Charlie Hebdo Is Not To Blame

In the wake of the tragedies that have occurred in Paris over the last few days a number of commentators, some traditionally left-leaning and some more obviously right-wing, have suggested that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo contributed to the climate of extremism that led to these attacks. The arguments often take the form of a double assertion: first, that the cartoons in question were flagrant or “unnecessary” violations of the Muslim prohibition against images of the Prophet; and second, that these violations were motivated by Islamophobia and racism. The conclusion, merely implicit in some commentaries and more explicit in others, is that because the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were also racist bullies they bear a degree of culpability for what happened; consequently, they also make poor martyrs for either the profession of satirical cartooning or the right to free speech.
 

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The cover of this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo.

There are several problems with this argument, however. Most troublingly, to imply that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo contributed to the radicalization of Muslims by repeatedly violating an important tenet of Islam reduces the wide range of Muslim opinions on this specific issue to the extreme position held by the terrorists themselves. To take up this position is to fail to understand that the so-called “prohibition against images of the prophet” is actually already a radical interpretation of Islamic doctrine. No such prohibition exists in The Qu’ran. In fact, significant numbers of Muslims do not hold to this supposed prohibition, and even among those who do, interpretations of the precise meaning and purpose of the relevant phrases in the hadith literature are diverse. (On this topic, see here.

But there are other reasons for resisting the argument that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo were somehow responsible for creating the climate of extremism that led to this incident. The more I learn about the work at Charlie Hebdo (and I admit I have more research to do in this regard), the more I am convinced that this implication is unjust and unfair.

I am a British-born academic who has lived in the United States for over two decades; I am largely ignorant of contemporary French culture, and I confess I am only now becoming even superficially familiar with Charlie Hebdo (just like most of us, I suspect). But from what I have been able to ascertain in my preliminary investigations, while the cartoonists at the magazine were commenting satirically upon religious extremism, they were not creating it. The extremism was already there. They were calling it out — perhaps in a foolhardy way, perhaps courageously, and with varying degrees of mean and clever wit — but they were reacting to something that was already present in the culture, and that was being fostered by even more negative, reactionary, and ill-intentioned forces based outside France. (Indeed, no matter what one thinks of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, any role they could have played in radicalizing these particular terrorists is surely outweighed by Said Kouachi’s months of training in Yemen under a branch of Al Qaeda.)

Nor does it seem correct to accuse the editors at Charlie Hebdo of racism, as some have done. Experts who are better informed than me with regard to the history and culture of French comics (the brilliant Bart Beaty, for example) tell me that, on the contrary, the editorial position of the magazine was consistently anti-racist. This is not to say that a case against individual cartoons could never be made; caricature is an art-form built on principles of exaggeration and abstraction, and the point at which the visual “shorthand” of the cartoonist becomes a stereotyping technique cannot be fixed, but will vary from situation to situation and viewer to viewer. Nevertheless, any such case would have to be made within the larger anti-racist intentional context of the magazine, and nuanced accordingly. I’ve yet to read such context-sensitive work; it is not a feature of those denunciations of Hebdo as “racist” that I have seen. Nor does there appear to be any evidence that the editors at the magazine regarded the Muslim community in general with hostility. In fact, there appears to have been at least one person of Muslim heritage on the staff at Charlie Hebdo who was killed in the attacks: Mustapha Ourrad, a proofreader.

Yes, Charlie Hebdo published work that was profoundly hostile towards religious extremists within Islam; it was similarly hostile towards other religious authoritarians, too (which is probably why rightwing Catholics like Bill Donahue have been willing to suggest that the cartoonists were essentially asking for it). Indeed, the general stance of the magazine appears to have been one of gleeful contempt for religious and political hypocrites of all stripes. Certainly, the boost that explicitly racist politicos like Le Penn are currently seeing in the French polls in the wake of these events would have horrified Charlie Hebdo’s editor Stephane Charbonnier, a life-long left wing activist who was (according to the New York Times) raised in a family of French communists. In fact, I think Charb would be commissioning some bitterly ironic anti-fascist cartoons in the wake of the current xenophobic rightwing groundswell — if only he were here to do so.

In other words, the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo seem to have been exactly what you might expect satirical cartoonists in the French tradition to be: mockers of pomposity and demagoguery of all kinds.

I think I understand the motivations of at least some of the critics of Charlie Hebdo, even if I do not agree with their assessment of the magazine. They are concerned, rightly, that Muslims of good will should not be held responsible for these crimes or bullied into silence; and they are concerned, rightly, that ongoing incidences of the victimization of Muslims in France, Britain, America, Palestine, and elsewhere should not be overlooked or worse yet, justified, in the wake of this outrage. And they are right because at a time like this it is obviously very important that Muslim voices (in particular) are heard, in all their diversity. Indeed, it is absolutely necessary that Muslims of good will should be welcomed to the table, so that we can repudiate vile, greedy fools like Rupert Murdoch when they spew their poison and ignorance into the world.

But surely it must be possible to include Muslim perspectives on this kind of violence without accusing the cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo of political insensitivity (a criticism that seems to misunderstand the very point and purpose of satire), let alone deliberate racism (a charge that thus far appears to me unjustified)? Instead, and perhaps more productively, we could chose to emphasize that a man of Muslim heritage worked and died alongside the cartoonists at the magazine; that another Muslim man, a police officer named Ahmed Merabet, died defending the cartoonists at the magazine; and that yet another Muslim man, Lassana Bathily, saved several hostages from another terrorist at a Kosher grocery the next day. If we keep reminding people that members of the Muslim community were victimized here, and others also acted heroically, that will go some way towards making the reactions of people like Murdoch seem absurd, and make productive dialogue between social groups more possible.

In sum, and while there is no doubt much more that could be said, I think the suggestion that the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo are in any significant way culpable for the climate of extremism that led to these tragic events is unfair not only to those cartoonists but also to the many members of the Muslim community who would never in a million years respond to a cartoon — however offensive they deemed it — with a bullet. It also just puts the cart before the horse. After all, if a right wing Christian were to shoot Andreas Serrano for making “Piss Christ” I would not repudiate blasphemous artists for unnecessarily provoking radical Christians; instead I would ask what forces were at work to make some Christians feel that murdering artist-provocateurs was a necessary and acceptable defense of their faith. I wouldn’t think the act was somehow the responsibility of Christians everywhere, but neither would I blame Serrano himself — for all that “Piss Christ” is more readily legible as a desecration of a religious icon than any of the cartoons at Charlie Hebdo I’ve seen. (And I am aware that Serrano himself declares the work to be devotional.)

I write these remarks in the hope that they will be interpreted not as an attack upon those with whom I disagree, but in what I hold to be a spirit of fairness both to the dead and to the living, of all faiths and of none.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Outside Charlie Hebdo

I’m really appreciative to all the Francophones on various sites who have taken the time to put Charlie Hebdo’s work in a rich cultural context, opening up the magazine’s visual aesthetic and clarifying their editorial and political vantage point with more nuance than most of our mainstream Anglophone sources. These people’s willingness to do the tedious work of translating image after image, kindly and with probably strained patience, has elevated a very stark conversation into a vastly more nuanced one.

Here we have a convergence of so many issues that compel our culture to debate: free speech, extremism, faith and fascism, violence, humor, bullying, mockery, racism, sexism, and art. And yet so many opinions seem to fall broadly into one of just two camps – the ones that just outright call CH racist, and the ones that cloak it in the venerable mantle of satire.

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a long discussion with me on the subject of satire knows that I really just, generally, don’t find any aesthetic pleasure and only very limited intellectual pleasure in satirical work. Even when it’s very well done, it is a mode of discourse that relies on a spectrum ranging from discomfort to derision, and my response is almost always to turn away on purely emotional grounds. I’ve been very open about this opinion; it’s not new this week. It’s made me feel very awkward about adopting the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag, because I wouldn’t have said something like that before last Wednesday’s events. The hashtag makes the magazine a metonym for all the people killed – even the Muslim policeman. I respond strongly and decisively to those who were killed and wounded as people, with voices and rights and subjectivity. But I respond to the magazine and the cartoons with ambivalence – because even though I tend to agree with the politics, the aesthetics are beyond me.

Probably for that reason, my reactions are not substantially mitigated by actually understanding the satire, although it helps. The logic of Charlie Hebdo’s satire is certainly much clearer to me now that so many people have spoken patiently and eloquently to clarify it. In particular, the cover depicting the sex slaves of Boko Haram as welfare queens appears much smarter and more complex when interpreted as “why do you care so much about these threatened and disadvantaged girls, but not about the threatened and disadvantaged girls right on your doorstep?” I am convinced that much of the work is indeed more complicated — and certainly contextually rich – than appears at first glance to readers who do not inhabit the immediate cultural context. These are political cartoons, and politics is always contextual.
 

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But I don’t think there’s any amount of context that will make me find that cartoon less viscerally off-putting. It’s just so ugly to represent those girls that way. The explanation makes sense, but it doesn’t change my aesthetic reaction. It doesn’t feel ok to use their horrifying experiences, even for some noble cause. The complicated reading makes my reactions more complicated too, but it doesn’t make the negative reaction go away.

And even if the explanation did actually make me like that one, not all the cartoons yield to complicated readings. Some of the work really does seem to be simply calling a stupid fig a stupid fig, nothing more than making a wrongheaded idea look sickly and unappealing by shining a puce limelight on it. Basically an intensified form of caricature, It’s a tactic embraced by a lot of contemporary satire. It’s popular – a lot of people really do like it. But I’m not one of them. I’m not sure that type of satire, whether it occurs relatively gently on the Daily Show or with poison incisors at Charlie Hebdo, is anything more than vulgar mockery – even if it’s not racist, sexist, imperialist or otherwise. I’m not convinced it’s a meaningful way to deal with stupidity and wrongheadedness – at least, it doesn’t really seem to be trying to change the wrongheadedness so much as it seems like gallows humor for people who see no possibility of change. It doesn’t recast the stupid thing in a way that raises questions and doubts among the community that believes it or even tolerates it; it doesn’t get inside the heads of the people who think the wrongheaded thing and challenge their motivation or logic; it just puts people on the defensive. The target doesn’t feel outsmarted; they just feel disrespected.

In what way does that serve a positive end or increase our overall intelligence? Doesn’t satire need to be effective at challenging and destabilizing stupid beliefs if it is intended to have political power? If it only reaches people who don’t hold the belief, isn’t it just mockery? Mockery just ends up creating a group identity among the people who collectively believe the stupid thing is stupid. I think that may be why people react so negatively to this kind of imagery – even if it doesn’t actually qualify as racist (and I will refrain from an opinion on that in this particular context that is not my context), it does alienate and separate, working against solidarity rather than increasing it.

So faced with the difficulty of feeling intense compassion and so much horror at Wednesday’s events, yet not quite feeling the identification with Charlie Hebdo that the “Je Suis Charlie” hashtag implies, I am left with an intellectual’s inward-looking response, trying to explain to myself why it just doesn’t feel quite honest to use the tag. I know I am not Charlie Hebdo’s target audience. I struggle to appreciate satire even when it’s really obviously well done. I am stopped by the tone and the feel of the work. I cannot spend enough time with it to understand. But that means the nuances of my emotional and aesthetic responses to this kind of work are largely inaccessible to me – I can intellectually see why much of this work is satire, but I can’t experience it as anything other than raw and ugly and mean and sad.

Again, I am indebted to conversations that catch me up in ways I can’t do myself. In response to the original version of this comment on Facebook, a friend made a comment that struck me as important – “who are outsiders to presume to ‘cast doubt’ on someone else’s beliefs?” Outsiders don’t speak from a place of profound understanding. An outsider’s satire doesn’t know; it just knows better. And when I tried to think of satire that I like better than most, I noticed that Stephen Colbert and Jonathan Swift both rely very heavily on the first person, which is a way of “inhabiting” the person and ideas being satirized. I think the first person is a little sop to people like me, who are put off by how much emotional and critical separation is necessary to make satire work.

This is, perhaps, what makes Charlie Hebdo’s Boko Haram “welfare queen” cartoon so particularly hard for me. What am I supposed to do with the empathy and sadness I feel for the kidnapped girls? Just transfer it over to the welfare moms – as if empathy is generic and disconnected from each group of women’s real stories? The pregnant bodies in the cartoon are named as the “sex slaves of Boko Haram,” the cartoon asserts that they are speaking. But it’s not their voice and their story and their point of view – it’s the voice of the “welfare queens.” The reality of those girls being forced into sexual slavery is alluded to through the pregnancy, but it’s sidestepped and displaced into the significantly different resonance that pregnancy carries in discussions of welfare and indigence. Any identification with anybody here is uncomfortable and unsatisfying – to “get the joke”, to see how smart it is, everybody must be kept at emotional arms’ length.

Clearly I’m just not supposed to react to it this way. Is it even possible to simultaneously satirize and empathize? I don’t know that it is – it is certainly easier to avoid satire altogether than to find the hypothetical example that succeeds at this. And first-person does get very complicated very fast when the subject being satirized is “other” from the satirist in some palpable way – like race or ethnicity or religion. You bang quickly up against issues of authenticity.

And yet – I’m not typically much for authenticity so I’m not entirely comfortable with that, either. Surely it cannot be impossible to satirize someone different from you. That’s why I initially went with the “getting inside someone’s head” – surely the greatest satirists understand their subjects in some profoundly incisive way, not just knowing that they are wrong, but comprehending why they believe they are right.

Perhaps in all of this, I am just missing human nature. It is not human nature to inhabit the minds of people whose beliefs are anathema to us. And surely satire cannot be truly politically effective if it discounts human nature. So all this has brought me back to again concluding that I just don’t like satire, or appreciate it, or enjoy it.

I suppose it has to be said, in all of this, that the use of violence against speech is never anything other than brutal totalitarianism, regardless of the speech and regardless of the violence. But I think about mockery and judgment and how destructive and alienating they are. And I want to be able to understand what distinguishes, on one end of a spectrum, the great artistic and political tradition of satire from, on the other end, plain old bullies mocking people and ideas they don’t like because it makes them feel superior. Understanding is not as easy, I think, as I would like. Satire traffics in mockery and judgment, and the world already has too much of those things and too little connection and justice. I cannot be Charlie, because I am an outsider, and I do not understand. But perhaps I can be Charlie, since by their own logic, being an outsider is good enough.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

Not Just Charlie Hebdo

Let’s talk about Ali Ferzat.

Ali Ferzat is a Syrian political cartoonist. A scathing one. He gets right to the point in his drawings and isn’t known to shy away from what he sees as dirty politics. This was no exception when Bashar al-Assad came into power in Syria. In August 2011, Ferzat was seized by a militia group loyal to Assad and beaten—his assailants made extra sure to break the bones in his hands. While Ferzat survived the attack, he is now living in exile in Kuwait.

ali-ferzat-cartoon

Political comics reign supreme in the Middle East, a place where politics and religion are The (capital T) biggest games in town. Humor is a universal tool, after all, and humor always makes such heavy topics easier to digest. The same can be said of political comics in the United States, but, I’m sorry, in the Middle East? It’s an old-fashioned throwdown. Their humor is scathing and raw and it sometimes causes revolutions. The people in charge know this. The press—including the comics printed in the papers—is tightly regulated, and cartooning is a heavy form of activism. I want to talk about the Arabs in the Middle East whose tools of dissent are also pens and brushes, who are in the line of fire—not just from terrorist groups, but sometimes their own governments. And, guess what, they’ve also had some opinions about the Charlie Hebdo attack.

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Translation: This is how we get revenge on the cartoonists’ killer. By Lebanon’s An Nahar.

 

The first comics I ever had access to were the comics of Naji al-Ali. Though political comics existed in the Middle East before he started creating work, this guy worked his mojo. I think it’s safe to say that he’s still the most famous Arab cartoonist to date. His iconic character, Handala, is still referenced in comics drawn today. He was a Palestinian refugee, and his work very much reflects this. He felt for the Palestinian everyman and was scathing toward the ineffectiveness of Arab countries, the ambivalence of the West, and the cruelty of Israel. No one was safe in his comics, and he made so many enemies that he was exiled from most Middle-Eastern country and settled in London, where he was murdered in 1987. They never caught the perp.

I remember seeing his comics for the first time and thinking how terrifying they were.

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I won’t even address the blatant racists/religionophobes who claim Muslims/Arabs are the source of all evil, because I don’t talk with those people and they aren’t worth the kilobytes. I’m talking about microaggressions. I’m talking about absolute silence and the feeling of speaking to walls. Unless Whites end up being the ones in the crosshairs. (An officer was also killed at Charlie Hebdo, but—let’s be real—most of those outside of the Muslim/Arab community are not paying much attention to Ahmed.) (And then there were the four Jewish hostages killed—targets only because of their freedom. I unfortunately can’t say that I heard much noise made about them, either. Is there something about exercising one’s rights passively, instead of aggressively, that’s less newsworthy? Is it the same turning wheel that blocks out Ahmed? My gut tells me it’s both of these things.)

Suddenly the cartoonist’s ideal is under attack and our free speech is thwarted—except it always has been, in plain sight. Just read the top BBC News stories every morning. There’s no shortage of misery. We never talk about those lives since they aren’t “here,” even though to the American psyche (and I can only speak of the American psyche), France is a part of “here,” while half of the world is not. The problem is that we’re all connected, whether we like it or not. We inhabit the same universe. I just read about Boko Haram terrorizing Nigeria. These are people who are slaughtered—who are fleeing in droves—because they are moderates being overtaken by radicals. How do we care so much about some types of terror, but not others?

I’m going to talk about myself, because I want to explain that sick feeling I’ve had in the pit of my stomach for the past few days.

I call The Hookah Girl my “heartbreak book.” The comic is about Palestinians being human. No publisher would touch it, though one had the grace to tell me they feared being firebombed (they didn’t specify by whom—hipsters wanting their money back?). A Jewish man who told me I should be ashamed of myself for the comic brought me to tears on the Javits Center floor. I co-created a comic strip that was actually picked up by a certain syndication company. The comic was also about Arabs being human. The marketing team didn’t sell the strip to a single paper. Did they try? No idea. I just know that I learned a lot about the media from that experience. I wrote a scholarly paper about women in Middle-Eastern comics that highlighted the portrayal of women in these comics as well as the flesh-and-blood female cartoonists who are actually creating them. Palestinian society and politics are something I keep a close eye on because, well, I’m half Palestinian, I’m sort of interested in that kind of thing. I talk about it. I’ve had people take me aside and tell me I’m doing something positive but they themselves could never “publicly” say such things. I’ve lost friends because of it, too. I had to jump through some extra-special hoops to get my passport and one time the FBI came into our apartment while we weren’t there to search it (I hope they enjoyed the pile of dirty dishes in our sink).

This has been the loneliest, most Sisyphean road. And I’m tired. I’m really tired.

I understand the need to do something constructive with the outrage. I would never take that from anyone. But take this opportunity to remember that the world is in a fight against radicalism and all its members need solidarity. Think of the activists who are still alive—you don’t have to be dead to be a hero.

Je ne suis pas Charlie; je suis tout le monde.
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For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.

In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom From Criticism

On Wednesday morning, the French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo was attacked by three masked gunmen, armed with kalashnikovs, who stormed the building and killed ten of its staff and two police officers. The gunmen are currently understood to be Muslim extremists. This attack came minutes after the paper tweeted this drawing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

 

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(“Best wishes, by the way.” Baghdadi: “And especially good health!”)

An armed attack on a newspaper is shocking, but it is not even the first time Hebdo has been the subject of terrorist attacks. Gawker has a good summary of past controversies and attacks involving Hebdo. Most famously, the magazine’s offices were firebombed in 2011, after they printed an issue depicting the Prophet Muhammad on the cover.

In the face of such an obvious attack on free speech, voicing anything except grief-stricken support is seen by many as disrespectful. Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter, one of the first American comics sources to thoroughly cover the attack, quickly tweeted this:

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When faced with a terrorist attack against a satirical newspaper, the appropriate response seems obvious. Don’t let the victims be silenced. Spread their work as far as it can possibly go. Laugh in the face of those savage murderers who don’t understand satire.

In this case, it is the wrong response.

Here’s what’s difficult to parse in the face of tragedy: yes, Charlie Hebdo is a French satirical newspaper. Its staff is white. (Update:Charlie Hebdo’s staff it not all white. See note below.) Its cartoons often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia. While they generously claim to ‘attack everyone equally,’ the cartoons they publish are intentionally anti-Islam, and frequently sexist and homophobic.

Here, for context, are some of the cartoons they recently published.

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 intouchables

 muhammad

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welfare

(Yes, that last one depicts Boko Haram sex slaves as welfare queens.)

These are, by even the most generous assessment, incredibly racist cartoons. Hebdo’s goal is to provoke, and these cartoons make it very clear who the white editorial staff was interested in provoking: France’s incredibly marginalized, often attacked, Muslim immigrant community.

Even in a fresh-off-the-press, glowing BBC profile of Charb, Hebdo’s murdered editor, he comes across as a racist asshole.

Charb had strongly defended Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad.

“Muhammad isn’t sacred to me,” he told the Associated Press in 2012, after the magazine’s offices had been fire-bombed.

“I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law.”

Now, I understand that calling someone a ‘racist asshole’ after their murder is a callous thing to do, and I don’t do it lightly. This isn’t ambiguous, though: the editorial staff of Hebdo consistently aimed to provoke Muslims. They ascribe to the same edgy-white-guy mentality that many American cartoonists do: nothing is sacred, sacred targets are funnier, lighten up, criticism is censorship. And just like American cartoonists, they and their supporters are wrong. White men punching down is not a recipe for good satire, and needs to be called out. People getting upset does not prove that the satire was good. And, this is the hardest part, the murder of the satirists in question does not prove that their satire was good. Their satire was bad, and remains bad. Their satire was racist, and remains racist.

The response to the attacks by hack cartoonists the world over has been swift. While many are able to keep pretty benign:

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Several of the cartoons sweeping Twitter stooped to drawing hook-nosed Muslim caricatures, reminiscent of Hebdo’s  house style.

 Beeler

Bertrams

Perhaps most offensively, this Shaw cartoon (incorrectly attributed to Robert Mankoff) from a few years back swept Twitter, paired with the hashtag #CharlieHebdo:

Shaw

Political correctness did not kill twelve people at the Charlie Hebdo offices. To talk about the attack as an attack by “political correctness” is the most disgusting, self-serving martyr bullshit I can imagine. To invoke this (bad) Shaw cartoon in relation to the Hebdo murders is to assert that cartoons should never be criticized. To invoke this garbage cartoon is to assert that white, male cartoonists should never have to hear any complaints when they gleefully attack marginalized groups.

Changing your twitter avatar to a drawing of the Prophet Muhammad is a racist thing to do, even in the face of a terrorist attack. The attitude that Muslims need to be ‘punished’ is xenophobic and distressing. The statement, “JE SUIS CHARLIE” works to erase and ignore the magazine’s history of xenophobia, racism, and homophobia. For us to truly honor the victims of a terrorist attack on free speech, we must not spread hateful racism blithely, and we should not take pride in extreme attacks on oppressed and marginalized peoples.

A call “TO ARMS”

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is gross and inappropriate. To simplify the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices as “Good, Valiant Westerners vs. Evil, Savage Muslims” is not only racist, it’s dangerously overstated. Cartoonists (especially political cartoonists) generally reinforce the status quo, and they tend to be white men. Calling fellow cartoonists TO ARMS is calling other white men to arms against already marginalized people. The inevitable backlash against Muslims has begun in earnest.

oppenheimer

This is the worst.

The fact that twelve people are dead over cartoons is hateful, and I can only pray that their attackers are brought to justice. Free speech is an important part of our society, but, it should always go without saying, free speech does not mean freedom from criticism. Criticism IS speech – to honor “free speech martyrs” by shouting down any criticism of their work is both ironic and depressing.

In summary:

Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons.

Fuck those cartoons.
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Update by Noah: Jacob initially stated that Charlie Hebdo’s “staff is white”. In fact, CH did have non-white staffers, including copy editor Mustapha Orrad, who was murdered by the terrorists, and journalist Zineb El Rhazoui. Jacob said that his point was that Charlie Hebdo’s chief editor was white, and that “The controversial cartoonists being mourned as free-speech martyrs are all white men.”
For all HU posts on Satire and Charlie Hebdo click here.