“The narrative of white Europeans being killed by Muslim extremists”

The CBC talked to Francine Prose about her hostility to Charlie Hebdo today.

Prose tells As It Happens host Carol Off that despite her objections, she supports the magazine’s right to free speech.

“Free speech is indivisible. If you believe in free speech you believe in any sort of free speech — that you can say anything you want. And that’s absolutely what I believe in and I would include in that everything Charlie Hebdo has done.”

But she says that doesn’t mean Charlie Hebdo deserves the award.

No, it doesn’t; she’s right about that much. They are two separate things.

“We defend the right of neo-nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois but that doesn’t mean we give them an award.”

I’m not even sure I do defend the right of neo-Nazis to march through Skokie, because that’s direct intimidation. I’ve always had reservations about that. [Read more…]

Satire is, by definition, disrespectful

Suzanne Nossel’s reply to Deborah Eisenberg, also in Glenn Greenwald’s collection, is very elucidating.

We believe that honoring Charlie Hebdo affords us an opportunity to inflect global opinion on an issue of longstanding concern to PEN and to free expression advocates worldwide, including many in the Muslim world: namely, efforts to devalue, ban, or punish acts deemed to constitute the defamation of religion. Such assaults come both from governments and from vigilantes, and they are not acceptable in either context.

That pulls a little against some of the other things she says, which are on the “speech all speech no matter what the content” side. This is saying that it’s not just a matter of all speech no matter what the content; that the particulars matter. I agree with that. Suppose instead of Charlie Hebdo we had writers for a hardline Catholic magazine, one funded by the Catholic League for instance, or the Iona Institute. I wouldn’t want to see them get a PEN award. The Catholic League doesn’t believe in free speech, just for one thing, while Charlie Hebdo emphatically does. The Catholic League doesn’t believe in freedom itself, except in the very strained sense of freedom for popes and bishops to control everyone else including non-Catholics. [Read more…]

Say no to the assassin’s veto

From PEN: Rejecting the Assassin’s Veto.

The “assassin’s veto” over speech has become a global phenomenon in recent years and, even more vividly, in recent months, when we’ve seen killings not just in Paris but also in Copenhagen and Bangladesh. Reflecting the intensification of violent intolerance for speech considered offensive by some, former PEN American Center President Salman Rushdie has commented that while he would write The Satanic Verses again today, he does not believe that he would survive the reprisals in this era.

Charlie Hebdo has positioned itself in the firing line of this battle, refusing to accept the curtailment of lawful speech by those who meet it with violence. It is undoubtedly true that in addition to provoking violent threats from extremists, the Hebdo cartoons offended some other Muslims and members of the many other groups they targeted. Indeed, were the Hebdo cartoonists not satirical in their genesis and intent, their content and images might offend most or all of us. But, based on their own statements, we believe that Charlie Hebdo’s intent was not to ostracize or insult Muslims, but rather to reject forcefully the efforts of a small minority of radical extremists to place broad categories of speech off limits—no matter the purpose, intent, or import of the expression.

And ask yourselves: who is ultimately most harmed by the efforts of a small minority of radical extremists to place broad categories of speech off limits? We’re not. It’s the people who are most subject to the power that those extremists (aka murderers) are enforcing who are most harmed. Muslims are marginalized in Europe but at the same time Islam is a powerful religion, and way too many people are crushed and maimed by that power.

Joyce Carol Oates joins the pissing contest

Joyce Carol Oates is another useful idiot. That doesn’t perturb me as much as for instance Prose, because I have never liked Oates’s writing, to put it mildly.

The useful idiocy:

Deborah Solomon ‏@deborahsolo 16 hours ago
Thank you, @PENAmerican, for honoring #CharlieHebdo & not bowing to the pressures of literary correctness. http://nyti.ms/1GmLLYe

Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates 4 hours ago
@deborahsolo @PENamerican It is a very delicate issue to honor “freedom of expression” without seeming to endorse seeming “hate speech.”

I wonder what the scare quotes are for. If Oates doesn’t think it is hate speech, then what is she talking about?

Joyce Carol Oates‏@JoyceCarolOates
@deborahsolo @PENamerican Have you actually seen these “satirical” images? If they were of Jews would be “anti-Semitism.” No?

Daniel Mendelsohn ‏@DMendelsohn1960 3 hours ago
@deborahsolo @JoyceCarolOates but the cultural context is quite different in France. Surely that is a factor?

Joyce Carol Oates ‏@JoyceCarolOates 2 hours ago
@deborahsolo That may be. But you would not give “Mein Kampf” a National Book Award if you were a judge–right?

Oh dear god – she compared Charlie Hebdo to Mein Kampf.

Ike Aramba ‏@shmarxism 1 hour ago
@JoyceCarolOates @deborahsolo One of the CH journalists was murdered for being Jewish – now you’re comparing it to “Mein Kampf”.

Quite.

Deborah Eisenberg gets Charlie Hebdo all wrong

Glenn Greenwald is collecting

the key documents giving rise to the controversy that has erupted inside PEN America over the award the group is bestowing on Charlie Hebdo.

He starts with an email from Deborah Eisenberg to PEN’s Executive Director Suzanne Nossel on March 26.

What a wonderful thing to give an award to some person or institution that courageously exemplifies freedom of expression – and how entirely in keeping with the objectives of PEN. But as a member, up until now anyhow, of PEN, I would like to express myself freely on PEN’s decision to confer the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award on the magazine Charlie Hebdo. [Read more…]

Six writers in search of a clue

You have got to be kidding.

The New York Times reports:

The decision by PEN American Center to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted six writers to withdraw as literary hosts at the group’s annual gala on May 5, adding a new twist to the continuing debate over the publication’s status as a martyr for free speech.

It’s one of those cases where there wouldn’t be a “debate” if so many people weren’t industriously getting everything wrong.

The novelists Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have withdrawn from the gala, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Gerard Biard, Charlie Hebdo’s editor in chief, and Jean-Baptiste Thoret, a Charlie Hebdo staff member who arrived late for work on Jan. 7 and missed the attack by Islamic extremists that killed 12 people, are scheduled to accept the award.

[Read more…]

And in that they were exceedingly successful

The Washington Post has the whole text of Garry Trudeau’s speech on receiving the George Polk award, so we can do a thorough job of scowling at the wrongness.

I, and most of my colleagues, have spent a lot of time discussing red lines since the tragedy in Paris. As you know, the Muhammad cartoon controversy began [more than] eight years ago in Denmark, as a protest against “self-censorship,” one editor’s call to arms against what he felt was a suffocating political correctness. The idea behind the original drawings was not to entertain or to enlighten or to challenge authority — his charge to the cartoonists was specifically to provoke, and in that they were exceedingly successful.

Wait. I disagree that the idea behind the original drawings was not to challenge authority – and for that matter in doing so to entertain and enlighten. But to challenge authority? Fuck yes! Of course it was. It was to challenge theocratic authority that was saying You Must Not Draw This One Historical-Religious Person, because our religion says so. Disobeying that wholly illegitimate command is to challenge authority. Yes the religion in question is a religion of outsiders in Denmark, so yes that complicates things, but it doesn’t make Islam not authoritarian. If only it did. [Read more…]

Well, voilà

I started to say I hate to agree with David Frum, but then I paused and decided I don’t, really – I’ve seen or heard him say reasonable things more than once, so it’s fatuous to hate to agree with him just because he’s a conservative.

He wrote about Garry Trudeau v Charlie Hebdo a couple of days ago, starting with a compliment to the Anglo-American liberal instinct to sympathize with the underdog.

This is not a universal human norm. Across much of the modern world, human beings still follow the ancient Roman rule,vae victis—woe to the loser. But the liberal tradition appealingly sees its core task as standing up for the weak against the powerful.

[Read more…]