Fine distinctions

Francine Prose on Facebook on Monday:

Why is it so difficult for people to make fine distinctions? The writers opposing the PEN award support free speech, free expression, and stand fully behind Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish whatever they want without being censored, and of course without the use of violence to enforce their silence. But the giving of an award suggests that one admires and respects the value of the work being honored, responses quite difficult to summon for the work of Charlie Hebdo. Provocation is simply not the same as heroism. I do hope that the audience at the PEN gala will be shown some of the cruder and more racist cartoons that CH publishes, so they will know what they are applauding and honoring. I’m disheartened by the usually sensible intelligent Salman Rushie’s readiness to call us “fellow travelers” who are encouraging Islamist jihadism, and also to label us, on Twitter, as “six pussies.” I can only assume he meant our feline dignity and was not implying that we are behaving like people who have vaginas. It would be sad to think that a writers organization cannot discuss free speech without resorting to political accusations and sexual insult.

Well, speaking of fine distinctions, what about the fine distinction between actual racism and satirical meta-racism? What about using racist tropes as a way of mocking racism?

That seems to be a fine distinction that Prose is ignoring or unaware of.

You can argue that that’s a bad idea; you can argue that that kind of satire doesn’t travel well, because customs differ from place to place; you can argue that it’s risky; you can argue a lot of things. But it’s just silly to pretend there actually is no distinction between racism and satirical meta-racism.

 

More and more Soft-heads

Boris Kachka at The Vulture has that letter to PEN.

This afternoon, a letter went out to members of the PEN American Center — not an official communique but a letter of dissent, boasting 35 signatories and soliciting many more. It concluded, “We the undersigned, as writers, thinkers, and members of PEN, therefore respectfully wish to disassociate ourselves from PEN America’s decision to give the 2015 Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo.”

So they think the Kouachi brothers were right, then – not right to murder, but right in their reasons to murder. [Read more…]

Now it’s 35 shits

This is absolutely disgusting.

More than two dozen writers including Junot Díaz, Joyce Carol Oates and Lorrie Moore have joined a protest against a freedom of expression award for Charlie Hebdo, signing a letter taking issue with what they see as a “reward” for the magazine’s controversial cartoons.

A protest. A fucking protest against giving an award to a strongly anti-racist and left wing magazine because they think in their ignorance that it’s racist.

In their letter the writers protest against the award from PEN America, the prominent literary organization of which most of the signatories are members, accusing the French satirical magazine of mocking a “section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized”.

That’s an ignorant uninformed mistaken accusation. [Read more…]

How feminists are not like Islamists

From a comment on a Facebook post of mine about Brendan O’Neill’s malicious comparison of feminist objections to advertising that uses a woman in a bikini to sell a product to Islamist objections to women not wearing burqas:

I don’t know of a single person who has been killed by feminists for political reasons. Not even one. Or a single terrorist attack where a feminist group claimed responsibility. If there were a single such victim their name might as well be engraved in stone, they would not likely ever be forgotten because of the sheer rarity. There are so many victims of Islamists and so many terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamist groups that not even an expert could possibly hope to remember them all.

…

To instead resort to an absolutely unjustifiable comparison in a pitiful attempt at scare-mongering against an obviously peaceful political group not only discredits the article, as it calls the author’s grip of reality into serious question, it is also frequently used as a tactic to minimise the atrocities of Islamists by drawing completely false equivalences, such as when the Index on Censorship reacted to the murder of Theo van Gogh by comparing the chilling effect on free speech of his murder to the effect he himself had on free speech by “intimidating” Muslims with his movie.

The message is either that feminism is an existential threat to us, and the tube is in danger of being bombed by feminist fanatics to punish us all for the bikini adverts – which is plainly ludicrous – or that Islamism is just another political movement, no different and no more threatening than Take Back the Night or Greenpeace, and we have no reason to treat it differently – which is also plainly ludicrous, but there are plenty of leftists who do their utmost to get you to take it seriously, regardless.

Well said.

They have in their stupidity and malice allied with the wrong side

Nick Cohen – award-winning Nick Cohen – excoriates the Six Soft-heads in the Spectator.

Those who shout the loudest about respecting “diversity” and the culture of others, cannot stir themselves to respect the French enough to learn their language and understand their culture. If they did, they would know that Charlie Hebdo is a left-wing magazine, which used Boko Haram to parody  conservatives so lost in paranoia they imagined enslaved Nigerian women were threatening to come to France and steal their money.

Max Fisher of Vox tried to shake up Anglo-Saxon leftists by pointing them to a New Yorker cover showing Barack Obama as a Kenyan Muslim and Michelle Obama as a terrorist. It was a satire of the Tea Party fantasy that Obama was a foreigner, who could not stand for election, his wife was a far leftist and between them the couple married the ideologies of the Mau-Mau and the Black Panthers. No one who understood New York liberal culture could fail to see the satire. Similarly, he continued, as if he were speaking to an unusually stupid child, no one who understood Parisian culture could fail to see that Charlie Hebdo was mocking the prejudices of the French Right.

[Read more…]

293

One piece of better news out of Nigeria – not fantastic news, just correcting a bad thing news, but still, something.

Nigeria’s military says it has rescued 200 girls and 93 women from a notorious Boko Haram stronghold, but an army spokesman says the hostages were not those kidnapped from Chibok a year ago.

“The troops rescued 200 abducted girls and 93 women,” Colonel Sani Usman told Reuters in a text message.

They were not, however, from Chibok, the village from which more than 200 girls were abducted in April 2014, he said.

“So far, they (the army) have destroyed and cleared Sassa, Tokumbere and two other camps in the general area of Alafa, all within the Sambisa Forest.”

The women and girls were rescued from camps “discovered near or on the way to Sambisa,” one army official said.

[Read more…]

Would they deplore any awards made in their memory?

Alex Massie takes on the Six Soft-heads with the kind of gritted disdain they deserve.

I wonder if these people also think the Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses also had it coming? I wonder if they think there would be something unseemly about awarding Salman Rushdie – and all those involved in publishing his novel – awards for their courageous defence of liberty? People died and many others risked assassination to bring The Satanic Verses into print. Perhaps, however, there is a feeling that this was a noble enterprise because it was somehow a more literary enterprise? (Except, of course, plenty of people failed the Rushdie test too.) [Read more…]