When you say Je suis Charlie, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdos depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave? Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power. Its for these reasons that I cant be, dont want to be, Charlie - if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazines right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, It is possible to defend the right to obscene... speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech. And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would provoke an outcry and proudly declared it would in no circumstances... publish Holocaust cartoons? Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life - especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 00:56:58 +0000
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