Posts Tagged ‘Charlie Hebdo’
Free Speech – Charlie Hebdo: leftwing ‘anti-racism’ joins hands with rightwing anti-Muslim bigotry
Kenan Malik is writing on Charlie Hebdo and free speech:
The irony is that those who most suffer from a culture of censorship are minority communities themselves. Any kind of social change or social progress necessarily means offending some deeply held sensibilities. ‘You can’t say that!’ is all too often the response of those in power to having their power challenged. To accept that certain things cannot be said is to accept that certain forms of power cannot be challenged. The right to ‘subject each others’ fundamental beliefs to criticism’ is the bedrock of an open, diverse society. Once we give up such a right in the name of ‘tolerance’ or ‘respect’, we constrain our ability to confront those in power, and therefore to challenge injustice.
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.
What nurtures the reactionaries, both within Muslim communities and outside it, is the pusillanimity of many so-called liberals, their unwillingness to stand up for basic liberal principles, their readiness to betray the progressives within minority communities.
Barnaby Raine responds:
No. You don’t have to be a theocrat to worry about a magazine that caricatures and denigrates Muslims and their religious symbolism in a period when that othering is a prominent mechanism by which imperial violence is justified, you just have to be vaguely progressive. Some Muslims may not mind the cartoons. I do mind, not as a “nice white liberal” desperate to appease some alien community, but as a left-winger who opposes the politics implicit in and fuelled by mocking the marginalised.
On a more general note, the above article seems to mirror the French left’s racially charged language of secularism in drawing political dividing lines at an ideal rather than a material level. To be on the left is not a purely ideal position based on identifying the ‘best ideas’ and siding with them, it is above all a material position, it entails siding with the oppressed in any given power relation. The right takes the other side. Marching alongside the representatives of a state that bans Muslim women from dressing as they choose, bans pro-Palestine demonstrations and has banned Muslims from protesting against Charlie Hebdo in the past, and mobilising the idea of “free speech” in the defence of that state and in the defence of a magazine that mocks Muslims while the ‘War on Terror’ stigmatises them should all be considered fairly simply right-wing. This article even berates Charlie Hebdo for firing a cartoonist responsible for anti-Semitic caricatures. That is either naive in imagining that speech-acts occur in a vacuum rather than potentially involving material consequences, or it is reactionary for being aware of those consequences — steps towards the legitimisation of anti-Semitism, in that case — and not caring. Similar CH cartoons about Muslims have been much more common and have not resulted in firings, unsurprisingly given the surrounding political context. So express outrage at the murder of 12 journalists, of course. But is it really necessary to paint them as progressive heroes, when their social function was anything but that?We’d add one thing: Free speech not buts..
Face of the day: Julien paints a portrait of the French cartoonist Jean Cabut
Face of the Day:
The artist Julien paints a portrait of the French cartoonist Jean Cabut, also known as Cabu, as a tribute to him, in Marseille, southern France, Friday Jan. 9, 2015. Masked gunmen stormed the offices of a satirical newspaper Charlie-Hebdo Wednesday, and killed 12 people: eight journalists, including Cabu, two police officers, a maintenance worker and a visitor were killed in the attack. (AP Photo/Claude Paris)
Next week’s Charlie Hebdo cover: ‘Urgent – hiring 6 new journalists’
Next week’s Charlie Hebdo cover: “Urgent: hiring 6 new cartoonists”:
I was hoping for something more offensive. But if this is the cover, it’s well done.. But most likely it’s a very good fake.
Update: That Charlie Hebdo cover is a fake…a brilliant fake. It’s a tribute by French TV show Les Guignois.
Je Suis Charlie Hebdo: but Obama, Clinton and all the free speech loving cowards don’t want to be him
“Je Suis Charlkie Hebdo”. Everyone’s saying it. Free speech rules! The British politians who want to regulate journalists; the Twitter narks; the police; and the newly Enlightened all just love Charlie Hebdo and that free speech.
This Buzzfeed writer’s catharsis is not untypical of the collective epiphany.
When in 2011 the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed following the trailing of a special edition mocked up to look like it was guest-edited by Muhammad (editor Stéphane Charbonnier had to live under police protection) Time magazine’s Paris Bureau Chief didn’t side with free speech. He went with this:
Okay, so can we finally stop with the idiotic, divisive, and destructive efforts by “majority sections” of Western nations to bait Muslim members with petulant, futile demonstrations that “they” aren’t going to tell “us” what can and can’t be done in free societies? Because not only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?
The difficulty in answering that question is also what’s making it hard to have much sympathy for the French satirical newspaper firebombed this morning, after it published another stupid and totally unnecessary edition mocking Islam. The Wednesday morning arson attack destroyed the Paris editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo after the paper published an issue certain to enrage hard-core Islamists (and offend average Muslims) with articles and “funny” cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammed—depictions forbidden in Islam to boot…. do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of “because we can” was so worthwhile? If so, good luck with those charcoal drawings your pages will now be featuring.
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Posted: 9th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
Germany’s Titanic shows craven US media: ‘We are Charlie Hebdo’
Lovers of free speech love Charlie Hebdo. But do any of us want to be Charlie Hebdo? The US media is gutless.
Only the big nosed Jew stays in the picture:
But in Germany, it’s different.
The German satirical magazine Titanic has announced a press conference:
TERRORIST ALERT: At 16 o’clock, a press conference is scheduled in the TITANIC editorial offices, with [commercial TV station] RTL, [public broadcaster] Hessischer Rundfunk, [German daily newspaper] Frankfurter Rundschau, and all other private and public media present. This is an opportunity for terrorists to not only execute satire editors, but also the entire lying German press. There will be sandwiches afterwards!
Titanic editor Tim Wolff adds:
“Of course, on the personal level, we are scared when we hear about such violence. However, as a satirist, we are beholden to the principle that every human being has the right to be parodied. This should not stop just because of some idiots who go around shooting… If it is indeed Islamists, I still don’t see any reason for alarm. We have published very critical jokes about Islam in the past and we have found that Muslims, at least in Germany, are quite capable of dealing with this kind of humor.”
Good work.
Charlie Hebdo Massacre: The Jews did it
People gather to pay their respects to the shooting victims of Mohamed Merah in Toulouse, France, Friday March 23, 2012. France’s prime minister fended off suggestions Friday that anti-terrorism authorities fell down on the job in monitoring a radical Islamist who gunned down Jewish children, paratroopers and a rabbi in a wave of killings that revolted the country.
Yesterday, men screaming ‘“Allahu akbar” murdered 12 people in Paris when they attacked the Charlie Hendo magazine offices. Like you, we know who did it. Yeah. The Jews. Always the Jews.
Writing on the grandly titled International Business Times, Gopi Chandra Kharel explains all:
Charlie Hebdo Attack and Mossad Link: Is Israel Venting Its Fury For France’s Recognition of Palestine State?
Headlines ending with a question mark can always be answered ‘no’. But a Jew told me that. So. We should read on…
There is no clarity on which organisation is behind the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on Wednesday and therefore, conspiracy theories are gaining traction in internet forums.
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Posted: 8th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comments (4)
Piss Christ! Associated Press censors library lest it provoke murderous Christianists
Piss Christ! Can we all say that in unison? Piss Christ!
Anyone shoot you in the face? Anyone threaten to murder you? Go on. Say it again. Louder. PISS CHRIST!
The Associated Press thinks nutters and victims of Christianophobia might be listening and driven to murder by hearing or seeing Piss Christ. To spare its clients the death threats and being murdered by Christianists, this bastion of free speech has removed Andres Serrano’s 1987 photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) from its image library.
Piss Christ (no exclamation mark) is a photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in a glass of the artist’s urine. It is not to be mistaken for Christ Piss, which is used to describe the wine served at my niece’s Holy Communion.
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Free speech no buts: Buzzfeed writer says Charlie Hebdo dead are not victims
Now that 12 people are dead the liberals can return to the view that free speech is free with no ‘buts’? The Twitter narks that call the police on anyone saying things they don’t like, police persecuting people for saying the unsayable online and a State-approved license for journalists are all horrific assaults on our free thinking.
Shame it took a massacre in France to remind liberals that freedom to think is also freedom to offend.
Take Buzzfeed’s Siraj Datoo. In 2012, he wrote on Charlie Hebdo and those Mohammed cartoons:
Charlie Hebdo did, and always should, have the right to publish such images. The freedom of the expression is fundamental in a democratic liberal society and each individual must be allowed to express their opinions in a peaceful and democratic way.
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Charlie Hebdo were asking for it: it’s reverse ecumenicism, dummy
Supporters of Pakistan’s Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, or United Action Forum, hold a rally in Islamabad, Pakistan to condemn publication of cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in Denmark and France, after Friday prayers Feb 3, 2006. Pakistan’s parliament passed unanimously a resolution condemning cartoons of Islam’s prophet in European newspapers, and small protests were held in major cities as anger grew in this Islamic nation. (AP Photo/B.K.Bangash)
In 2006, Christopher Hitchens spoke about the Kurt Westergaard, the Danish caricaturist came under attack from Islamists after he had drawn a 2005 caricature of the Prophet Mohamed with a bomb hidden in his Turban. The cartoon was one of 12 similar cartoons on Mohamed published Jyllands-Posten newspapers.
Westergaard was forced into an life on the run. Hardline Muslims wanted him dead.
One day, a 28-year-old man broke into Westergaard’s home. He was armed with an axe and a knife. Westergaard was home looking after his five-year-old granddaughter, Stephanie. Westergaard ran into his “panic room”. Stephanie was outside in the living room.
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Posted: 8th, January 2015 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
Charlie Hebdo massacre: murderous Islamophobia and free speech made us do it
After the massacre at the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, the liberal turns to Islamophobia. It’s not the murderous bigots we should be uniting against, standing on the front line in this horrendous assult on free thinking and free speech. No. It’s about making a stand against Islamophobia.
What good is legal freedom of speech if violent enforcers of a different, older, and foreign set of laws take it upon themselves to punish you extrajudicially?
Richard Seymour writes:
The murder of Charlie Hebdo journalists is appalling. But we should fear the coming Islamophobic backlash.
If your first thought on seeing cartoonists murdered by Islamic racists was to wonder about non-Islamic racism against the racists, you’re not alone.
Now, I think there’s a critical difference between solidarity with the journalists who were attacked, refusing to concede anything to the idea that journalists are somehow “legitimate targets,” and solidarity with what is frankly a racist publication.
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Viva La Liberte: Berlin’s daily newspaper BZ leads with every Charlie Hebdo cartoon
The perfect response to the attack on free speech and Enlightenment. Vive la liberte!
The murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo will not quiet us:
Spotter: @wblau:
Charlie Hebdo: Islamists tap into the West’s war on free speech
Victims Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut (aka Cabu), Charb and Tignous
You crying? You feel the prick of tears? You angry? You should be. You should be furious. The cold-blooded attack on the offices of French magazine Charlie Hebdo claimed 12 lives. You should weep for the lives of the murdered. They were champions of free speech and free thinking. And you should be angry that all we must hold dear is under attack.
The 12 dead are victims of a slaughter by violent, Islamic racists. The magazine’s “controversial” cartoons and editorials – always billed as “controversial” in the mainstream press, as if it were a bad thing – were meant to trigger a battle of ideas. The sane could debate the rights and wrongs. People would talk. No-one would get hurt – not by voices and debate. Charlie Hebdo would be the polemicists, fomenting a new view and changing the dialogue. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to buy it. You can criticise it. You can vote with your feet at the offence and blasphemy. But the Islamists took up guns.
The 12 victims were murdered for taking the piss out of Muhammad, for showing their comic liberty.
Is Islam so weak it cannot counter a French magazine? Is it so fearful it kills all debate, unable to confront ideas with sanity and reason?
And what now? Do we look to ourselves, the free thinking and censor our views so as not to offend the gun-toting nutters? Do we strive to understand the mindset of two men who see a picture and murder a dozen people? Hey, everyone’s a critic, right? Or do we skewer the censorious bastards with wit?
How brave are we in the West?
Not very.
We banned the Jesus and Mohammed T-shirts. Police demand we tell on anyone saying something unsayable on Twitter, turning us into police narks.
You know what. Screw them. Say what you think. Don’t be gratutious. Don’t seek to offend. Just say what you think and believe. Be prepared to debate that view. Be open to ideas and people. If the other person disagrees, then your argument has failed. Don’t pick up a gun and shoot them dead. Don’t put them in prison. Mock them.
Free speech used to be a right in countries where it was allowed. It’s spread. Online, we enjoy speaking out, sharing our views, prejudices, stupidity and relishing our right to cause offence. These Islamists want to smah that. In doing so they have placed us all on the front line in the war on free speech. We must fight them.
Can we?
Not easily.
Our police and protectors we need to uphold freedoms hard won are seeking to licence journalist with a poxy Royal Charter and spy on us with the horrendous RIPA law.
Fight it. Appeasement has its limits.
Charb, one of the caricaturists killed today, said:
“I am not afraid of retaliation. I have no kids, no wife, no car, no credit. It perhaps sounds a bit pompous, but I prefer to die standing than living on my knees.”
Stand up to tyranny.
Posted: 7th, January 2015 | In: Key Posts, Reviews | Comments (5)
Charlie Hebdo Gets Bombed: Usual Suspects Lampooned
SOMEONE has tossed a Molotov cocktail into the offices of Paris-based left-wing satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. That’s the organ edited by the Prophet Muhammed.
Back in 2006, the magazine published the Jyllands-Posten’s (The Jutland Post) 12 cartoons on the “face of Mohammed”. It added a caricature of its own that took up its entire front page. The Union of Islamic Organizations of France sued. In 2007, a Paris court ruled that the cartoons did not defame Muslims and the magazine has shown no intention of insulting the Muslim community with the caricatures. Once again Mohammed is on the cover.
The magazine issued a statement:
“To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia… Charlie Hebdo has asked Muhammad to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue. The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it.”
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Posted: 2nd, November 2011 | In: Reviews | Comment (1)
