Yesterday, twelve people were shot dead at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. It was reported that the gunmen shouted “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “God is Great” in Arabic (“Allahu Akbar”), and so the attack is believed to be the work of militant Islamists in response to offensive cartoons that appeared in the magazine.
I am posting this as a place to collect relevant writings and media appearances by philosophers, political theorists, and others on or relevant to these attacks, or to the general issues underlying them. Please post them, with links if possible, in the comments.
Here are two:
First, there’s an interview with Jacob Levy (McGill) on the BBC in which he praises the widespread support for freedom to speak offensively in the wake of the attacks, but notes the hypocrisy of such support in conjunction with France’s ban on certain traditional Muslim clothing, in particular, veils to cover women’s faces.
Second, there is a piece by Jason Stanley (Yale) in The New York Times. He arrived in Paris, coincidentally, right after the attacks, to give a series of lectures. An excerpt from his “Postcard from Paris”:
Liberalism is a political philosophy that has as its two chief ideals, liberty and equality. In a liberal democracy, all citizens have equal power, because all are possessed of reason, and have the liberty to employ it in expression. In France, which has a right to be considered one of the modern birthplaces of the liberal democratic revolution, satire has long had a special role. Satire is the ultimate method by which reason can address power. With the use of satire, even those without control of resources can, with merely the use of a pen, bring figures of authority down to earth.
The revered cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo had not only mocked the chief religious figure of the Islamic faith; they also had subjected Pope Francis to equal ridicule. No authority figure was safe. To take Charlie Hebdo as singling Islam out for abuse is a misunderstanding, one might think. Their target was authority, whatever its source.
Yet, as the staff of Charlie Hebdo was aware, there surely is a difference, in France, between mocking the Pope and mocking the Prophet Muhammad. The Pope is the representative of the dominant traditional religion of the majority of French citizens. The Prophet Muhammad is the revered figure of an oppressed minority. To mock the Pope is to thumb one’s nose at a genuine authority, an authority of the majority. To mock the Prophet Muhammad is to add insult to abuse. The power of the majority in a liberal democracy is not the power of monarchs, to be sure. But it is power nonetheless.
(image of window at Charlie Hebdo, from Associated Press)
UPDATE (1/10/15 – 2/1/15): I’ve gone through the comments and gathered up links submitted in response to the OP, and added some seen elsewhere:
– Patrick Savida (Université de Poitiers) – “Charlie Hebdo: un courage democratique” (in French) (via Nick)
– Nigel Wartburton (Philosophy Bites) – tweets and links (via Nick)
– Bob Kirkman (Georgia Tech) – “Charlie Hebdo“
– Chris Bertram (Bristol) – “Charlie Hebdo” (via Brian Weatherson)
– Samir Chopra (Brooklyn College, CUNY) – Kill All The Cartoonists; God Will Sort Them Out
– Justin E.H. Smith (Université Paris Diderot ) – “Finding Something to Say about Charlie Hebdo” (via S)
– Stephen Law (Heythrop College, University of London) — “What’s the point of lampooning religion? To upset the religious?”
– Serene Khader (Brooklyn College) – “Why You Won’t See Me Posting ‘Je Suis Charlie’” (via More Indeed)
– Kenan Malik (writer, lecturer, broadcaster) – “je suis charlie? it’s a bit late” (via L)
– Amol Rajan, Editor of The Independent interviewed -“Publishing Muhammad cartoons would have been too risky” (via David Wallace)
– Fredrik deBoer (Purdue), “On Debating Dead Moral Questions”
– David Brooks (NYT columnist) – “I Am Not Charlie Hedbo” (via Bob Kirkman)
– Joe Sacco (graphic novelist, journalist) – “On Satire – a response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks” (via Anon)
– Glenn Greenwald (journalist) – “In Solidarity with a Free Press” (via J C McG)
– Scott Long (human rights consultant) – “Why I am not Charlie” (via J C McG)
– Adam Shatz (journalist) – “Moral Clarity” (via J C McG)
– Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Groningen) – “Charlie Hebdo and the Intolerant Enlightenment” (including a link to a piece by Eric Schliesser — in Dutch) (via Nick)
– Teju Cole (writer, photographer, art historian) – “Unmournable Bodies” (via sin nombre)
– Glen Newey (Leiden) – “Rival Sanctities”
– Slavoj Žižek (Ljubljana) – “Are the worst really full of passionate intensity?“
– Amos Guiora (S.J. Quinney College of Law, Univ. of Utah) – “To Fear Offense or Reprisals Is to Surrender Our Values” (via anonymous 17)
– David Atkins – “When Defense of “The Other” Runs Contrary to Liberal Values” (via Blain Neufeld)
– Seyla Benhabib (Yale) – “Piety or Rage? On the Charlie Hebdo Massacres“
– Noam Chomsky (MIT) – “One Man’s Terror Is Another Man’s War“
– Catherine Liu (UC Irvine) – “Intellectual History and the Death of Politics: Jacobin, Sade, Charlie Hebdo“
– Etienne Balabar (UC Irvine) – “Trois mots pour les morts et pour les vivants“
– Brian Klug (Oxford) – “The moral hysteria of Je suis charlie“
– Zygmunt Bauman (Leeds) – “The Charlie Hebdo Attack And What It Reveals About Society“
– Jameel Jaffer (ACLU) – “Charlie Hebdo, The Interview, and Censoring Torture Photos“
– Daniel Weinstock (McGill) – “The (Messy) Ethics of Freedom of Speech“
– Antonio Negri – “Charlie Hebdo, fear and world war: two questions for Toni Negri” (by Mike Watson)
In French (sorry), by political philosopher Patrick Savida:
http://www.raison-publique.fr/article714.html
Nigel Wartburton has been tweeting a lot too, and linking to lots of materials, including Philosophy Bites, on free speech.
https://twitter.com/philosophybites
I offered one small comment, off to the side of the main stream of commentary and demonstration following the attack, here: http://www.ethicsnotes.net/2015/01/charlie-hebdo.html.
My concern is not so much with the discussion of free speech or liberal democracy as such, which I agree is part of the wider significance of the attack and should be expressed.
My concern is that the particular horror of the deaths of twelve human beings is being obscured by all the abstractions flying around. The gunmen are said to have attacked freedom, liberalism, democracy, France . . . but they also killed twelve individuals.
I am still more concerned with the moves of some, including otherwise respectable thinkers who espouse a strident form of atheism, to use the attacks to score points against religion in general, Islam in particular. It is more than a little offensive to use the deaths of human beings as mere means to less-than-admirable ends.
Good for Jason Stanley to point out that Charlie Hebdo’s satire of Islam is a form of abusive power, but I don’t think this goes far enough. Charlie Hebdo publishes racists (mostly Islamophobic) and sexist cartoons. They did not serve a noble cause. Satire was an important political instrument before free speech when the press could be shut down by legitimate authorities. It is a good tool against those who hold power over the satirist. France is no longer that world and the cartoons lampooning Muslims are not speaking to power, they are a sign of white privilege speaking down to Muslims. Not all victims need be noble ones and racists have a right to life, too. I think we need to put these cartoons into perspective. If an American press ran a cartoon lampooning Bush for whatever and then ran a cartoon with president Obama’s beer summit where Obama and Gates had their beers with a slice of Watermelon and were drawn stereotypically black, I think it would be fair to say that that particular newspaper ran a racist cartoon. If they did things like that repeatedly, we would probably be right to call that newspaper racist even if they were only making fun of prominent black figures or extremist black figures. From everything I can find on Charlie Hebdo, this is the French equivalent of what they published. I know we aren’t supposed to speak ill of the dead, but I don’t like the idea of making racist cartoons some sort of noble venture.
Sin Nombre writes:
“the cartoons lampooning Muslims are not speaking to power.”
I’d say a sufficient condition for “speaking to power” is that you are murdered for doing so.
“Yet, as the staff of Charlie Hebdo was aware, there surely is a difference, in France, between mocking the pope and mocking the Prophet Muhammad. The pope is the representative of the dominant traditional religion of the majority of French citizens. The Prophet Muhammad is the revered figure of an oppressed minority. To mock the pope is to thumb one’s nose at a genuine authority, an authority of the majority. To mock the Prophet Muhammad is to add insult to abuse. The power of the majority in a liberal democracy is not the power of monarchs, to be sure. But it is power nonetheless.”
If there are a significant number of people who believe that others should die for insults and cartoons, then there is a need to insult and mock that very group and their revered figures. Stanley goes through the motions of condemning the attack, and I’m sure is quite sincere, but my mother taught me that anything comes before a ‘but’ is meaningless and I imagine she would say the same about ‘yet’. To vilify these brave cartoonists as abusing an oppressed minority rather than thumbing their noses at evil—and to do so on immediately after their murder by the very evil they mocked–is disgusting and shameful.
Chris Bertram (Bristol) has an excellent post up at Crooked Timber – http://crookedtimber.org/2015/01/07/charlie-hebdo/
This is an equivocation. Either you do not know what “speaking to power” means or you are intentionally distorting its meaning.
The idea that the only appropriate targets of satire are those who fall under some notion of “power” is absurd. Any number of people need to be satirized for any number of reasons, and those people aren’t restricted to the some range of people who are in “power.” For instance, people who believe that others should be murdered for mocking religious figures are people who are good targets of satire.
As Rousseau would say, a gun is also a power.
How’s this, satirizing extremists in itself is not wrong and is healthy for any democracy. It is the manner in which extremists are satirized that bothers me about Charlie Hebdo. They frequently use racialized or sexist images to characterize Muslims. They played on Islamophobic and Orientalist themes. They were racist and to pretend that they weren’t racist is to deny a very important fact. I have a hard time seeing how racism is political satire. Reading the comments here and elsewhere on their work makes me feel like the Islamophobia is escaping everyone’s notice. I get this feeling that Fanon mentions in Black Skin, White Masks where he talks about people’s surprise that he is so civilized or when they criticize black people, they mean other black people. That’s basically what those cartoons are. Oh, we don’t mean all Arabs, just those bad Arabs (as we gleefully mock them using stereotypical Arab imagery). There’s a way to do political satire against extremist that doesn’t buy into racist stereotypes and then there’s the way the all white staff of Charlie Hebdo decided to do it. I’m saying there way is racist. Were Rush Limbaugh to meet a similar fate would we all be saying “I am Rush”?
Sin nombre, it is superficial to point out that what the cartoonists did would not conventionally have been described as ‘speaking to power’. I take it that that was part of David Wallace’s point. The real issue concerns why it should *not* be described that way, given that they were murdered. Often the point of using that expression is to praise the speaker’s courage. The cartoonists were well aware of the danger; their building was under armed police guard.
I am heartened, however, by your acknowledgement of their right to life.
A sudden change in view or tactics?
And, yes, I would say ‘I am Rush’ or ‘I am Chomsky’ or ‘I am anyone else who was murdered for saying or thinking something’: I support an open society.
To be clear, no one should be killed for their beliefs or their drawings. My point is that these cartoons are not brave. They are drawn by people who have an extraordinary amount of white privilege in a country that has a lot of Islamophobic people and these cartoons cater to them. To pretend that they are anything more is either to be unaware of one’s own privilege (not uncommon), to be unaware of France’s very long and racist history with the Other, or to be unaware of the sort of work that Charlie Hebdo publishes. Please stop reminding me of why philosophy has a white male privilege problem, because that’s what these comments sound like.
A change in tactics since my real point is that these cartoonists were racist seems to be lost. So would you then say that Rush was a crusader for free speech? Would he some how be doing noble work perpetuating racist stereotypes? I am for an open society too, but let’s not pretend people are who they are not even if they were murdered.
Actually, your original point was that the murderers were not “in power.” And THEN that some of them (or, at least, you should have said some of them since Muslims are some times white) are racial minorities, and that criticism of them was really criticism of a race, apparently Arabs (and many Arabs are of course not Muslims).
And a flip through the cartoons shows nothing racist. Just goofy looking cartoons of people of a number of races. That’s sort of what cartoon satire does.
I’m not aware of Limbaugh crusading for free speech. I don’t really keep up with him though. The people are Charlie Hebdo obviously did, and they paid for it with their lives. We should honor them not try to use them as pawns in goofy fake academic activism.
Darius, I take it that courage means saying something that is unpopular in that one might be harmed in doing so. Generally this means speaking to a legitimate authority who has the power to harm the speaker. A gun alone does not give one authority (even if Mao says it does). Also, I assume that courage is something noble. Perpetuating orientalist images of Muslims is not courageous. I notice no one is taking up my earlier analogy about black stereotypes. I don’t know why since this would be a fair French equivalent. Being a racist is not courageous even if one’s racism does come with the threat of violence, which, obviously, it should not.
Sin Nombre writes:
“My point is that these cartoons are not brave.”
I’d say a sufficient condition for an action to be brave is that you carry on doing it even after your office has been firebombed for your doing it, and even though you know that doing it is placing your life at risk.
As for Rush Limbaugh: if saying the (by and large disgraceful) things he says was leading to credible threats against his life, then yes: if he carried on saying them regardless, I think I would call him a crusader for free speech.
What possible definition of “power,” political or otherwise, could you have which has the corollary that being murdered can be proof of said power? If you mean by “power” some little agency like the power to organize a few boyhood friends from the 19th, buy a gun, and shoot people, then you are correct. However, this is a trivial kind of power. In common usage, “speaking to power” is what one does when one speaks critically of a dominating, political power. If this is how Sin Nombre is using the phrase (which would make sense), then your claim is as false as it is obfuscatory.
I don’t think your abstraction holds, David. Let’s say someone plots to assassinate a police office, which could mean they will face the death penalty. At the risk of that person’s own life he kills a police officer. Was that person brave? The courage of speaking to power also involves systemic racism. In that case, Charlie Hebdo benefited from systemic racism. They are part of the white male power structure of France and Rush Limbaugh is part of the white male power structure of the United States. While Charlie Hebdo faced death threats and that made their work dangerous, it does not follow that all dangerous work that risks one’s own life is brave. While I (uncomfortably) think hate speech should be allowed, I wouldn’t call anyone who perpetuates it a crusader for free speech since this obscures the traditional fight for free speech, which was born as a form of human liberation. Hate speech is a form of human subjugation.
So many problems in your comment, Here is a name. First, my original point is that they were racist and not speaking to power as they insulted Muslims. I still stick to this and still think you are equivocating on this concept since you ignore the importance of systemic racism. Second, racism is not just about skin color (or racial identification). It is a wide net about oppressed minorities who have various othering features. Third, those goofy pictures are only funny because of specific and historical orientlist images we have inherited. I strongly suggest you read Edward Said’s book on Orientalism if you are not seeing what makes those cartoons racist (also you obviously haven’t seen the one that reads: “Le Pape a Paris: Les Francais Aussi Cons Que Les Negres.” I’m going to guess that you are not familiar with the literature on racist jokes and racist cartoons. This isn’t fake academic activism and they deserve no more honor than any other person who is murdered.
Assume that the cartoonists and the cartoons were in fact racist. What follows from that that is relevant in the immediate discussion of this act of political violence? I’m seriously asking, though I do admit to being dubious that there’s a reasonable case for such a fact being relevant to any discussion that would be in good taste this week.
Further, it’s not obvious to me that it is all things considered wrong to make martyrs of the cartoonists even if their work was racially insensitive. (Why ‘racially’? Islam is not a race. Not just mincing here. There are crucial differences between racism and religious bigotry.) No actual martyr is perfect, and the lionization of martyrs can obviously serve a powerful and legitimate role in the political struggle against the evil that killed them.
Samir Chopra (Brooklyn College), at his blog: Kill All The Cartoonists; God Will Sort Them Out.
To William Lewis: in my usage, at least, “speaking to power” is what one does when one speaks critically of a group which credibly threatens harm to those who so speak.
If I am threatened with harm for a speech act, if carrying out that speech act causes my office to be firebombed and my life to be threatened, if I keep doing it despite the threats, and if I am then murdered, I have spoken to power and died for it, and it’s secondary at best whether that power was wielded by government authorities, criminal gangs, or terror groups.
More generally (and to sin nombre in particular)-
Whether some speech act (be it racist, or misoygnist, or blasphemous, or whatever) is a defence of free speech is *crucially* dependent on whether it’s being made against a background of threats and coercions against that act. The reason Rush Limbaugh is *not* a crusader for free speech has nothing to do with the content of his speech and everything to do with the fact that he speaks in complete safety. Charlie Hebdo’s speech acts occurred against a background of (all-too) credible threats to their lives; they were perfectly aware of this; their editor was completely explicit that they carried on with what they were doing in significant part *because* of the principle of free speech. This is close to a textbook case. To respond to their slaughter by foregrounding the content of their speech is to offer a defence of free speech so half-hearted as to border on lip service.
sin nombre writes, “Third, those goofy pictures are only funny because of specific and historical orientlist images we have inherited.”
False. It seems to me that I found this image (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4d/Charliehebdo.jpg/220px-Charliehebdo.jpg) to be funny, not because of any “specific and historical orientlist [sic]” connotations that it may have inherited, since I’m not too familiar with such connotations, but because I took it to be lampooning a ridiculous system of rules (Sharia) and advocates of it.
Justin E.H. Smith — http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2015/01/finding-something-to-say-about-charlie-hebdo.html
I apologize for so many comment posts. I will try to keep my responses to a minimum.
To swift: what follows from CH being racist is that we not honor the work of racists. If they are martyrs, then people retweet their covers and perpetuate racialized images of Muslims. I say race even though Islam is a religion because we in the West have a particular racialized image of a Muslim (dark skin, turban, beard, big nose, etc.). There’s more to this but I think it is important to recognize that the Muslims who face Islamophobia in France are in many ways discriminated like blacks and Latinos are in the US. So my concern is that we honor Charlie Hebdo and make racist speech more politically acceptable. I don’t care if this is distasteful, and quite frankly given the circumstances that is a funny argument to make. I think this is a helpful way to think about why we need to be realistic about what Charlie Hebdo publishes: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2015/01/in-the-wake-of-charlie-hebdo-free-speech-does-not-mean-freedom-from-criticism/
To David Wallace. Your strip a very important factor from “speaking to power”: the systemic racism as the heart of most power relations. It does matter where one derives their power as I think is evident from our reaction. In fact, compare two types of reactions. The murder of twelve people in Paris has filled the streets with peaceful protesters (and some horrible people attacking Mosques); the bombing of the NAACP, which almost received no press coverage though it happened the same day. Both are obviously horrible acts, but because Charlie Hebdo is speaking from power, because they are part of a white supremicist power structure and because we are all riled up against Muslim terrorists, that is where our focus lies. The reason this is not a text book case is because CH is the victim of those who are disadvantaged in society, not those with power. It makes their deaths no less awful, but it does not make their work courageous.
To Sacco. That is actually a textbook case of exaggerated orientalist features. I have a hard time believing you were never exposed to orientalist images and many of our orientalist beliefs (as racist beliefs in general) are more or less subconscious. This particular image makes the prophet (?) wearing a turban, long nose, dark skin, and beard are all to make him monstrous and other. Notice the lack of racially exaggerated features on pope Benedict:
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I found Ross Douthat’s article in the NYTimes very helpful (http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/). I think it contains a persuasive response to the worries expressed by Sin Nombre, especially in the following passage:
in a cultural and political vacuum, it would be okay to think that some of the images (anti-Islamic and otherwise) that Charlie Hebdo regularly published, especially those chosen entirely for their shock value, contributed little enough to public discussion that the world would not suffer from their absence.
But we are not in a vacuum. We are in a situation where my third point applies, because the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on everyone offending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer a society where offense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
No, my problem is not with blasphemy nor with the importance of saying unpopular views. My problem is that we are pretending that the provocations of Charlie Hebdo that were targeted at Muslims were anything other Islamophobic. Were the KKK to print a news letter that had wide circulation (and keep in mind almost every state in the US has an active chapter of the KKK) and they were threatened and killed for publishing racist cartoons of Obama with say watermelons, it would still be a horrible event but I would hope my colleagues would not pretend that the KKK’s magazine was something to defend and that their cartoons perpetuating racist images were something to reproduce in the name of standing against the intolerant. Both parties here are intolerant and the three men who committed this crime are unacceptably intolerant, but let’s not pretend racialized images (I do not care about the blasphemy as I am an atheist) aren’t racialized images made by the dominant white group.
Since you’re willing to go as far as to claim that I’m either mistaken about my own beliefs or being disingenuous in reporting them, I’m sure my replies will continue to fall on deaf ears. Nevertheless, let me assure you, on pain of coming off as a seriously ignorant person, that I really didn’t, at least until now, have a concept of an oriental as “wearing a turban, long nose, dark skin, and beard.” Again, on pain of coming off as an even more seriously ignorant person, I used to only associate ‘oriental’ with, I don’t know, China in the 1800s. So, I know you’re having a hard time believing that I never had the former concept, and so you’re having a hard time accepting my explanation about why the image is funny, but believe it. I found the image to be funny for the reasons I cited above. I’m only bothering to go on about this rather incidental point about what’s funny about the images because I think our exchange is evidence of just how far you’re willing to go to maintain your view of this topic.
So, sin nombre is pretty clearly correct about the notion of “speaking to power” only applying to speech aimed at dominant political power. Of course, this is also why the notion is morally neutral and has no interesting implications. The Nazis, prior to their ascent to power, were speaking to power. They then ceased to speak to power as soon as they attained power. Same with communists, fascists, etc. Likewise, radical Islamicists are speaking to power when they call the West decadent and morally depraved (as long as they do so within the borders of a Western country). If, however, they came to power in these Western countries and imposed Sharia law, they would then cease to speak to power. The notion of “speaking to power” is largely a form of non sequitur that allows one to avoid talking about the ideological content of the speech in question, which is what is truly morally relevant.
Charlie Hebdo was pretty clearly racist. How this is relevant to anything is beyond me. There is no need to glorify them. The entire focus on freedom of expression appears to be a gigantic red herring. No one was suggesting that we legitimately curtail freedom of expression in the first place. This was an act of extremists operating outside the law. It’s as if someone robbed a bank and everyone decided that this was a good opportunity to justify property rights.
The only real thing that we should be discussing is the nature of radical Islam, and how best to deal with it. The term “Islamaphobia” appears to be used as some form of ad hominem used against anyone who would suggest that radical Islam is not just a fluke phenomenon that is solely the result of Western Imperialism. No doubt Western imperialism played a significant role in the current levels of radical Islam, but it is not the sole cause. One simply cannot ignore the core texts of Islam and the history of the religion. People who self-identify as Muslims can believe almost anything. This, too, is a red herring. The radical ideology has a clear basis in the core texts of the religion. Those who suggest that mere cultural sensitivity will resolve the problem have not, to my knowledge, provided any significant evidence to back this claim aside from calling everyone who disagrees with them an Islamophobe. It may simply be that countries with significant Muslim populations we will have to live with a significant level terrorism due to Islamic extremism no matter how culturally sensitive they become.
Can you honestly think of no relevant disanologies between the Klan and Charlie Hebdo? Can you honestly think of no explanation other than racism for why this story received more coverage than the Colorado bombing? I’m sensitive to the possibility that lionizing CH could cause unwarranted harm to oppressed and innocent people. If you make the case that it would, I’d try to be open to accepting it. But such clear false analogies make that a lot more difficult.
I am baffled by Sacco’s comments. I don’t know what to say other than one need not be aware of the racists beliefs they have inherited to in fact have them. Oriental means eastern and since the Middle East is east of the West we generally lump in those inhabitants of the Middle East (who come from many different ethnic groups) into one big group, usually Arab. There are a lot of cultural images we have of Arabs that are pretty much what I described.
To Grad Student, I mostly agree. Charlie Hebdo’s racism is relevant only in that we must not pretend that that publication does not exist within a larger context of Islamophobia . So this is relevant because of the red herring of freedom of expression, which makes these cartoons look honorable rather than racist. Islamophobia is a serious problem, especially in Europe. Read recent reports about how Muslims are being treated in Western European countries. A majority of Germans think Islam is a threat. Look up PEGIDA if you don’t believe me.
Swift, of course there are differences and important ones. I just think too many people are pointing to the religious aspect, which we have a long history in the west of challenging rather than the fact that these are basically racist cartoons. I’m regretful for using such an absurd example. I honestly don’t think there is any better reason than racism as to why the NAACP bombing received so little press. In the one case, white people were victims to what appear to be Islamic radicals (that plays nicely into our fears of Muslim terrorists); in the second, black people had their lives threatened by an unknown bomber (but we so rarely think of terrorists as being white). A bombing in the US should be a huge deal. Why isn’t it? I won’t say racism is the only reason, but I think our unacknowledged racist beliefs. Lionizing CH is harmful because it perpetuates these awful images of Muslims and because it plays into the clash of civilizations narrative (that Grad Student seems to be arguing).
The majority of people involved do not need to be violent monsters in order for there to be a clash of cultures or values. If a Muslim population ends up producing enough radicals, then that population will not be able to live peacefully with the broader Western society in which it is embedded, no matter how peaceful or well-intentioned the majority of the members of the population might be. People generally aren’t willing to live under a perpetual threat of violence *when they have the power to do something about it*. The question is whether the current radicalism is due to fluke historical contingencies that can be corrected, or whether Islam itself inherently offers the ideological basis necessary to produce a steady stream of radicals. There is a clear basis for the radical authoritarian ascetic ideology in the central texts of Islam, so the latter seems like a distinct possibility. Alternatively, it may well be the case the radicalism is solely due the fact that Western countries oppress their Muslim populations in various ways.
On a side note, I just don’t see how anyone could deny the effect of racism/implicit bias in the way Western media portrays Muslims. It’s so obvious.
I can’t start to fathom the disanalogies between the KKK and Charlie Hebdo…
Here, you can start counting the overwhelming number of anti-racist, anti-fascism, pro-immigrants cartoons found in the magazine these last years. http://stripsjournal.canalblog.com/tag/x%C3%A9nophobie
Many supporters are reasonably arguing that, if “islamophobic” (assuming they were), the cartoons are not racist. They’re also part of a variegate myriad of grotesque representations of anything the cartoonists thought both worth discussing and laughing at in France (and abroad). You can find there at least as many stereotypes as there are kinds of people pictures. And there’s a hell of a lot of such kinds. Good luck singling out stereotypes supporting your story against every other possible alternative.
Again, no one is denying that France is plagued by implicit and explicit racism, and a structural inequality between religions and ethnic origins resulting colononialism. On the least charitable interpretation, i.e. assuming a few cartoons were truly racist in your sense, they’re at worst of symptom of this problem, not a cause. And perhaps more accurately a (healthy) reflection of France’s problem, not a convenient scapegoat.
This was a reply to sin nombre. Also, apologies for typos.
§2 – “pictureD” not “pictureS”
§3 – “resulting FROM colonialism”
Nick, just because Charlie Hebdo makes fun of everyone doesn’t mean they don’t contribute to Islamophobia in France and perpetuate it. I already used this example above, but let’s say a newspaper publishes a cartoon lampooning Bush, and that same paper publishes a racialized cartoon of Obama (and they do a lot of them, as CH did a lot of cartoons about Muslims). Well, I have a hard time seeing how that paper isn’t racist. I don’t know what distinction you are making between Islamophobia and racism since, especially in France, Islamophobia is often part of a hatred towards racialized people. I guess I don’t see a difference that makes a difference here (especially since I think both are equally morally reprehensible). I am not saying CH is a cause of this Islamophobia, but they are working within a white supremacist system to perpetuate negative stereotypes about Muslims in France. Even though CH poked fun at others, this does not make them not-racists, since Muslims are an oppressed minority in France. If you don’t know what’s going on there, here’s a good place to start: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/10/02/are-muslims-permanent-foreigners-in-france/
So I am not sure how showing that there are other people being lampooned is important. X lampoons oppressed minority and their beliefs, perpetuating stereotypes in a racist country. Is X a racist? What does it matter that X also lampoons others, even those in power? How does that make the first act not racist? What am I missing? I feel like your argument is basically the equivalent of saying, sure I make racist jokes but I make jokes that also offend wealthy white people. Well, making racist jokes sort of makes you a racist.
To state that systemic racism is at the heart of most power relations goes against current anthropological understanding. The ability to kill conspecifics from a distance with projectile weapons distinguishes homo sapiens from all other species in the animal kingdom. Hominds acquired this ability approximately two million years ago; anthropologists believe that this unique ability played and continues to play a crucial role in human evolutionary development, including the development of cooperative behavior and language. Human political organization and social control tracks the development of projectile weapons. I would consider the ability to kill conspecifics at a distance with projectile weapons a defining characteristic of the human. One cannot discount the all-too-human power-equalizing use of assault weapons in the case of Charlie Hebdo, which continued to publish despite continued threats. Their putative “white supremacist” power did not protect them.
Now we are going to pretend there’s no such thing as white supremacy. Alright, I’m done. Thank you colleagues for reminding me why there aren’t more minorities in philosophy.
Grad Student writes:
It’s as if someone robbed a bank and everyone decided that this was a good opportunity to justify property rights.
If some organisation was threatening banks with mass slaughter if they continued to operate, and then repeatedly acted on that threat, then yes, I think the immediate aftermath of one such slaughter would be quite a good time to defend the rights of banks to operate.
On the other hand, the immediate aftermath of a mass murder of bank staff strikes me as quite a *bad* time to discuss the problems with that bank’s loan policy.
One doesn’t have to pretend there is no such thing as white supremacy. What one has to do is define what one means by power, who has it, and why.
Defend the rights of banks to whom? The radical organization that doesn’t believe in property rights? Or to the majority of people who already believe in property rights and have expressed no wish to change these rights? In the first case, your arguments are likely to be ineffective. (To complete the analogy, the people who target the banks would have to do this in part because of beliefs in supernatural phenomena that are recalcitrant to any sort of reasoned argument or empirical evidence.) In the latter case, your defense would amount to an empty platitude. This is why I don’t think the discussion about the freedom of expression makes sense.
(Well, aside from the point about the rather severe tension between the affirmation of freedom of expression and France’s decision to ban burkas. That’s pretty ridiculous.)
There is something I am missing in your position. Is the musical The Book of Mormon racist because it lampoons an oppressed minority in the US? If not would it be racist if, say, Mormons were predominately black? I think the gap between personal animus towards a religion and towards a race is pretty huge. Religions are (in part) ideologies that people choose and which may be morally pernicious. Race is neither voluntary nor morally evaluable. So prejudice against a religion could conceivably be justifiable in a way that racial prejudice never could.
OK, I’m wrapping this up too because I feel we’re bumping against a wall with you, sin nombre.
As a native French citizen who has spent most of his life there until very recently, and one whose French is the native language, I am — at least prima facie — in a decent position to assess “what’s going on there,” unlike too many uninformed commenters (I’m not saying you are). But a caveat: I’m a fortunate, albeit not proud, privileged white (atheistic) male.
– Maybe I’m biased, but it seems to me that making fun of everyone in equally irreverent ways dramatically undermines the charge of racism
– Islamophobia is an actual social fact, and when it’s a fear of muslims rather than fanaticism, it’s something we should fight against. But it’s also very often a red herring waved by simplifying minds to avoid debating the merits of a religion, or at least of the governance of its most harmful followers. Unless YOU think we should racialize muslims, islamophobia may well be completely disconnected from racism.
– In the specific case of Charlie Hebdo, arguable instances of islamophobia can more charitably be interpreted as (i) directed against a creed they otherwise would be happy to ignore because (ii) it comes in increasingly radicalized forms among the youth, hence (iii) more accurately targetting fanatics and terrorists rather than believers and any race whatsoever. Now on this interpretation — and that’s actually the correct one if you take the full context into account —, stereotypes in the supposedly islamophobic/racist caricatures are more readily seen as stereotypes of their targets, namely, the crazies, the fanatics, those precisely who believe it’s their duty to kill cartoonists for their offense. Recall the caricatures first were a response to the Denmark case, then to the terrible movie on the life of Mohamed, finally to the very threats they were receiving accordinlgy. Now, it seems to me that most — I agree not all — modern islamists (not muslims) pretty much nicely fit the stereotypes. A caricature has to be recognized or else this defeats its whole purpose. Unless you can show me that offensing terrorists is (i) racist, (ii) an unwarranted use of one’s dominant position, (iii) a contributor to France’s real problem with racism, I remain unconvinced.
(I’m sure I left typos but heck it’s getting late)
Stephen Law (Heythrop College, University of London) — “What’s the point of lampooning religion? To upset the religious?”
I won’t respond to Christian because I think that given his remarks there is no possibility of having a common ground (and if you truly hold that view I suggest that at the next APA meeting you go to the African American philosophy talks and tell them that white supremacy does not trump some teenagers with guns).
Swift, I think this is a complicated case. On the one hand, Mormons are an oppressed minority in this country and did have to flee. I think, though, that maybe I am not making myself clear on what my problem is. I don’t care about the cartoons because of their blasphemous nature (though it does seem cruel and mean spirited given the power structures in France). My problem is that the cartoons are racist. In the case of Muslims, because most people’s conception of a Muslim is some dark skinned person from the middle east in a turban, a big nose, beard, etc. Muslims are generally racialized. There is fantastic work on this particularly on the confusion between Sikhs and Muslims, etc. being done. In the case of Muslims, then, I do not think the gap between race and religion is so big (and in fact it is equivalent to being anti-Semitic where Jews are still discriminated against even if they are atheist Jews or non-practicing Jews). I think this is an important part of European Islamophobia in general, that it’s not just lampooning religious ideas, but more like attacking an oppressed group who we can Other in many of the same ways oppressed groups have continually been othered.
Nick, thank you for your insight but I think all your points are very problematic or outright false. You say, “Maybe I’m biased, but it seems to me that making fun of everyone in equally irreverent ways dramatically undermines the charge of racism.” This is certainly testable. Try it with some colleague who is a woman or a minority. Tell sexist or racist jokes around them and then just excuse yourself because you tell jokes about all people. In seriousness, this point is false because the different positions of power say the French president has versus the position of power most Muslims have in France. Making fun of the president or the pope is challenging those in power, making fun of oppressed minorities is being a bully and abusing your power. There is more to this, as I will get to later.
You then write, “Unless YOU think we should racialize muslims, islamophobia may well be completely disconnected from racism.” I do not think we should racialize Muslims, I think Muslims are already racialized in our image of them as Westerners. My problem with this entire debate about religion is that too many people are looking at this in the abstract as if we don’t already have racialized images of people based on their religion. As if religion was something that didn’t already come with it’s own stereotypes. So Islamophobia is a racial problem (again, similar structure as anti-Semitism).
As far as your defense of Charlie Hebdo, let’s say your interpretation is the right one. I’m in no position to judge, I suppose. I think this argument is premised on a bad understanding of racism. Your whole defense is about offense. I don’t care about offense. Perhaps I have not been very clear about this, but it’s not that the cartoons offend anyone that matters to me. Maybe it matters to the three troubled youth who did this horrible crime. The cartoons are racist because they perpetuate negative stereotypes of Muslims and they do so in a country that is rather Islamophobic. The harm comes because its readers will consume these negative stereotypes and depictions and it will be part of the way they think about Muslims. This is my whole point about my earlier comparisons with racist comics about blacks in the US. What’s dangerous about racism is that people who may not be racist will start to believe the racist stereotypes. An analogy. Here in the US we have a problem with stereotypical depictions of young African American men. People believe they are more dangerous and often less innocent than young white men (http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-older.aspx). What happens as a result? Well, African American men are far more likely to be shot by the police and are far more likely to serve longer jail sentences for the same crime than young white men. Negative stereotypes harm anyone who posses those ethnic markers and since there are particular ethnic markers for Muslims negative stereotypes likely harm Muslims in France.
Now to your challenge. “Unless you can show me that offensing terrorists is (i) racist, (ii) an unwarranted use of one’s dominant position, (iii) a contributor to France’s real problem with racism, I remain unconvinced.” It quite frankly does not make much sense in light of what I said above (I hope). My point isn’t that Charlie Hebdo does something blasphemous but that in doing so it perpetuates racist stereotypes about Muslims that do not only harm terrorist but law-abiding Muslims who just want to live their life. Now, making racist cartoons is an unwarranted use of one’s dominant position (I don’t know why this would need to be proven). I think that perpetuating negative stereotypes about Muslims contributes to France’s problem in the same way anti-Semitic rags contributed to France’s anti-Semitic problem. The similarities between the two problems are striking to me.
If you still remain unconvinced, I strongly suggest you talk to someone who is Muslim not about blasphemy or religions, but about the stereotypes that person faces. Since you gave some insight about yourself, here’s some about me. I live in perhaps the must Muslim neighborhood in Brooklyn and am married to a Pakistani national. I see firsthand the religious intolerance Muslims face and the stereotypes about them. When I have worn a beard, I have been mistaken for Muslim. Religions are not separable from cultures, even large religions like Islam. Often Islam is viewed as a monolith religion or viewed as synonymous with Arab. Often it is thought of as a backward religions (as if sexism, racism, and violence somehow aren’t all in other religious texts). That means people think of Muslims as backwards, a stereotype that isn’t helped given current world economic divisions of rich and poor. When I see French Islamophobia I see wealthy powerful westerners looking down at people they think are poor, 3rd world, and backward. I see what Fanon describes as depictions of blacks by whites. You’d be surprised the sorts of questions people who are Muslim or minorities in general (as I am) get asked by ignorant people who have bought into stereotypes: did you have plumbing in your country, how do you speak English so well (not knowing that your country was very recently a former British colony), etc. This is what is harmful about racism. This is not satire to take down powerful people of influence, this is hate speech that furthers horrible images of people from other parts of the world and other religions.
“Maybe I’m biased, but it seems to me that making fun of everyone in equally irreverent ways dramatically undermines the charge of racism.”
I’m surprised that you think this, not least because Sin Nombre’s reply at #38 seemed perfectly clear to me. If a magazine ridicules Obama by drawing him as a monkey, that’s obviously racist–and what’s equally obvious is that nothing that appears elsewhere in the magazine can change that. Do people really think that mocking other groups as well somehow makes that okay? I am sympathetic to Sin Nombre’s arguments throughout this thread, and am pretty disappointed by most of the responses that he or she has received.
Serene Khader:
http://www.secondshiftblog.com/2015/01/wont-see-posting-je-suis-charlie/
Kenan Malik: je suis charlie? it’s a bit late https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/je-suis-charlie-its-a-bit-late/
excerpts:
Yet, hardly had news begun filtering out about the Charlie Hebdo shootings, than there were those suggesting that the magazine was a ‘racist institution’ and that the cartoonists, if not deserving what they got, had nevertheless brought it on themselves through their incessant attacks on Islam. What is really racist is the idea 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.
What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities. There are hudreds of thousands, within Muslim communities in the West, and within Muslim-majority countries across the world, challenging religious-based reactionary ideas and policies and institutions; writers, cartoonists, political activists, daily putting their lives on the line in facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for democratic freedoms; people like Pakistani cartoonist Sabir Nazar, the Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen, exiled to India after death threats, or the Iranian blogger Soheil Arabi, sentenced to death last year for ‘insulting the Prophet’. What happened in the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris was viscerally shocking; but in the non-Western world, those who stand up for their rights face such threats every day.
Returning to the original request for relevant writings: here’s the one I found most disturbing, not by a philosopher or a theorist but by the editor of the Independent newspaper, interviewed in the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/08/charlie-hebdo-muhammad-cartoons-independent-amol-rajan .
excerpts:
The editor of the Independent has said “every instinct” told him to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons caricaturing the prophet Muhammad but described it as “too much of a risk”…
[The editor, Amol Rajan,] was “very uncomfortable” with his decision not to reprint Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, which he described as “self-censorship”. Rajan said he had a duty to his staff and had to “balance principle with pragmatism”. “Every instinct that you have as an editor is to publish and be damned. You don’t like the idea of self-censorship, you don’t like the idea that you grant a victory to these religious fanatics by not publishing something that instinctively you would like to,” Rajan told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Thursday.
“But the fact is as an editor you have got to balance principle with pragmatism, and I felt yesterday evening a few different conflicting principles: I felt a duty to readers; a duty to the dead; I felt a duty to journalism – and I also felt a duty to my staff.[“]
You can’t keep saying X is racist without putting X in context. Again, caricatures of Mahomet and muslims were mostly if not exclusively targetting fanatics. Now these guys tend to picture themselves (e.g. progaganda videos) under this very guise: that which you keep insisting is merely an orientalist stereotype. If caricatures were in the first place targetting fanatics, not muslims, and if the caricatures in fact resemble the fanatics (if only through the proxy of the Prophet), then this can’t possibly be a genuine form of racism. As for your analogy with racist jokes against Obama , as far as I know, that’s again strongly disanaloguous: here we’re focusing on religion, we’re not picturing muslims as monkeys, and most importantly, any human being was likely to be depicted with disgracious animal-like features by the cartoonists. And for what it’s worth, comedy shows consistently make fun of everybody, with sometimes racist-like jokes. Not all of them are funny for sure, but a crazy mix of jokes agaisnt jews, muslims, catholics, blacks, Asians, French, Americans, you name it, before an audience made up of equally diverse people, in a comedy context, strikes me as benign.
Now, will you please give a sense to mourning and stop telling people what they should read or do. I have talked and sometimes laughed about stereotypes with victims of such stereotypes — Arabs, blacks, Indians, Chinese, jews, gays, lesbians, … I know what they mean, how harmful they can be, but also when they’re harmless in context. But none of this should actually matter since, again, caricatures never targetted muslims/arabs but stupid, crazy, evil fanatics. The very fact that arabs worked at Charlie Hebdo (and one policeman, Ahmed, and one proofreader, Mustapha, were killed by the terrorists) and that the magazine advocated for the right to vote for foreigners, and against the Front National, Sarkozy, neocons and racists at the UMP, European neo-fascism, Gaza blockade, among others, clearly adds up to a relevant context you keep failing to take into account.
I think we’re done, now. At least I am. More people are being killed in my country right now.
Fredrik deBoer (Purdue), “On Debating Dead Moral Questions”.