Paris / Berlin – The right to “freedom of speech” was the claim by which Charlie Hebdo magazine always defended itself, and it has brought more than a million people onto the streets of Paris and other world capitals carrying signs “Je suis Charlie” in solidarity with the slain cartoonists. On the day following the massacre, in the spirit of freedom of speech, surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo pledged to continue publication with a print run for the next issue, not of the usual 60,000 but of 3 million copies. The BBC reports that in this spirit the French government is granting nearly €1 million to support the magazine; the Digital Innovation Press Fund, partially funded by Google, donating €250,000, to match a donation by the French Press and Pluralism Fund; and the Guardian Media Group pledging £100,000.
But is freedom on the press all that is at stake here? Charlie Hebdo had always pushed the limits, despite warnings following the fire-bombing of their offices in 2011, that their characterizations of Muslims, which smacked of racism and Islamophobia, were a provocation to extremists. Charlie Hebdo’s response that it mocked all religions, and that Islam was no exception, would not have appeased the radical Islamists, drawn from the most marginalized and oppressed segments of French society. How to weigh the sacrosanct national value of satire as a form of freedom of speech against the religious sensibilities of the frustrated youths of the banlieux?
This is a question that, in the outpouring of national fervour, it seems that the French are not yet asking. But the New York Times and The Guardian have refused to reproduce the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and not just on the grounds of prudence. As Tom Spurgeon in the The New York Times of January 11-12 observes, Charlie Hebdo had “a much more savage, unforgiving, doing-it-for-the-sake-of-doing-it” spirit than would be permitted in many countries today, where “there’s a sophisticated dialogue about what privilege means, and a feeling that you don’t need to insult people, especially downtrodden people, to make your points”. On Sunday 11, a minor fire-bomb attack was reported on the offices of the Hamburger Morgenpost, which Saturday published Charlie Hebdo cartoons.
France has not always been true to Voltaire’s principle, now so often quoted: „I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it“. Nor has it always respected the now-sacrosanct humour of cartoonists as an expression of freedom of speech. When in November 1970 Charlie Hebdo’s predecessor, the satirical weekly Hara-Kiri, announced the death of Charles de Gaulle at his property at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, the headline read: „Bal tragique a Colombey: un mort“ (Dance-hall tragedy at Colombey – one dead). This not only offended Gaullists but was doubly offensive because the previous week there had indeed been a dance-hall tragedy where a fire had killed nearly 150 people. On the grounds of a breach of lèse-majesté against the deceased President, the magazine was immediately and permanently banned from sale to minors by the minister of the interior, only to be revived as Charlie Hebdo, with the announcement: „Hara-Kiri is dead. Read Charlie Hebdo, the paper that profits from other peoples‘ misfortunes“.
More recently Charlie Hebdo seemed to violate its own canons of free speech, firing one of its cartoonists for the offense of anti-Semitism because he mocked a former French president’s son who converted to Judaism. As NBC reporter Ayman Mohyeldin wrote, Hebdo fired one of its cartoonists and accused him of anti-Semitism because he mocked the son of a former living French President who converted to Judaism. Why is mocking a living person anti-Semitic hate speech but mocking sacred religious figures not? Who decides what is anti-Semitic and who decides what is Islamophobic?
How then is this newly-found zeal for liberal values to be weighed against insults to the downtrodden? We know that the worst injustices may hide under the mantra of liberal values, and especially freedom of expression, including racism, sexism, political and economic exploitation, because, guarantees of freedom do not give any freedom to the dispossessed, they simply guarantee the freedom of those that have it, and allow inequalities to flourish under the myth of equal citizenship. BBC livestream Sunday interviewed a French social worker of Algerian descent, who reported seeing Arabs starving in their ghettos, the banlieux on the outskirts of Paris, and young girls prostituting themselves just to be able to eat. Many in Sunday‘s crowd proudly declared themselves French and that France allows no distinctions or divisions, in apparent ignorance of conditions in the banlieux. A genuine „carnival atmosphere“ was reported and Hollande declared „la grande nation“ to be capital of the world (for a day). Obama has since been heard soul-searching his decision not to send someone to the Unity March more senior than the US Ambassador to France, in order to partake of this grand celebration of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Angela Merkel, David Cameron, Matteo Renzi, among over 40 world leaders joined Francois Hollande for the Sunday Unity March, in a moving show of solidarity in support of liberal values. They included Benjamin Netanyahu (who wasn‘t invited) and Mahmoud Abbas (who then had to be). Netanyahu, took an opportunity for electoral campaigning, inviting French Jews to resettle in Israel in even greater numbers, and even succeeded in getting permission to bury the Jews slain in the Kosher supermarket in Israel.These are all politicians in tight corners who have much to gain from reclaiming the high ground from their populist right-wing (and oftenIslamophobic) opponents and they took their chance.
Most impressive was the outpouring of grief and spirit of reconciliation from the 1.6 million people of all ethnicities, confessions and creeds who joined the march. One hopes that this great show of fraternal solidarity will encourage France to work to better integrate its Muslim community languishing in poverty in the banlieux. But one fears that the atrocities committed against Charlie Hebdo will only result in more Islamophobia and the further victimization of ordinary Moslems who had no part in the power play of al-Qaeda or professionally trained terrorists executing a commando-style massacre, but as in all the wars, are simply pawns in a bigger game. In the days since the Charlie Hebdo killings, at least 20 mosques have already been attacked throughout France, which does not bode well.
France is home to the biggest Moslem community in Europe and at the same time enjoys some of the highest levels of Islamophobia, which the European Organization for Security and Cooperation has already reported as on the rise. The cover of the current issue of Charlie Hebdo features the new novel of that most Islamophobic of authors, Michael Houellebecq, “Submission”, a political fiction about a Moslem becoming President of France, which this week President Hollande promised to read and which Marine Le Pen of the National Front has referred to as “a fiction that could one day become reality”. It competes on the best seller list with Eric Zemmour’s gloomy tale “The French Suicide”, which blames immigration, feminism and the student uprisings of 1968 for the ruination of France.
What about other relevant contexts for this massacre? On the day that Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were killed 35 Yemeni Muslim police cadets were killed by an al-Quaeda bomb and no one came out into the streets to support them. Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the Middle East has been subject to bombing and destruction on a scale never seen since World War II. More than 3.5 million Iraqis have been killed or died from war-related illnesses and malnutrition since 1990 when sanctions were imposed, most of them innocent civilians; and 3 million Syrians have been displaced or are in flight and right now likely freezing to death in the below zero temperatures of a particularly harsh winter.
The deep structural context for the Paris massacres is not irrelevant. When Cherif Kouachi was tried in 2008 for helping funnel French fighters to Iraq and sentenced to 18 months in prison, the Associated Press reported him telling the court that he was outraged by images that revealed the torture of Iraqi inmates by U.S. guards at the Abu Ghraib prison. Although France refrained from participation in Iraq, no one doubts that the French-backed bombing of Libya has contributed to the chaos and destruction of that country, and the flow of immigrants as well as of Jihadis; while since the beginning of Obama’s drone programme in Yemen, early in his first term, commentators have been warning that high levels of recruitment to al-Qaeda are the most likely outcome. The systematic destruction in the late 20th and early 21st centuries of some of the oldest cities and civilizations in the world, along with their cultures and religions, and the dispossession and annihilation of millions of their citizens must also be put in the scales against freedom of speech and the preservation of a characteristically French sense of humour.
Terrorism is morally contemptible and serves no purpose, as the French Jews and Moslems who attended Sunday‘s march affirmed. But sometimes it is the only weapon the dispossessed feel they have. The path ahead requires that France try to strengthen equality as one of the founding values of the republic, along with liberty and fraternity which have been so warmly embraced.