unpopular elections results. Such assessments are almost always cruelly unjustified. And the only way to make the situation better is for people to continue to be vocal and share their experience with others and the wider world.
That being said, please forgive me for not being more concerned in this particular case. After all, this very same “defenceless minority” claiming to have been “attacked” (by cartoons no less) will in the same breath remind you that theirs is the fastest growing religion on Earth – approaching two billion adherents (or roughly 28% of all living humans) – with representatives in just about every nation on Earth. In France, specifically, Islam is the second most professed religion with a population of roughly five million, making up 7% of the total population there. For scale, this number is equal to the entire population of the metropolitan area of Canada’s largest city, Toronto; in a country, France, that takes up an area roughly the size of Newfoundland and Labrador. Similarly, for scale, we could compare this (very unpopularly no doubt) to the size of the Jewish population of France, the world’s third largest Jewish population. This group numbers around 500,000 or 0.7% of the total French population. (Globally, the Jewish population figures around 14 million, or 0.2% of humankind.) And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to notice that, in addition to the occasional cartoon-based jab from Charlie Hebdo, the Jewish population of France is presently being attacked and murdered by gunmen in their places of business, resulting in the largest Jewish emigration trend anywhere. And this comes, as you know, after this same population was, in living memory, rounded up and exterminated like animals in that very same country. If you don’t like that comparison we might look at the circumstance of a visible minority in Canada. Here First Nations, a political collective of much smaller distinct cultures, in relatively recent history made up 100% of the population of this land. After a multi-generational invasion, conquest, and genocide these people now, collectively, make up just 4% of the population. (The Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, the largest in Canada, represents just 0.07% of Canada’s population and amounts to a virtually invisible 0.0003% of the global population.) So this is a very real minority, in every possible context, and one under very real attack on every possible level physical, cultural, linguistic, political, industrial, legal, economic,environmental, and spiritual.
(Perhaps it is silly or even offensive to make such comparisons, but when claims are made and provocative words are being thrown around I think they need to be clearly defined and put into some context.)
The problem with a critique like that which Mr Long forwards, in addition to being demonstrably false, is that it diverts attention from a much bigger problem. What many people, like Mr Long, seem keen to ignore is that the real threat facing Islam (if that’s possible given its popularity and global disbursement) and Muslims everywhere comes, in fact, from other Muslims (and indirectly, therefore, from the very texts of Islam.) This should be crystal clear. From direct rule by brutal authoritarian monarchs and their families to general inequality and, in places, the vulgar subjugation of an entire gender; from legalized dismemberment and beheading of dissenters to the sanctified slaughter of Muslims for the crime of being born into the wrong tribe: these are the ideas that are most offensive and pose the greatest threat. Surely, the existential battle-to-the-death between orthodox Sunni and Shi’a factions across all of the Middle-East is more noteworthy, causing of concern, and deeply offensive than the most remote and wholly trivial comic depictions (by outsiders no less, working at an unknown satirical paper in the secular, European republic of France.) Or haven’t you noticed?
And, further still, if there is to be a criticism of the flush of “I am Charlie” slogans and supporters it is only that they should have been there all along. Where were the journalists and professors and heads of government calling for freedom of speech when lectures, protests, and opinion pieces are censored on the sole ground that they may theoretically offend some folks (folks who are not forced to attend or to read anything and are completely free to abstain from listening, learning, or sharing)? Where was this broad coalition of rational voices in defence of the prophets and patrons of the enlightenment and of democracy? Well, no doubt they’ve been scared into silence by folks like Scott Long, PhD.
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