On January 7, 2015, Stéphane Charbonnier, the former editor of 'Charlie Hebdo', as well as eleven others, were murdered by two French Algerian Muslim brothers at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo.
'Charlie Hebdo' had long displayed a particular delight in attacking sacred cows — especially popular religions. The 'Charlie Hebdo' website (as the site appeared on February 28, 2016) listed religion first among those things they are against --
https://charliehebdo.fr/en/ (the content shown had already been modified by the time this blog post was published)
"CHARLIE STANDS AGAINST... Religions which move mountains…of fools. ..."
 |
| A portion of the main Charlie Hebdo web page, as it appeared on February 28, 2016. |
CHARLIE IS...
A skewed angle on the news that skewers the news, a cheeky, snot-nosed, hands-in-pockets view other media disdains. Food for thought, funnies, investigation and satire from journalists, writers, columnists and, of course, cartoonists.
CHARLIE STANDS FOR...
Secularism – pure and simple, no ifs no buts. Anti-racism always, ‘identity politics’ almost never. No ‘communities’ – only community. Environmentalism free of political turf wars. Universalism without all the weeping doves. Sexual equality but not like Sarah Palin wants it. Animal rights without tofu. Culture without the petri dish.
CHARLIE STANDS AGAINST...
Religions which move mountains…of fools. Redneck xenophobes who won the birthplace lottery. Facebook billionaires googleising the world. Bankers gambling away our money. Industrialists forcing us to live in gasmasks. Footballers more air-headed than their footballs. Hunters who shoot at us when we’re picking mushrooms. Dictators who put us in the position of occasionally agreeing with Bernard Henri Levy.
CHARLIE IS FOR
Peace, love and free kittens for everybody.
CHARLIE IS AGAINST
War, want and very bad haircuts....
Given all the reporting regarding 'Charlie Hebdo' and Islam, it would be easy to come to the mistaken impression that 'Charlie Hebdo' only mocked Islam.
Stéphane Charbonnier was widely quoted regarding the double standard for mockery or criticism of Islam --
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-protests-france-cartoons-idUSBRE88H1CX20120918
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/charlie-hebdo-long-history-provocative-religious-satire-article-1.206863
"We do caricatures of everyone, and above all every week, and when we do it with the Prophet, it's called provocation."
After depicting a caricature of Muhammad on the cover of a November 2011 'Charlie Hebdo' issue, the 'Charlie Hebdo' offices were fire-bombed.
Here is a short video from the 'The Telegraph', giving a brief overview of 'Charlie Hebdo', and the fire-bombing of their offices in November of 2011 --
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/.../Charlie-Hebdo-attack-2011-firebomb-over-Prophet-Mohammed-issue.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-magazine-in-paris-is-firebombed.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/08/.../charlie-hebdo-editor-made-provocation-his-mission.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/.../book-by-slain-charlie-hebdo-editor-argues-islam-is-not-exempt-from-ridicule.html
Here is that 'Charlie Hebdo' cover, from a November 2011 issue, showing their caricature of Muhammad, which was reported to have provoked the fire-bombing of the 'Charlie Hebdo' offices. Stare at this image, and ponder the kind of mind that would want to commit multiple murders because of it --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Hebdo#Muhammad_cartoons_and_aftermath
 |
| The cover of a November 2011 issue of Charlie Hebdo, which is presumed to be linked to the fire-bombing of its offices that same month. The word balloon reads "100 lashes if you don't die of laughter!" |
Here is Stephane Charbonnier being interviewed as he views the damage from that 2011 bombing --
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/.../Charlie-Hebdo-attack-2011-firebomb-over-Prophet-Mohammed-issue.html
Just two days before his death, Stéphane Charbonnier finished writing a short book, that has now been published in English under the title: 'Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression'.
In 'Open Letter', Charbonnier denounced the use of the term Islamophobia as dangerously misleading --
http://www.independent.co.uk/.../...-letter-to-the-islamophobia-frauds-who-play-into-the-hands-of-10193565.html
http://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/.../this-open-letter-survived-the-charlie-hebdo-attacks-1.3393131
...
Really, the word "Islamophobia" is badly chosen if it's supposed to described the hatred which some lame-brains have for Muslims. And it is not only badly chosen, it is dangerous. From a purely etymological viewpoint, Islamophobia ought to mean "fear of Islam" – yet the inventors, promoters and users of this word deploy it to denounce hatred of Muslims. But isn't it odd that "Muslimophobia", or just "racism", isn't used instead of "Islamophobia".
Why has this word taken over? From ignorance, from idleness… but also because those who campaign against Islamophobia don't do so to defend Muslims as individuals. They do so to defend the religion of the prophet Mohamed.
...
Here is a review by John Semley that essentially proves Stéphane Charbonnier's comment quoted above. Semley's review is a case study in empty, ad hominem filled writing. John Semley insists in his review quoted below that 'Charlie Hebdo' is 'racist and idiotic', as well as being 'giggling cowards' (among other insults) — despite offering nothing to even hint at justifying such remarks.
Ultimately, Semley concludes that mockery of Islam is unfair and unjustified. Why? Because Muslims are supposedly persecuted by Christians (again, Semley makes no attempt to defend this assertion), and because Islam prohibits it.
Yes. Really.
If a religion prohibits caricatures of certain figures, you just have to obey. Semley defends Islam here exactly as Charbonnier described in the quote above from 'Open Letter', so it is no wonder that Semley would attack Charbonnier for denouncing such an obviously ridiculous stance, never mind for not being as slavishly conformist as Semley --
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/.../review-charlie-hebdo-editor-charbs-open-letter-is-problematic/article28050654/
Review: Charlie Hebdo editor Charb’s Open Letter is problematic
JOHN SEMLEY
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Jan. 07, 2016 2:09PM EST
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published Thursday, Jan. 07, 2016 2:09PM EST
The night of the Charlie Hebdo shooting, just over a year ago, I went to a comedy show. Not as some act of solidarity or anything. Just because some friends were putting together a comedy show. Some of the performers made uncomfortable jokes about the shootings, and about cracking wise under a dark pall that saw a group of French satirists and cartoonists brutally murdered by Islamist terrorists. Like, I think, most people on Jan. 7, 2015, I was shocked and saddened by the attacks. Yes, it was a shock and sadness that has become, these days, so rote as to feel almost banal. But nevertheless.
I learned about Charlie Hebdo in the days (and even hours) after the attacks. I soon found myself at odds with sentimental liberal acquaintances on the Internet, who hastily championed the Hebdo jokers as martyrs in some imagined war against freedom of expression. It became increasingly difficult to square the image of the slain Hebdo staffers as secular saints with their crude drawings depicting the Prophet Mohammed prostrated on his stomach, splayed anus pointed at the reader, or Jesus Christ having anal sex with God, drawings that began to strike me as inciting, offensive, sometimes racist and, more than anything, just stupid.
This is not meant to diminish their deaths, or the tragedy of it. But making an overstated case for the political, social and satirical relevance of the kind of infantile scribblings that you might find on a White Power message board online strikes me as oversimplifying. That Charlie Hebdo was racist and idiotic doesn’t justify the murder of its staff. But it doesn’t justify their work, either.
Open Letter, a posthumous “manifesto” by Hebdo editor Charb (a.k.a. Stéphane Charbonnier), one of the 11 people gunned down in the paper’s offices last year, is an opportunistic, largely facile attempt at justifying Charlie Hebdo. What might otherwise have been distributed as a tatty, Xeroxed pamphlet plunked on Parisian newsstands is packaged by Little, Brown in a slim, hardcover volume, and tacked with a forward by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (who apparently studied the history of cartooning and caricature in grad school). Even in presentation, it’s a garish artifact targeted at the same schmaltzy liberal simpletons who hailed the Hebdo shooting victims as sacrificial offerings in the West’s war against both Islam and free expression.
Charb’s so-called manifesto – like Gopnik’s framing essay, and like a lot of the conversations about Charlie Hebdo and freedom of the press in the wake of the shootings – is cobbled around a sloppy and entirely fallacious premise. “The Charlie cartoonists,” Gopnik writes, “were, always, radically democratic and egalitarian in their views.” It’s a sentiment Charb repeats ad nauseum. As he puts it, “If we suggest that it’s okay to make fun of everything except certain aspects of Islam because Muslims are much more sensitive than the rest of the population, isn’t that discrimination? Shouldn’t we treat the second-largest religion in France, exactly as we treat the first?”
In response to such moronically reductive questions, and against claims of Charlie Hebdo’s “radically democratic” tendencies, I’d say, quite simply: No. Reading wobbly defences such as this, I keep coming back to that old adage about “perfect laws for a perfect world.” It’s something philosophers, historians, and economists such as David Hume and Adam Smith wrote about – that the ideals of law (whether the constitutional laws of men or the “higher laws” of God and religion) seem to presume a perfect world in which they can be applied; one in which all things are equal. Of course, this wasn’t the world Hume or Smith lived in. And it’s sure not the world we live in. To presume that the standards of law and civility should be applied in a manner where all other things are considered equal is a rhetorical trick, and one Charb and the Hebdo defenders deploy with childlike abandon, like school kids playing semantics to weasel out of trouble.
Depicting a Christian icon such as Jesus (even if he’s engaged in buggery with his Holy Father) is not the same as depicting Mohammed. There are two main reasons for this. First, as mentioned above, all things aren’t equal. Peaceful, law-abiding Muslim and Arab communities are persecuted, feared and openly antagonized (in France and elsewhere) in a way that’s not commensurate with the treatment of Christians, whose moral universe shapes that of huge swaths of the Western world. Second, Islam is pretty particular about an iconism: The religious prohibition against representing sentient beings, particularly God and Mohammed. So, to depict the Prophet at all, let alone in one or another state of sexual degradation, is especially offensive. It’s not an example of some “radically democratic” ethic (unless it’s so “radical” as to be entirely undemocratic). It’s deliberately, pointedly provocative.
Charb drapes his racism and intellectual feebleness inside basic counterintuitive inversions of logic, as if he’s playing the role of Baby Žižek. The basic thrust of Open Letter is, “Well, are not the real Islamophobes the ones who automatically assume that all Muslims would be offended by our silly doodles?” Again: no.
The late Charb would likely brand me as one of the “terrorized intellectuals, moralizing old clowns and half-witted journalists” who rail against Charlie Hebdo. That’s fine. Freedom of speech and all that. But a dashed-off leaflet such as Open Letter proves to me that the real clowns, and the real Islamophobes, are the ones who stir sentiments of racism, xenophobia and religious persecution while hiding behind their constitutional protections and civil guarantees of freedom of expression like giggling cowards.
Again, I say this not to devalue the Hebdo shootings, but to dispel something of the aura of martyrdom surrounding it. Their ethics of freedom of expression and unchecked expression are all noble and good and all. But they’re built for a perfect world. And a world in which cartoonists who earn their livings doodling the genitals of major religious figures are hailed as vanquished heroes strikes me as the furthest thing from a perfect world.
I learned about Charlie Hebdo in the days (and even hours) after the attacks. I soon found myself at odds with sentimental liberal acquaintances on the Internet, who hastily championed the Hebdo jokers as martyrs in some imagined war against freedom of expression. It became increasingly difficult to square the image of the slain Hebdo staffers as secular saints with their crude drawings depicting the Prophet Mohammed prostrated on his stomach, splayed anus pointed at the reader, or Jesus Christ having anal sex with God, drawings that began to strike me as inciting, offensive, sometimes racist and, more than anything, just stupid.
This is not meant to diminish their deaths, or the tragedy of it. But making an overstated case for the political, social and satirical relevance of the kind of infantile scribblings that you might find on a White Power message board online strikes me as oversimplifying. That Charlie Hebdo was racist and idiotic doesn’t justify the murder of its staff. But it doesn’t justify their work, either.
Open Letter, a posthumous “manifesto” by Hebdo editor Charb (a.k.a. Stéphane Charbonnier), one of the 11 people gunned down in the paper’s offices last year, is an opportunistic, largely facile attempt at justifying Charlie Hebdo. What might otherwise have been distributed as a tatty, Xeroxed pamphlet plunked on Parisian newsstands is packaged by Little, Brown in a slim, hardcover volume, and tacked with a forward by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (who apparently studied the history of cartooning and caricature in grad school). Even in presentation, it’s a garish artifact targeted at the same schmaltzy liberal simpletons who hailed the Hebdo shooting victims as sacrificial offerings in the West’s war against both Islam and free expression.
Charb’s so-called manifesto – like Gopnik’s framing essay, and like a lot of the conversations about Charlie Hebdo and freedom of the press in the wake of the shootings – is cobbled around a sloppy and entirely fallacious premise. “The Charlie cartoonists,” Gopnik writes, “were, always, radically democratic and egalitarian in their views.” It’s a sentiment Charb repeats ad nauseum. As he puts it, “If we suggest that it’s okay to make fun of everything except certain aspects of Islam because Muslims are much more sensitive than the rest of the population, isn’t that discrimination? Shouldn’t we treat the second-largest religion in France, exactly as we treat the first?”
In response to such moronically reductive questions, and against claims of Charlie Hebdo’s “radically democratic” tendencies, I’d say, quite simply: No. Reading wobbly defences such as this, I keep coming back to that old adage about “perfect laws for a perfect world.” It’s something philosophers, historians, and economists such as David Hume and Adam Smith wrote about – that the ideals of law (whether the constitutional laws of men or the “higher laws” of God and religion) seem to presume a perfect world in which they can be applied; one in which all things are equal. Of course, this wasn’t the world Hume or Smith lived in. And it’s sure not the world we live in. To presume that the standards of law and civility should be applied in a manner where all other things are considered equal is a rhetorical trick, and one Charb and the Hebdo defenders deploy with childlike abandon, like school kids playing semantics to weasel out of trouble.
Depicting a Christian icon such as Jesus (even if he’s engaged in buggery with his Holy Father) is not the same as depicting Mohammed. There are two main reasons for this. First, as mentioned above, all things aren’t equal. Peaceful, law-abiding Muslim and Arab communities are persecuted, feared and openly antagonized (in France and elsewhere) in a way that’s not commensurate with the treatment of Christians, whose moral universe shapes that of huge swaths of the Western world. Second, Islam is pretty particular about an iconism: The religious prohibition against representing sentient beings, particularly God and Mohammed. So, to depict the Prophet at all, let alone in one or another state of sexual degradation, is especially offensive. It’s not an example of some “radically democratic” ethic (unless it’s so “radical” as to be entirely undemocratic). It’s deliberately, pointedly provocative.
Charb drapes his racism and intellectual feebleness inside basic counterintuitive inversions of logic, as if he’s playing the role of Baby Žižek. The basic thrust of Open Letter is, “Well, are not the real Islamophobes the ones who automatically assume that all Muslims would be offended by our silly doodles?” Again: no.
The late Charb would likely brand me as one of the “terrorized intellectuals, moralizing old clowns and half-witted journalists” who rail against Charlie Hebdo. That’s fine. Freedom of speech and all that. But a dashed-off leaflet such as Open Letter proves to me that the real clowns, and the real Islamophobes, are the ones who stir sentiments of racism, xenophobia and religious persecution while hiding behind their constitutional protections and civil guarantees of freedom of expression like giggling cowards.
Again, I say this not to devalue the Hebdo shootings, but to dispel something of the aura of martyrdom surrounding it. Their ethics of freedom of expression and unchecked expression are all noble and good and all. But they’re built for a perfect world. And a world in which cartoonists who earn their livings doodling the genitals of major religious figures are hailed as vanquished heroes strikes me as the furthest thing from a perfect world.
Here is a recording of Eiynah from the blog 'Nice Mangos', interviewing John Semley on her podcast 'Polite Conversations', regarding his review quoted above of 'Open Letter' —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBve1K6u2X8
https://soundcloud.com/politeconversations/episode-4-john-semley-is-charlie-hebdo-racist
If you were not disgusted enough already, listening to that podcast should further convince you that John Semley's critical thinking skills are seriously degraded. Eiynah is a Pakistani-Canadian who left Islam and became an atheist — she writes anonymously, since she receives death threats from Muslims for being an apostate.
Notice that John Semley's method of defending Islam in his review above is not new — that is, calling the critics racist, despite the glaringly obvious fact that Islam is not a race, it is a system of belief (see Ben Affleck's ridiculous attempt to defend Islam in much the same way).
It is chilling to listen to John Semley hold firm in his idiotic criticism of 'Charlie Hebdo', even while talking to another person who lives under threat of death from Muslims. At one point in the podcast, Eiynah challenges Semley to explain why the belief that individuals should be murdered for leaving Islam should not be mocked (it is, after all, obviously insane), and Semley is completely incapable of responding — he simply evades the question.
One has to wonder: how many more must be murdered by Muslims, for no good reason, before those like John Semley and Ben Affleck would even begin to acknowledge that there is a massive problem with Islam?
I found John Semley's review to be so empty of useful criticism, and so full of unstated implications, I rewrote it myself to clarify its real meaning. In closing, here is my highly modified version of Semley's supposed criticism, in an attempt to at least make it honest. My additions are in red below --
Review: Charlie Hebdo editor Charb’s Open Letter is problematic
Original by JOHN SEMLEY — modified to remove the dishonesty (additions are in red, strikeout through irrelevancies)
I learned about Charlie Hebdo in the days (and even hours) after the attacks. I soon found myself at odds with sentimental liberal acquaintances on the Internet, who hastily championed the Hebdo jokers as martyrs in some imagined war against freedom of expression. I say 'imagined war against freedom' in order to dismiss the obvious harm that everyone knows has already been done (like, say, the grotesque murder of Theo Van Gogh — never mind the repressive Islamic states and their anti-blasphemy laws), because openly acknowledging the real harm does not support my attempts to denigrate the work of Charlie Hebdo. And, obviously, we all know that numerous journalists have been killed by radical Muslims (not to mention the 2011 Charlie Hebdo fire-bombing) — but I'll stick with the word 'imagined' here in a feeble attempt to fool readers that might be ignorant of the obvious and real dangers demonstrated from Muslims in recent years, so I can denigrate Charlie Hebdo. The phrase 'imagined war against freedom' is especially absurd, and expecting almost complete blindness from my admiring readers, when one considers that I am writing this as the result of a group of people being gunned down by religious fanatics for publishing pictures the fanatics did not like. It became increasingly difficult to square the image of the slain Hebdo staffers as secular saints with their crude drawings depicting the Prophet Mohammed prostrated on his stomach, splayed anus pointed at the reader, or Jesus Christ having anal sex with God, drawings that began to strike me as inciting, offensive, sometimes racist and, more than anything, just stupid. Note that I will keep repeating 'splayed anus' regarding Charlie Hebdo cartoons, even though it is only one among hundreds of their cartoons (at best), in order to give uninformed readers the false impression that a single cartoon accurately describes all of Charlie Hebdo's work, again, since that supports my attempts to denigrate them, even though it does not accurately characterize the work of Charlie Hebdo. The use of the word 'splayed' here actually creates a false description, since the Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting Muhammad with his ass pointed directly at the reader, has a star covering the anus (the title reads: "A Star Is Born") — that is, the anus is not 'splayed', though I will keep repeating that anyway. Also, notice that my charges of racism are an ad hominem fallacy, since they are unsupported, and act as an attempt to make it appear that I have done real research on the meaning of many of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, even though I will not provide even a single example here, despite stating that I know of such examples.
This is not meant to diminish their deaths, or the tragedy of it. I will repeat this statement yet again below, even though I have already described the rational reaction to these brutal murders as 'almost banal', and even though I will also refer to Charlie Hebdo as a group of 'giggling cowards' — despite the painfully (especially to me) obvious fact that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had more courage than I am able to fathom. No one needs to point out to me that denigrating a group of people after they were murdered for supposedly giving offense, is a dramatic display of cowardice. Obviously, apart from the possibility of receiving insults for my weak writing in this opinion piece, I am taking no risk here — I am giving a partial defense of radical Muslims, and a supposed right not to be offended, after all. But I'm still not going to give any specifics to demonstrate any of my accusations, because I do not have to — my admiring readers do not require evidence. But making an overstated case for the political, social and satirical relevance of the kind of infantile scribblings that you might find on a White Power message board online strikes me as oversimplifying. That Charlie Hebdo was racist and idiotic doesn’t justify the murder of its staff. But it doesn’t justify their work, either. Of course, I also know that repeating an ad hominem fallacy, as I just did in calling Charlie Hebdo 'racist and idiotic', does not provide valid criticism either. But again, I do not need to provide a valid argument for my criticism, with justifying examples, because my admiring readers do not want to read such distracting details anyway — they just want to be titillated by my name calling (and so do I).
Open Letter, a posthumous “manifesto” by Hebdo editor Charb (a.k.a. Stéphane Charbonnier), one of the 11 people gunned down in the paper’s offices last year, is an opportunistic, largely facile attempt at justifying Charlie Hebdo. I say 'opportunistic' even knowing that the Charlie Hebdo offices where fire-bombed back in November 2011, after the magazine published an issue with a caricature of Muhammad on the cover. That is, I know Charlie Hebdo had already been attacked by Muslims, but I will still describe Stéphane Charbonnier's criticism of the term 'Islamophobia' as exploiting an opportunity. And I will use the phrase 'largely facile' even though this too is invalid criticism, since it is obviously true that truth is not determined by complexity. That is, saying that an explanation is simple, in no way demonstrates that it is false. What might otherwise have been distributed as a tatty, Xeroxed pamphlet plunked on Parisian newsstands is packaged by Little, Brown in a slim, hardcover volume, and tacked with a forward by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik
Charb’s so-called manifesto – like Gopnik’s framing essay, and like a lot of the conversations about Charlie Hebdo and freedom of the press in the wake of the shootings – is cobbled around a sloppy and entirely fallacious premise. “The Charlie cartoonists,” Gopnik writes, “were, always, radically democratic and egalitarian in their views.” It’s a sentiment Charb repeats ad nauseum. Just as I inject ad hominem fallacies ad nauseum. As he puts it, “If we suggest that it’s okay to make fun of everything except certain aspects of Islam because Muslims are much more sensitive than the rest of the population, isn’t that discrimination? Shouldn’t we treat the second-largest religion in France, exactly as we treat the first?”
In response to such moronically reductive questions, and against claims of Charlie Hebdo’s “radically democratic” tendencies, I’d say, quite simply: No. Reading wobbly defences such as this, I keep coming back to that old adage about “perfect laws for a perfect world.” It’s something philosophers, historians, and economists such as David Hume and Adam Smith wrote about – that the ideals of law (whether the constitutional laws of men or the “higher laws” of God and religion) seem to presume a perfect world in which they can be applied; one in which all things are equal. Of course, this wasn’t the world Hume or Smith lived in. And it’s sure not the world we live in. To presume that the standards of law and civility should be applied in a manner where all other things are considered equal is a rhetorical trick, and one Charb and the Hebdo defenders deploy with childlike abandon, like school kids playing semantics to weasel out of trouble. I make some classical author references here, even though they are completely irrelevant, in the hope that I can distract uncritical readers from noticing the glaring double standard that I am going to defend. Charlie Hebdo was certainly making no assumptions about some supposed set of "perfect laws for a perfect world" — the preferential double standards (i.e. the imperfect laws) that people always create was precisely the point. That is, the hypocritical pretense that one group or religion deserves some special status and respect, demands mockery and contempt — respect must be earned, and tolerance is only justified for the civilized.
Depicting a Christian icon such as Jesus (even if he’s engaged in buggery with his Holy Father) is not the same as depicting Mohammed. There are two main reasons for this. First, as mentioned above, all things aren’t equal. Peaceful, law-abiding Muslim and Arab communities are persecuted, feared and openly antagonized (in France and elsewhere) in a way that’s not commensurate with the treatment of Christians, whose moral universe shapes that of huge swaths of the Western world. I actually have no idea how extensively Christians persecute Muslims, since there is no way for me to demonstrate this statement, but I am going to insist it is true anyway, since it supports my view, and it will be too difficult for any reader to disprove it. And, of course, this comment will help to distract readers from the many Muslim victims of Islam, who are murdered for not obeying the views of more fanatical Muslims (typically their own family members). Second, Islam is pretty particular about an iconism: The religious prohibition against representing sentient beings, particularly God and Mohammed. So, to depict the Prophet at all, let alone in one or another state of sexual degradation, is especially offensive. It’s not an example of some “radically democratic” ethic (unless it’s so “radical” as to be entirely undemocratic). It’s deliberately, pointedly provocative. Actually, I know it is ridiculous to claim that cartoons are provocative, and I am hoping that no one will notice the absurd cultural relativism I am defending here. Obviously, a religion could not morally force young adolescent girls into marriage, for example, because its participants thought men owning women was required by the religion. In the same way, no belief system can legitimately block criticism and mockery with the claim 'it is prohibited by the belief system'. Obviously, this is completely absurd, even to me — the delusional belief in some group of people that something is sacred, does not make it sacred. But I also desperately hope that no one will notice that I am defending intolerance, by making the claim that some are justified in believing that an entire belief system should be immune from criticism or mockery, thereby justifying intolerance of such criticism. And, of course, it makes no sense for anyone to respect anything about a particular religion, when most members of that religion do not respect the simple right of others to disagree, and wish to kill them if they do. Obviously, I know that a belief system cannot improve, if criticism of it is prohibited — and the more unfounded and irrational the belief system, the more desperately it needs to be criticized. And the events surrounding Charlie Hebdo, considered alone, dramatically demonstrate that the last thing the world needs is to setup some bizarre and completely exceptional status for Islam, simply because its followers claim they deserve it, as I am stating here. Islam has always been treated with a respect that is completely unjustified by the absurdly violent content of its belief system. And obviously, Charlie Hebdo did nothing to stop anyone from practicing Islam, yet Charlie Hebdo was attacked by fanatical Muslims, repeatedly, for refusing to follow supposed Islamic dictates — by any barely reasonable definition, Charlie Hebdo is tolerant, while a great number of Muslims are not.
Charb drapes his racism and intellectual feebleness inside basic counterintuitive inversions of logic, as if he’s playing the role of Baby Žižek. The basic thrust of Open Letter is, “Well, are not the real Islamophobes the ones who automatically assume that all Muslims would be offended by our silly doodles?” Again: no.
The late Charb would likely brand me as one of the “terrorized intellectuals, moralizing old clowns and half-witted journalists” who rail against Charlie Hebdo. That’s fine. Freedom of speech and all that. But a dashed-off leaflet such as Open Letter proves to me that the real clowns, and the real Islamophobes, are the ones who stir sentiments of racism, xenophobia and religious persecution while hiding behind their constitutional protections and civil guarantees of freedom of expression like giggling cowards. I know I am really outdoing myself here. Describing a group of people who publicly published without the protection of anonymity, as 'hiding behind constitutional protections and civil guarantees', when those people were gunned downed by Muslim fanatics is the height of macabre irony. Yes, 'Charlie Hebdo' did stir up sentiments of 'religious persecution' as I claim, but I desperately hope that readers are completely blind here, and are too lazy to notice that the religion I am defending did the persecuting. And so much for those 'constitutional protections and civil guarantees' that I pretend to defend.
Again, I say this not to devalue the Hebdo shootings (I cannot resist injecting this comment again, even though I have liberally sprinkled my writing in this piece with empty, sophomoric insults of Charlie Hebdo — obviously, denigrating a victim has the effect of trivializing their death or suffering, regardless of how many times I repeat the opposite), but to dispel something of the aura of martyrdom surrounding it. Their ethics of freedom of expression and unchecked expression are all noble and good and all. But they’re built for a perfect world. Actually, only a world where people were not fanatical, hysterical murderers would do (i.e. partially civilized), but I will still pretend that such a world should be called 'perfect', even though it is, again, expecting almost complete blindness from my admiring readers. And a world in which cartoonists who earn their livings doodling the genitals (again, an insignificant number of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons showed genitals, but I cannot help pretending that defines their work one last time) of major religious figures are hailed as vanquished heroes strikes me as the furthest thing from a perfect world.
