What We Talk About When We Talk About Charlie

By Jörg Heiser

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Why we have to debunk, in the wake of the Paris attacks, the defensive reflexes, and the narcissist victim-blaming.

It was only just last Wednesday that, on the evening of the day of the horrific terrorist killings in Paris that people all across France, but also in other countries, in front of French embassies or in newspaper newsrooms, gathered silently in mourning, many of them holding up placards with the statement ‘je suis Charlie’.

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Yesterday, about 3.7 millions have gathered in the streets of Paris, Marseille and elsewhere in France to mourn the victims and demonstrate, and as so many showed up it seems they prevented, by sheer presence, what many had feared would happen, that reactionary politicians would hijack the event and dominate it, ready to instrumentalize the horrific event for their islamophobic, anti-immigration, or pro-surveillance causes; instead, yes, state representatives including those whose countries are ranked rather low on the Reporters Without Borders annual Press Freedom Index such as Russia or Turkey, who have a record for sending journalists to prison and silencing dissidents, marched at the front of the demonstrations, but were not able to take centre-stage – while being forced by the dynamics of the event to expose themselves to the obviousness of the hypocritical double standard of them marching here. And the Le Pen family and the Front Nationale couldn’t participate in Paris at all, unmistakenly told by all other parties and unions that the presence of the Far Right would be unwelcomed. And again, there were millions of people holding up pens, and signs reading ‘Je suis Charlie’ (a beautiful Le Monde portfolio of portraits here ).

If artists, writers and editors aren’t shaken to their bones by what happened last Wednesday to artists, writers and editors – disregardingly of whether they liked or despised, or even knew well their work – then I don’t know. There are continuously horrific atrocities around the world, and some have rightly pointed out that the mass killings of around 2000 people by Boko Haram in Nigeria last week went almost unnoticed given the predominant news coverage of Paris. And just to be clear, there would be no excuse to forget that in Paris apart from satirists being killed for being satirists, and policemen being killed for being policemen, Jews have been killed for being Jews; and that in the wake of the events there have been also numerous attempts around France at intimidating and harming, if not killing Muslims for being Muslims.

Nevertheless if I didn’t acknowledge a particular concern with the collective killing of these people with pens sitting around an editorial table I would suppress sensing a particular kind of concern, by way of my profession that I love. These events are symptom as well as trigger not only, like other attacks before, for the antagonization of civil society forced mainly by the deadly dance between reactionary-conservative and far-right war- and hatemongers on the one hand and jihadi quasi-fascist fundamentalists on the other (how antagonization is the typical aim of criminal sociopaths and totalitarians is precisely what Juan Cole pointed out in an important early reaction to the attacks). They are also having an even more searing relevance for the issue of freedom of expression, which some in the wake of these events have strangely called a ‘fetish’.

Freedom of expression is an ideal that not least the often hypocritical Western governments have failed dramatically with their greed for big data, pretending to be able to prevent events like Paris by way of drone-bombing and mass surveillance (which already didn’t work in Boston). It is an ideal that we ourselves fail every time we hesitate before saying something necessarily critical because it might even just, say, harm our career. It is an ideal that, surely, seems very hard to realize outside of small rich countries like Finland, Norway or the Netherlands (who lead the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index ). And finally, yes, it is an ideal that is all too often hijacked by phonies and hypocrites. But, honestly, a ‘fetish’?! (I’ll return to that).

I’d like to try to get my head around some of the neuralgic points of the debate in the wake of the attacks. And I want to point to some aspects that I felt have not been acknowledged enough yet:

1) The future fear of artists, writers, cartoonists of speaking their mind with mockery, or even just mild ridicule, i.e. the precedent this collective killing of satirists and writers sets, an unprecedented escalation after the Fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the killing of Theo van Gogh, in countries and parts of the world where hitherto they had lived under the impression of being relatively safe.

2) Hence what’s at stake is not just the more factual side of freedom of speech and the press, but also the freedom of art, and laughter – related, but not the same.

3) The unresolved trauma of France’s colonialist legacy with Algeria, and what kind of background it forms to the current antagonisms.

4) The terrible failure of some major voices of literature and intellectual discourse to rise above smug self-serving arguments in the wake of these events; something that, again, reminds me starkly of the way some reacted back in 1988 when Ayatollah Khomeini unmistakably called for Rushdie to be murdered for having written a book, and many supposedly free minds found ways to blame the victim à la ‘he had it coming’.

Let me start with the last point. I was dumbfounded – or maybe I wasn’t so much, given that I have seen similar mechanisms unfold in previous crises – that after Wednesday’s horrific event it took less than 24 hours before Social Media as well as news and opinion outlets were abound with journalists, academics, activists, artists and bloggers eager to state: I am not Charlie.

Few doing so failed to acknowledge some sense of condolence for the dead editors and satirists, even if as lip service. But almost in the same breath, they said ‘but’, or at least ‘although’: that the Charlie Hebdo staff were, in fact, racist, sexist and islamophobic. The first, and arguably dumbest of those was a post on Jacobinmag.com, tellingly franchised from Lenin’s Tomb (though I doubt even Lenin would have been amused), which entertained the ‘thought’ that the most pressing question now, while the bodies were not cold yet, was to determine whether the terrorist attack was in fact really ‘terrorist’ (putting the word, in the wake of these events, in inverted commas is newspeak in its most debased, obscurant form), while not even bothering to produce any evidence that Charlie Hebdo was racist, just smugly referring readers who desired to know to first having an introductory course by reading Edward Said’s Orientalism.

In other cases, the evidence was quickly produced, with a number of cartoons taken out of context circulating and being reposted. Let me quote at length from an excellent blog post by journalist Olivier Tonneau at the French investigative news website mediapart:

‘It might be worth knowing that the main target of Charlie Hebdo was the Front National and the Le Pen family. Next came crooks of all sorts, including bosses and politicians (incidentally, one of the victims of the bombing was an economist who ran a weekly column on the disasters caused by austerity policies in Greece). Finally, Charlie Hebdo was an opponent of all forms of organized religions, in the old-school anarchist sense: Ni Dieu, ni maître! They ridiculed the pope, orthodox Jews and Muslims in equal measure and with the same biting tone. They took ferocious stances against the bombings of Gaza. Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic. Charlie Hebdo also continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay.’

So how can it be that these editors actually campaigning for the sans papier would be so quickly identified as islamophobic racists? Some of the shocking imagery suggested such an allegation. Take one of the most outrageous examples.

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‘touchez pas nos allocs’ translates as ‘Don’t touch our welfare allocations!’. The case seems clear: an outrageously racist and sexist depiction of girls abducted by Boko Haram and made sex slaves presented, in racial stereotyping, as grotesquely screaming pregnant women of colour, with a future as ‘welfare queens’ in France. But then I did a few minutes of research and came across this online discussion .

What the contributing users – some French, some American – were saying can be roughly distilled into this: mixing two unrelated events that made the news in France last year – the Nigerian school girls kidnapped by Boko Haram; the French government announcing welfare benefit cuts – is a double snipe, in classic Hebdo style, at both Boko Haram and those who hold grotesque fantasies and stereotypes about ‘welfare queens’, i.e. the French Far Right and its followers. Many of the covers of the magazine work in this strategy of mimetic parody mixing two seemingly unrelated things to create crude absurdity in order to respond to the crude absurdity of the Le Pen followers (think of the Steve Colbert Report done by Southpark, but ten times amplified by France’s tradition of mean, challenging joking, made to grin and bear it, going back to the 17th century ).

This doesn’t take away from anyone feeling offended, or feeling that the critique is deranged or undermined by the way it’s put, and thus racist and sexist. Yet in any case a more nuanced understanding of the often purposefully un-nuanced and crude jokes Charlie Hebdo were making, often risking indeed to perpetuate what they seemingly intended to criticize – the outrageous racism of Marine Le Pen and her followers – is in evidence. And just to remind, her are some Le Pen covers:

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It’s fair to enough to object to what can be considered racist and islamophobic content in Charlie Hebdo, as long as one acknowledges its anti-racist and anti-fascist content as well. But even if Glenn Greenwald– someone I admire for his tireless, even heroic investigative stance in regard to state surveillance and many other issues – and others issuing similar statements were indeed right with their assertion that Charlie Hebdo were, in total, just a bunch of smug racists, portraying them almost as the French equivalent of Der Stürmer, making them perpetrators not victims, I wonder why they took not nearly as much effort as these users in the above link to actually look into the details of that allegation. Moreover, I wonder why they managed so well to ignore all the many Charlie covers mocking French government politicians, catholic clerics, and, incessantly, the Le Pen far right, many of which appeared just around the time of the above cover.

Just to give three more prominent examples (incidentally all three by fairly successful book-publishing writers). Tariq Ali was quick to point to Charlie Hebdo’s alleged softness on Judaism: ‘It has occasionally attacked Catholicism, but it’s hardly ever taken on Judaism (though Israel’s numerous assaults on Palestinians have offered many opportunities)’ – ‘hardly ever’ is actually hardly true, with the magazine numerously having been accused of being anti-Semitic because of anti-clerical caricatures not only of Bishops and Imams but also orthodox Rabbis (it’s kind of a tragic irony when Art Spiegelman , of all people, has to insist on that point, in the spirit of free speech, in a video discussion with Tariq Ramadan who claims that Charlie Hebdo, for the sake of cashing in – saying that about a magazine which firmly refused to run advertising – were nothing but Islamophobic while Jew-friendly).

Tariq Ali, straight after condemning Michel Houellebecq’s new novel with its future scenario of a Muslim French president (obviously without having read it yet), also adds that ‘Charlie Hebdo, we should not forget, ran a cover lampooning Houellebecq on the day it was attacked.’ – which is kind of a breath-taking rhetorical manoeuvre either of making a positive point but totally without exploring its effect on the one-sided argument; or, even more absurdly, of victim-blaming by way of mere association, managing to hold even against them that they were mocking Houellebecq, not praising him.

Teju Cole’s line of argument is more persuasive, pointing to the many other misdeeds done in the world, including US drone strikes or killings in Mexico. This is a kind of obvious point he prepares though by portraying Charlie Hebdo as purely racist, tellingly, without bothering to even mention their record of being fiercely anti-Far Right (and yes, just to be clear, being anti-Far Right doesn’t automatically make one non-racist, but not mentioning the fact even if in passing while speaking to a general audience in the New Yorker is dubious).

And the famous quote ascribed to Voltaire, ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.’, Teju Cole seems to think, can simply be taken down by pointing out that Voltaire was an anti-Semite (in all fairness, Cole doesn’t make explicit reference to the quote, but it’s clear he has it in mind given how it has made the rounds in recent days on twitter and elsewhere). Apart from the fact that with that reference, you can easily take down a whole bunch of writers otherwise well revered including everyone from Kant to Marx to Dickens, to name but a few (while it remains to be asked whether that discredits all the ideas they ever put forth), there is no point really in taking down Voltaire when the quote in question is falsely ascribed to him anyway (it stems from British writer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, who coined it in her Voltaire biography to characterize his attitude ).

Moreover, even if the quote stemmed from Voltaire himself, and even if his reputation was compromised by some of his writing, wouldn’t it precisely prove his point; that, as least as long as today’s scholars still seriously debate, as they do, whether the undeniably anti-Jewish passages in Voltaire’s writing, weighed against Jewish-friendly passages, make him unquotable, so to speak, or whether we should continue to make his work widely available and discuss its content despite of its flaws and ideological failures; that we should of course… well, defend its further availability ‘to the death’ normally would sound preposterously out of proportion. But thinking of Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier a.k.a. Charb, who had been living under constant death threats for years, at least since the firebombing of the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2011, and who knew he was on an ‘official’ Al Qaeda hit list since 2013 , the phrase does take on new, chilling meaning.

‘But the question needs to be asked,’ writes Will Self , and one can see him thoughtfully furrowing his brows, ‘were the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo really satirists, if by satire is meant the deployment of humour, ridicule, sarcasm and irony in order to achieve moral reform?’ This equation of satire with ‘moral reform’ Self has published on the website of the Official Jack-Ass War-Porn Hipster Institute for Moral Reform, better known as Vice magazine. But he doesn’t stop there. He manages – just as Tariq Ali manages to blame Charlie Hebdo for mocking an author he despises, i.e. Houellebecq – to blame Charlie Hebdo for the financial support the publication has received in the wake of almost its entire editorial being slaughtered: ‘The memorial issue of Charlie Hebdo will have a print run of 1,000,000 copies, financed by the French government; so, now the satirists have been co-opted by the state, precisely the institution you might’ve thought they should never cease from attacking.’ Oh you only ‘might’ve thought’, as they lay dead, that they didn’t manage to continue attacking the French government as they had done incessantly (which Self of course fails to mention) when they were still alive.

He goes on to argue that because in his last cartoon published, Charb portrayed a jihadist with a hat called pakol he supposedly ‘marked the fighter out as an Afghan, and therefore as unlikely to be involved in terrorist attacks in the West’, thus not getting ‘the basic facts about his targets [sic!] correct’. First of all the pakol is worn in Pakistan as well , plus the cartoon’s point, which – hauntingly from today’s point of view – joked about the threat of an attack in reference to belated New Years Greetings– ‘Still no attacks in France – wait! We have until the end of January to present our wishes.’ – wasn’t making a claim about potential French attackers but rather, precisely, about the men behind them, recruiting them, and helping them along from afar, portrayed here with the same dumb yellow face Charb reserved for pretty much all of his protagonists, whether pedophile priests or racist policemen (that he didn’t also foresee that it would be a Jemen rather than Pakistani unit of Al Qaeda allegedly involved would probably be the next thing Will Self would have held against Charb).

But Will Self is not finished yet with his dire diatribe: he manages, within one paragraph, to mention the ‘strangeness of a magazine editor who was prepared to die for his convictions’, AND to claim that his satire merely existed to comfort Charlie Hebdo’s readership. (This pattern of argument turned up in Social Media now and again: in the moment an editorial collective had been murdered some real smart alecs submitted that Charlie Hebdo, being the smug white racists they allegedly were, could have only been serving the privileged while sneering about the discriminated, thus not even deserving the label ‘satire’, as if it totally didn’t matter that they had a very real reason to feel threatened.)

‘Our society makes a fetish of “the right to free speech” without ever questioning what sort of responsibilities are implied by this right’, Will Self goes on, exercising precisely his ‘fetishized’ right to free speech, if a little irresponsibly. So be it, of course. Might I add, in the spirit of free speech: shame on Will Self for this piece of drivel – but I’d carry his pen from London to Paris if it was necessary for him to be able to continue driveling, without harm.

So why do these writers, at different levels of intellectual integrity and capacity, take these positions? I think there are three possible answers. The first one would be that the urge to react and make sense quickly inevitably produces inaccuracies, half-blinded guesses. The second answer would be that for the sake of creating more traction for the argument, simplifying its message is key, hence one leaves out anything that doesn’t fit one’s ideological search mask.

The third, and possibly more telling or interesting answer is that there is a more complex process of rationalization at play, to do with the dynamics of guilt, shame and blame. I’ll take an example of someone I truly respect and in case of whom I know the motivations have nothing to do with the cheap and twisted envy narcissistic, egotistic writers can sometimes harbor.

An American friend of Pakistani descent absolutely rightly pointed out to me, in an email exchange, that France doesn’t have an impeccable record for freedom of speech at all, i.e. double standards being in place. Her example was the banning of the hijab from public schools introduced in 2004. Now I can see people arguing that laïcité is demanding such a thing, and that kippahs and large crosses were also banned. I tend to think that the hijab ban, and in this I agree with my friend, was rather a defeat for free speech (arguably even a concession indeed to islamophobia), because the foundational idea for secularism is precisely not banning people from personally expressing whatever religious belief they hold or conform to in public places, whether in words or garment, but keeping religion from becoming state doctrine, becoming an active political power on an institutional level.

I don’t know what exactly Charlie Hebdo had to say about the matter back in 2004, but numerous cartoons I found clearly show their target not to be the Muslim community, but the hypocrites in power: for example a 2004 cover calls out Jacques Chirac (the then-president) for double standards on freedom of speech: being contra the hijab being allowed, but pro preventing a juridical investigation of the Alain Juppé affair (head of the UMP party Juppé, that same year, had been found guilty of abuse of public funding for the party).

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But either way, bringing up the hijab ban, or other arguable failures of the State of France to live up to its own ideals of liberté, fraternité, egalité, brought forth in order to argue against the collective killing of artists/writers/editors being a case of freedom of speech being under threat to me is self-defeating. Again, maybe unknowingly, the ones who in fact outspokenly criticized France for not living up to its ideals are blamed for that very fact. It’s a defensive mechanism, and I can understand it coming from people tired of being cornered as Muslims constantly held under the suspicion that they hold some kind of ‘clandestine glee’ (a term that, as ‘klammheimliche Freude’ was first used in Germany in the 1970s denoting actual leftist feeling precisely that kind of clandestine glee vis-à-vis the murders of the Red Army Faction) for the deeds of Islamofascist terrorists; or, even worse, that there is really no distinction between Muslims in general and the small Islamofascist minority that, from Nigeria to Syria to Paris, causes so much mayhem.

But I do have a hard time accepting the defensive patterns coming from self-important writers who just can’t bear that there are these victims of an obviously barbaric act who, as writers/artists as well as human beings, outshine them in their boldness.

The realm of art and satire has other rules than the one of news journalism. Whereas we can rightly demand journalism to stick to the facts and play by the rules of the most basic decency, in a civil society there must be a realm where ‘out of line’ behaviour and tourettish insult and grotesque can play themselves out without constant governance, not only out of sheer tolerance but also because it is in that realm of anarchic parody and thought that a civil society can question its explicit as well as unspoken rules. This is not always easy to bear, and insult can sometimes add to injury. But it doesn’t kill you, and therefore there is no excuse on earth for it killing them.

Maybe, against this background, it’s also an all the more tragic note that with Jean Cabut, a.k.a. Cabu, a conscripted veteran of the Franco-Algerian war, the experience of which had made him a strict anti-militarist, has been killed. For his killers were sons of Algerian immigrants, orphaned at a young age. The copy editor killed was Mustapha Ourrad , also orphaned at a young age. Ourad was born in Algeria, had lived as a homeless person for a while, was an autodidact intellectual who loved Nietzsche and Baudelaire , and had become the long-time copy-editor of Charlie Hebdo (I challenge any of the self-righteous mainstream media blamers of Charlie Hebdo as racist whether they would be prepared to hire someone applying with that kind of biography as their copy editor). The girlfriend of editor-in-chief Charb, Jeannette Bougrab, is a former junior minister for Youth and Community Life under Sarkozy – whom Charb incessantly attacked – and the daughter of a Harki fighter in Algeria supporting the French presence in the country. As Robert Fisk has pointed out, without in the least using that as an excuse for the attack, there is an underlying trauma that is specific to France and its Muslim community which is overwhelmingly of Algerian descent (5 out of 6,5 Million, Fisk says). The millions of Algerians and thousands of Frenchmen killed in the war 1954–62, as well as the as yet unresolved shame of the massacre of up to 200 Algerian demonstrators intentionally killed by the Parisian police in 1961, can of course and must not excuse anything that happened last week. But it may explain a traumatic kernel that, as long as it is not fully addressed, will get in the way of the country finding a way to overcome the antagonisms the sociopaths and totalitarians so gleefully thrive on.

Finally, I couldn’t think of a better response, to all the arguments putting the blame on Charlie Hebdo for having been ‘racist’ by way of blasphemy, than the one that science writer Kenan Malik issued on his website :

‘What is really racist is the idea that only nice white liberals want to challenge religion or demolish its pretensions or can handle satire and ridicule. Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries. It is here that leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry.’

The people who took to the streets in France yesterday seem to be smarter than this tired mechanism: many of them might not have been very fond of Charlie Hebdo, but that was, for them, not the point. The point was to defend the right to dissent, however outrageous that dissent may seem to appear. THIS is why most people in France and elsewhere use this slogan ‚Je Suis Charlie’, NOT because they want to express their total agreement with everything Charlie Hebdo said or did (arguably the term can be traced back to the ‘I am Salman Rushdie’ pins people wore in the wake of the 1988 Fatwa against the writer). And the fact that parts of the Far right, notably also the Pegida movement in Germany which until last Tuesday would have considered Charlie Hebdo part of what they call the ‘Lügenpresse’ (Media of Lies, a Goebbels term), perverted the slogan by adopting it (Jean-Marie Le Pen, too well aware of the leftist history of Charlie Hebdo, notably rejected it) should be held against those who commit that twisted-logic, sick perversion – and no-one else.

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Instead of self-important subtraction – I am not Charlie – the people demonstrating across France and elsewhere made serial additions in the spirit of rejecting those who thrive on sharpening the contradictions: I’m Jewish, I’m Muslim, I‘m Atheist, I’m French, I’m Charlie.

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