Lliana Bird also objects to the whole “Charlie Hebdo is racist!” thing.
[O]ne thing I’ve found difficult to ignore is the growing voices of those who knew little of the cartoonists and journalists saying terrible things about them, which are quite frankly unsettling.
“Racist”, “Islamophobic” and “hypocritical” have been the most common accusations. Many seemingly educated friends and social media buddies seemed to be merely glancing at a few cherry-picked Charlie Hebdo covers without making any effort in understanding their true meaning or impetus (or often even of the French translation of the accompanying captions).
And that’s not enough, especially when the subject is people who were just murdered by two fanatical bigots for reasons that are beneath contempt.
Charlie Hedbo were leftists, some may even anarchists and punks. They printed numerous cartoons which were anti racism/xenophobia; that mocked and satirised the far right as bigots and racists. As long time reader and Frenchman, Olivier Tonneau pointed out in his excellent article, The National Front and the Le Pen family were in fact their primary targets above all others. Next came bosses, politicians and the corrupt. Finally they opposed organised religion. ALL organised religion. They didn’t hate or abuse or target any one group or religion. They did however mock ALL systems and organisations and individuals of power – from political to religious to everything in between. They were satirists, and all people, systems and organisations should be open to criticism and mockery (so long as it sticks within the laws of the land). They were democratic in their ridicule and satirisation. No one was exempt. To do otherwise would have been the hypocritical. Equal rights also means equal treatment.
I don’t agree with those last two sentences, because (among other reasons) equal rights don’t always mean equal treatment in areas other than satirical journalism. People can have equal rights but still also be stigmatized or scorned in various ways, and I do think that makes a difference to how (or if) they should be satirized. (A shorter way of saying that is to talk about punching up versus down, but I’m sick of that formula, and anyway I don’t like formulas.)
As Oliver Tonneau so beautifully writes: “Two young French Muslims of Arab descent have not assaulted the numerous extreme-right wing newspapers that exist in France (Minute, Valeurs Actuelles) who ceaselessly amalgamate Arabs, Muslims and fundamentalists, but the very newspaper that did the most to fight racism… I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, then you lost precious friends and allies last week.”
Terrible, isn’t it?
… all people, systems and organisations should be open to criticism and mockery (so long as it sticks within the laws of the land).
??? Did Lliana Bird perhaps file this from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan?
In case anyone has missed the breakdown of Charlie Hebdo‘s satire:
The picture: http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/img/taubira-en-singe-charlie-hebdo.jpg
Next cartoon: http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/img/mrap-discriminations.jpg
Cultural fluency is most definitely required.
Charlie H looks strange to my Anglo eyes, as I’m used to the gentler satire of Private Eye, which doesn’t take the piss out of religion per se at all, though it might dig at religious figures like the Pope. About a hundred years ago Chesterton noted that the savagery of French caricatures would shock the English and were symptoms of a very different history.
However I’ve been disgusted not just by people’s readiness to argue from ignorance but the desperate eagerness that some of the Left/progressives have been to find Charlie H racist. They were starting from an Islamophobe premise – if Islamists went and murdered cartoonists they must have had some kind of cause and partially justified grievance– and to bolster that they found and passed round those cartoons that were supposed to show that Charlie H are a dodgy lot and tho’ they would condemn the murders (of course!) they could therefore could not show actual solidarity.
I thought my opinion of the Islamist sympathising strain in the Anglophone Left and its intellectual dishonesty and moral corruption couldn’t get any lower but it has. At the same time my admiration of the French Left has risen sharply.
This is worth reading:-
“When Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, people also searched for answers. They didn’t have to look far; Breivik explained his motivation in a 1,515-page manifesto railing against the “Islamisation” of Europe at the hands of “Cultural Marxism.” At the time, commentators did not cast him as a disenfranchised victim of circumstance, or drag up historical events to demonstrate how Norway had done this to itself. Instead, Breivik was presented as what he was — a nobody who tried to be somebody by murdering people for a cause he’d discovered on the internet.
The reaction would have been quite different had Breivik committed his atrocity in the name of Islam.
Had his murders been openly and avowedly carried out in order to bring attention to some Islamist gripe, his manifesto would not have been dismissed as ravings, but closely analyzed as the thoughts of an alienated man driven to extremes by a heartfelt sense of injustice. Editorials would have paid lip service to the horror of the killings — then explained at length how immigration and “Cultural Marxism” might indeed have gone too far. Commentators would have been invited into news studios to argue that, while blowing people’s heads off for their political views is wrong, Breivik had had his cultural identity and dearly held beliefs trampled.”
https://news.vice.com/article/being-mad-about-cartoons-was-not-what-motivated-the-charlie-hebdo-murderers
Rosiebell, good comment.
I recently came across a You Tube video of a talk from Caroline Fourest. She is a French feminist, editor of the magazine ProChoix and former journalist at Charlie Hebdo. It’s worth watching:
Secularism against Fanaticism (Secular Conference) .
rosiebell:
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I must confess before going any further that I am a fascismophobe, and the similarities I have directly experienced in Islamic countries (Iran, Malaysia) lead me to classify myself as an Islamophobe into the bargain. Though I get along very well with the Muslims I do business with down at my local halal market, the way Islamic countries usually make it into the news (whippings for ‘Insulting Islam’; stonings for ‘adultery’; hangings & beheadings for apostasy and blasphemy etc, etc) is not exactly a good look; particularly for a ‘religion of peace’; unless of course the ‘peace’ they speak of is that of the graveyard.
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I maintain that the founding text of fascism was never ‘Mein Kampf’. It was the Koran: ahead of the former by about 1,600 years.
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The readiness of large sections of the western Left to sympathise with, cheer on, and get eagerly into bed with Islamists and sundry other ME fascists I find to be an appalling confession of moral and political bankrupcy, and reminiscent of the apparent compromise of principle that underlay the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939; which when examined more closely turns out to have been less of a compromise and more of a natural alliance, albeit a temporary one.
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Charlie Hebdo apparently set out to offend religious sensibilities all round. Nobody, in any society worth living in, can claim a right to be not offended.
Private Eye does not take the piss out of “religion”, but absolutely does definitely regularly takes the piss out of religions. It’s just careful to make sure that the only religions it takes the piss out of are the ones that don’t hit back.
To quote Jimmy Carr: “When I was a kid, I used to have an imaginary friend. I thought he went everywhere with me. I could talk to him and he could hear me, and he could grant me wishes and stuff too. But then I grew up, and stopped going to church. [Pause for audience response]. Oh come on, that’s what it is, isn’t? [Pause] Unless you’re Muslim, in which case it’s ALL ABSOLUTELY TRUE. [sotto voce] I mean I’m not a fuckin idiot.”
From Haaretz:
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Re Private Eye & religion – it takes the piss out of the Pope or the Archbish of Canterbury but I don’t think it goes on about actual contents of beliefs. Ian Hislop the editor is an observant CofE Christian. In Anglo terms Charlie H reminds me of the underground mags of the 60’s & 70’s which took the piss out of Christianity in the kind of climate which made The Life of Brian a bit of a shocker. Islam wasn’t an issue then. And it isn’t scatological. Charlie H looks more like Viz.
divaexmachina @#3 links a video with Caroline Fourest’s talk at the Secular Conference where Fourest addresses this very idea, although in reference to earlier cartoons of Mohammed.
Fourest scoffs at the suggestion that oil has been poured on a fire as if, as she says, there was no fire there before and the problem is just the oil. It’s funny to read the same argument now, after the shootings, as the problem is the cartoon.
Thank you for that link, Divaexmachina. I thought the last 5 minutes were especially good. She’s been making the same argument that I have been – that it’s not just silly and wrong and often racist to focus on some alleged essential differences among major religions, but it also dangerously distracts from the reality that Christian theocratic movements are a significant element of the European Right and Identitarian politics.
Almost every day I see arguments suggesting that Christianity has mellowed and that its theocratic tendencies died out centuries ago.* People who make this argument seem to know nothing about Spain, which was a confessional dictatorship under Franco, Vichy France, which was also Christo-fascist, Latin American dictatorships, contemporary Russia or Uganda, and so on. They don’t recognize that these movements exist in Europe and around the world (the fact that the current Pope is less of a public ally for the Catholic extremists is a good thing) and they gain strength alongside the Right in general. They also gain from opposition to blasphemy of any sort. And they have a very long memory. As Fourest makes clear, it’s not that Christianity, Judaism, and so on are or have become softer or more tolerant, but that their theocratic elements are often constrained by secular constitutions, governments, and traditions. But we can’t take those for granted, and making blasphemy exceptions for Islam opens the door for the Christian theocratic agenda while doing nothing to help the millions of people, mostly Muslims, living in Islamic theocracies.
This does not mean that we don’t have a responsibility to take care to distinguish blasphemy from racism (rather than simplistically thinking that all blasphemy surrounding Islam is or is not racism); it does mean that blasphemy and anti-faith activism are absolutely necessary and even urgently needed beyond addressing specifically Islamist movements and regimes.
*This is particularly hard to understand in the US, where theocrats occupy major positions in government and a self-proclaimed theocrat his just announced his candidacy for the presidency.
(the fact that the current Pope is less of a public ally for the Catholic extremists is a good thing)
Ha! I saw a report on his latest remarks literally a few minutes after I posted that. Seems I have to partially retract.
Here’s a link to good Pope Francis’s comments on criticizing religion:
http://time.com/3668875/pope-francis-charlie-hebdo/
Two things:
1. Someone didn’t pay attention during the “turn the other cheek” lesson that Jesus guy kept going on about.
2. I’m an atheist and I wouldn’t punch anyone for saying anything. Attack my loved ones physically and all bets are off but criticize them? I wouldn’t physically retaliate. Guess I’m a better Christian than Francis.
It’s probably worth mentioning that before the 2006 publishing of the Danish cartoons, CH used to be criticized for not making fun of Islam as much as other religions.
Here with talk show host Ardisson in 2005, Charb explains that they tend to not satirize imams like they do priests because of the power differential. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiQMc7UjyL4 (sorry, it’s in French).
Still, I’ve only seen them make fun of fundamentalists since 2006, not muslims.