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Charlie Hebdo – Part Deux
Posted by MASKED AVENGER on SEPTEMBER 3, 2020
Yesterday saw the delayed start of the trial of fourteen suspected accomplices to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack. Postponed for four months due to the coronavirus pandemic, three of the accused are being tried in absentia, reportedly having evaded apprehension by fleeing to Islamic State held territory in Syria. To mark the occasion the magazine republished the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad which sparked the deadly attack on their Paris office five and a half years ago, resulting in the death of twelve people including its editor and controversial cartoonist, Stéphane Charbonnier.
That the cartoons in question were insulting and highly provocative isn’t really open to debate (yes, I have viewed them) and I doubt Charbonnier or any of his team would have even denied the charge. Satire through wanton insult and mockery was Charlie Hebdo’s modus operandi after all and part of a French tradition of iconoclasm through caricature. For decades, if not centuries, it was the ecclesiastic hypocrisies of the Catholic Church that found itself the subject of this distinctly Gallic form of earthy humour; in fact the English adjective used to describe it, Rabelaisian, was coined in honour of the French Renaissance writer, François Rabelais whose grotesque, bawdy satirising of Catholic beliefs and practises set the precedent for the iconoclasts of the Siècle des Lumières.
Of course, Charbonnier and his team would have been well aware when they decided to publish those fateful images that insulting Islam was an altogether different proposition from deriding a Catholicism that had been rendered effete from two centuries of laicité and a swingeing campaign of de-Christianisation conducted in the aftermath of the 1789 revolution. They would have been aware that to abuse Muslim religious sensitivities was to invite a rather more robust response than a letter of complaint to the editor and a boycott of the magazine from its (non-existent) Muslim readership. Like juveniles they thought to amuse themselves by holding a flame to a pressurised aerosol can, only for it to explode in their faces. Tragic, but not altogether surprising.
Now I appreciate at this point you’re probably already screaming ‘terrorist’ (or something more profane and unprintable) but take another gulp of your latte followed by a deep breath and persevere a little more, if not for the sake of social cohesion then perhaps just out of morbid curiosity.
Every society, every civilisation, has its totems and its hallowed cows. Those venerated symbols and personalities deemed beyond the reach of contumely. For example, in the United Kingdom a 2011 YouGov poll indicated that 82% of voters backed the prosecution of those who set fire to poppies, which in that very same year is precisely what happened to one Emdadur Choudhury. After chanting “British soldiers burn in hell” – during Remembrance Day’s customary two minutes silence – he decided to further signal his contempt for the British Armed Forces by setting alight that universally acknowledged symbol of her war dead, the plastic poppy. Witnesses in the subsequent prosecution spoke of their distress upon seeing the spectacle and it was in the words of district judge Howard Riddle, “…a calculated and deliberate insult”.
As it was an act likely to cause “harassment, harm or distress” (the criterion for conviction under the Public Order Act) to those who had seen it he duly found the defendant guilty. Given that the act was carried out under police guard and it was abundantly clear that there was no possible threat to person or property – nor indeed was it directed at anyone in particular – the only one of the three conditions that could possibly have been met was that of distress. But distress to what precisely?
To personal feelings. To the idea that the honour of the British war dead is inviolable and not to be subjected to mockery or insult. You don’t have to be a genius to see where I’m going with this.
Across the Channel and approximately contemporaneous to the aforementioned incident the French government decided that insult to the national flag should be made a criminal offence and duly enacted legislation making it punishable by a fine of up to €1500. Their decision came on the back of a photo contest held in the riviera town of Nice which awarded a prize to a picture showing a man wiping his backside with the tricolour. Due to complaints the “offending” photo was withdrawn. It would appear then that people’s feelings do matter at times. But only certain people’s and certainly not Muslims’.
Again, at around the same time, the renowned neoconservative author and current associate editor of the right-wing publication, The Spectator, Douglas Murray was putting forward his views on freedom of expression, insult and social cohesion during a BBC panel discussion broadcast on radio. Given that he’s currently doing the rounds applauding Charlie Hebdo’s decision to republish their invidious depictions of Islam’s most revered personality I thought it’s worth reproducing some of what he said that day. For the sake of context, the discussion is centred on the merits (or demerits) of erecting a Muslim cultural centre in the vicinity of the Ground Zero site in New York (a project that in the end never came to fruition).
“…but there’s something else in this and Ruth [Deech] mentioned it earlier, which is the issue of sensitivities. You can have the legal right to do all sorts of things but in societies that work people make private decisions and public decisions about things that they will do that will aggravate their neighbours and so on…now I think this is a very good moment to say to Muslims in American and to Muslim in Britain and around the world, ‘fine, we hear a very great deal from you about your sensitivities, well we have sensitivities too…yes you can legally build this huge cultural centre just by Ground Zero but we think that in the interests of a pluralistic and genuinely open society it would be better if you took it elsewhere’…”
Upon being challenged by co-panellist, Maajid Nawaz, as to whether there was a right not to be offended in a liberal society he went on to say:
“I think it’s a bad idea in this case…in grown up societies we realise that we have to be offended at times…but there are times when the offense is organised, is grotesque like this and when you are walking on, yes you do, as I repeated earlier…you have the right to tread over very many people’s sensitivities, you do have that right but I would say that in this case you should not exercise it.”
Which stands in stark contrast to his more recent pronouncements, most notably on Iain Dale’s LBC radio show where he lamented that other publications had never wished to associate themselves with, let alone emulate, the crass provocations of Charlie Hebdo despite them being “totally legal in French law”. Over the passage of the past decade it seems legalism has established a higher order of precedence in Mr Murray’s calculus than concerns about sensitivities, aggravating neighbours, organised and grotesque offence or even pluralistic, genuinely open societies.
Inevitably at this juncture there will be plenty of you proclaiming that you’re not afflicted by such hypocrisies and that you genuinely believe in the “right to offend”, no matter its recipient. But do you? And the litmus test for this is when you see the curtailment of speech or other forms of expression you find ‘grossly offensive’, which runs roughshod over all that you hold dear – do you speak out as vociferously as you have done in support of Charlie Hebdo? If so then please do get in touch as I have a list of causes I think you might be interested in.
I could point out innumerable instances of Western hypocrisy on the matter of Free Speech but then to what end? If we can just accept as axiomatic that every community has something they feel a strong depth of attachment to and which the humiliation of would constitute a form of violence towards their very identity then perhaps we might be able to break the current impasse we find ourselves in.
Do I, as a Muslim (to borrow a phrase from my ‘liberal progressive’ Muslim brethren), feel that mockery and insult of the Prophet Muhammad (or Jesus or any of the other Prophets of God) ought to be permissible under law? No. Would I, ideally, wish for it be banned and severely punished? Sure (in much the same way I would ideally like a 300% pay rise and a three-day working week). Do I believe Charlie Hebdo have the ‘right’ to publish such filth? Unlike most mainstream Muslim commentators, I won’t sugar coat the reality – no, I do not, and I guarantee you most Muslims do not either. Do I appreciate, however, that under the statutes of secular European states such degeneracy, masquerading as satire and political commentary, is legal? Yes, I do. And while I don’t seek to interfere with this legal prerogative (although clearly this isn’t a sentiment shared by every other Muslim) I do reserve my right to denounce the type of vulgar insults publications such as Charlie Hebdo seem so fond of printing. I have no expectation that European nations will be reintroducing blasphemy laws (which incidentally existed in Britain right into the 1990s – but only for Christianity) nor do I agitate for their return as I realise the futility of such an endeavour.
So, what do I really want? What are my demands, so to speak? Well let me start by saying that my words are not aimed at the likes of Tommy Robinson and his hoard of monosyllabic lager louts. So, if that’s you reading feel free to get back to your Heineken (and congratulations for getting this far into a serious piece of writing). Neither do I appeal to the Douglas Murray constituency despite their more urbane mannerisms. Rather I’m appealing to that vast undecided middle ground, those with no innate hatred towards the Muslim community but who feel some measure of disquiet about aspects of Islamic belief and practise. To you I say that I understand your desire for us to assimilate. To adopt Western secular mores and behaviours. But just as with the Jewish community, who are our forerunners as the target of visceral European hatred, we simply cannot abandon our identity and expecting us to abjure the central tenets of Islam is to impose just such a demand upon us. Naturally, we will resist it. Bitterly.
We don’t expect you to love Islam or be wildly enthusiastic about it. If you don’t like it, or the actions of its founder, that is, of course, your prerogative. No compulsion in religion as the famous Qur’anic dictum goes. And believe it or not we’re not all that bothered if you choose to criticise or otherwise critique our faith; just please do it in a manner conducive to civilised discourse and debate. Bear in mind that the iconoclasts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment were taking aim at majoritarian views and practises not those of beleaguered minorities. That doesn’t mean, of course, that we expect to be immune to scrutiny, merely that you bear in mind the propensity for constant vituperative attacks on our faith – especially by those with sizeable public platforms – to engender violence or other forms of harassment towards us.
So please choose your words carefully so as not to give succour to those who might seize upon your speech as some manner of justification for their thuggery. Lastly with respect to the “organised and grotesque” offence of publications such as Charlie Hebdo would it be too much to ask for you to refrain from lionising them as champions of free expression? Respecting the legal right of someone to behave like a moron and to occasion gross offence doesn’t require their apotheosis.
If I can bring myself to ignore the provocations of individuals such as Charbonnier is it too much to ask that you don’t add to my pain by valorising them?
Somehow we all need to make this work, even if it be through gritted teeth at times. We can agree to disagree on occasion, and that’s fine. As a Muslim there is much I admire about the West, and much about its contemporaneous culture that I despise. I suspect many in the West feel the same about Islam. Which, again, is fine. If, as a Muslim, I can recognise the stupidity of burning poppies as a means of making a point about Western war crimes, is it really too much to ask for you to acknowledge the crassness of lewd caricatures of my Prophet?
https://maskedavenger1.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/charlie-hebdo-part-deux/
