TYWKIWDBI will not be dwelling on the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, which is extensively covered elsewhere. But I thought it worthwhile to excerpt a couple comments, first by Glenn Greenwald in
The Intercept:
One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to
condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the
ACLU vigorously defends
the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with
Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march;
they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while
defending the right to express them.
But this week’s defense of free speech rights was so spirited that it
gave rise to a brand new principle: to defend free speech, one not only
defends the right to disseminate the speech, but embraces the content
of the speech itself...
Some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo were not just offensive but bigoted, such as the one mocking the African sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare
queens. Others went far beyond maligning violence by extremists
acting in the name of Islam, or even merely depicting Mohammed with
degrading imagery, and instead contained a stream of
mockery toward Muslims generally, who in France are not remotely
powerful but are largely a marginalized and targeted immigrant population. ..
So it’s the opposite of surprising to see large numbers of westerners
celebrating anti-Muslim cartoons - not on free speech grounds but due
to approval of the content... Indeed, it is self-evident that if a writer who specialized in
overtly anti-black or anti-Semitic screeds had been murdered for their
ideas, there would be no widespread calls to republish their trash in
“solidarity” with their free speech rights...
When we originally discussed publishing this article to make these
points, our intention was to commission two or three cartoonists to
create cartoons that mock Judaism and malign sacred figures to Jews the
way Charlie Hebdo did to Muslims. But that idea was thwarted by the fact
that no mainstream western cartoonist would dare put their name on an
anti-Jewish cartoon, even if done for satire purposes, because doing
so would instantly and permanently destroy their career, at least...
To see how true that is, consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the
“equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive
speech - fired one
of their writers in 2009 for writing a sentence some said was
anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and
won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?
Similar thoughts were echoed at
The Dish (citing other sources):
Put simply, in France, racist and anti-Semitic speech, as well as
historical revisionism regarding the Holocaust, is illegal, as is all
speech that can be considered an incitement to hate. That is something
that very few Americans understand—or approve of...
The last lawsuit
to be filed against Charlie Hebdo in 2014 was declared ineligible only
because Islam doesn’t qualify for the special legal regime that
criminalizes blasphemy against Christianity and Judaism in the Alsace
region. And the British Muslims in 1989 wanted authorities to invoke
British blaspehemy laws, not the shar’ia, to sanction Salman Rushdie’s
novel – but there too Islam did not qualify for protection...
It wasn’t that long ago that entertainers like the Dixie Chicks were being roundly denounced and taken off the air for having the temerity to question our country’s wars.
The counterargument is that this is comparing apples to oranges:
This is a completely false equivalency, and really gets to the heart of
the cultural gap at play. To secularists like the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo,
Mohammed is a man like any other, he is no prophet, he is aggrandized
by a religion, and is therefore a legitimate target of satire, just like
the the Pope, or Jesus, or even the Dalai Lama if one is so inclined.
The Holocaust was systematic genocide based on religion/ethnicity.
I'll close the comments here, because there's so much discussion elsewhere (everywhere), but I'd suggest that those who expect to address the Charlie Hebdo event at cocktail parties or around office water-coolers should ponder the above in order to be prepared for the discussions.
