There was a time when I would gleefully have re-posted the Charlie Hebdo cartoons – or any other pictorial representation of Mohammed – just to irk Islamist militants, just to show them that theyre not the boss of me, just to show them that my free speech rights trump their perceived right not to be offended (which I still wholeheartedly and 100% agree with). But I have come to question the value in that and frankly see it as making me complicit this senseless cycle of violence and retribution. Heres a controversial but, to my mind, entirely defensible proposition: The cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo brought this upon themselves. If you dangle the red cape in front of the bull, do not be surprised if you soon see your innards fall to the dirt. If you stand in front of a speeding train, do not expect the power of well-reasoned arguments to keep it from smearing you down two miles of track. I know that when we talk about the Kouachi brothers or the countless tens or hundreds of thousands of other Islamist militants who would do the same, we are talking about humans and not animals or locomotives. But people who are willing to commit these acts are not to be reasoned with – at least not on the fly. You have just about as much chance of convincing the bull or the train not to do what it would appear destined and determined to do. It should go without saying that I do not believe that those deranged individuals were justified in the mass murder. Further, I am not going to try to school the dead cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo that they should have done anything differently. They knew the risks, and they defied them in defense of a great principle that underpins a free and open society. They were following their own desires, their own paths to righteousness – as much as were the Kouachi brothers when they murdered twelve people in cold blood. But intentionally to stick my finger in the eye of Muslims across the globe just to make a point about free speech ignores that there is an even-more-brutal truth behind their brutal, barbaric acts: The West has for centuries treated the Arab world (for starters) as its own personal plunder box. This anti-western sentiment did not develop in a vacuum. The Kouachi brothers did not hate the French or the Americans for our freedoms as went the false but familiar refrain after September 11, 2001. They may look down on us for our lifestyles, may consider us infidels, may view us as haraam and not fit for the kingdom of god. But they hate us and want to kill us primarily because we have occupied their lands for periods stretching beyond the memories of the oldest among them and continue to do so. As one commenter stated earlier this week, the Kouachi brothers are of the Iraq War generation, a generation that saw the US invade a sovereign country with no provocation and solely on pretense. This generation saw us torture their fellow Arabs and co-religionists. This generation and those before saw us meddle, constantly and consistently, with the goings on in their own lands in order to take their resources or to obtain strategic advantage. And this generation and those before them continue to see the US and Israel acting in concert to oppress and subjugate the Palestinians. These are the acts that radicalized a generation. These are the acts that are giving rise to a new, decentralized, wholly unpredictable warfare, the results of which we have seen this week and in the past few months. Ridicule and humiliation are effective tools when we dealing with opponents who are susceptible to those emotions often-debilitating effects. But I strongly question their value when dealing with people who are convinced – to a sociopathic extent – of their rectitude. There are better ways of engaging those people – not great, not perfect, but better and more effective, including recognizing our own part in the violence that both sides perpetrate against the other. Making fun of other peoples beliefs makes for great comic relief (sometimes) and can reaffirm our own feeling of cultural superiority in a world gone awry, but I would argue that it does not a whit of good in trying to find common ground and peaceful coexistence. Je suis désolé mais je ne suis pas Charlie.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 21:58:08 +0000
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