PAUSED

I apologize for the limited content this week, but out of respect for the awful news that all of us are trying to process from Paris today and the past few days it didn't seem appropriate to run what is a rather lighthearted No Politics Friday.
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A lot of left-wing people around the internet have suggested that their reaction to these events is split among 1. Defense of free expression, 2. Abhorrence of violence, and 3. Finding the cartoons in question something ranging from insensitive to racist.
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I don't consider that an untenable position; if I paint a giant-lipped Obama eating a watermelon and someone murders me, it is possible to believe that I did something offensive but that doesn't give another person the right to shoot me. Personally, though, I don't see the cartoons as racist or offensive so much as they appear puerile and silly. Like most Americans I'd never previously heard of this French magazine, and frankly the art (and the level of humor/satire involved) looks like junior high students drew it. Minus the shock value of depicting something some Muslims find insulting, what is the real value of this?

These journalists strike me as a European sort of Bill Maher/Howard Stern hybrid, getting more mileage out of being provocateurs than anything else. Rather than cheapening their deaths, I think the general silliness and MAD Magazine-esque tone of the publication they worked for makes the idea of anyone being willing to kill them over these cartoons even less comprehensible.

In short, I've decided that I can feel like these guys were a bunch of ass clowns without believing that they deserved to die or that I don't care that they did. I don't think anyone deserves to die a violent death for making jokes, good or bad. Although I waver sometimes on Jeff Dunham.
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40 thoughts on “PAUSED”

  • Agree wholeheartedly. These guy remind me of a nastier version of Matt Parker 'n Trey Stone, the guys behind South Park, with their "but we're EQUAL OPPORTUNITY OFFENDERS with NO SACRED COWS!" shtick, which nine times out of ten means being shitty to minorities from a position of privilege. The fact that shit-buzzards like tedious Falangist Ross Douthat and noted professor of Negrological Sciences and Applied Phrenology Andrew Sullivan are racing to their defense and demanding I join them tell me everything I need to know about Charlie Hebdo.

  • The question when I read things like these, when people say, "ah, but surely we can still agree that their cartoons were childish and provocative", and even more of course when people argue that they were racist, is still this:

    What do we gain from saying that, at this moment?

    Some religious maniacs gunned down cartoonists because they couldn't stand their beliefs being mocked. Even if the cartoons were totally racist and disgusting (and there is surely some disagreement on that matter), is that really what should be the take home at the moment?

    To the best of my understanding, Charlie Hedbo produced cartoons mocking Christianity, mocking Judaism, mocking political parties, mocking celebrities, and so on. But only their cartoons mocking Islam are considered 'provocative' enough to merit frowns and calls to cut it out. Most importantly, only their cartoons mocking Islam made somebody go and commit a cowardly bloodbath.

    Surely the interesting question at the moment would be, what is wrong with people who would commit such an atrocity over a bit of mockery that every other sect or party can take in stride? Or, what is wrong with politicians and journalists who tut-tut every cartoon of Mohammed even while they consider cartoons of Jesus to be par for the course in an open society?

    The observation that the cartoons may have been silly and provocative is at best totally irrelevant, at worst victim blaming, but in either case a distraction.

  • Alex — not "silly and provocative," but horrendously insulting.

    Imagine I run a cartoon magazine and, for no other reason than the shock value, I run a front page cartoon of the wife of the local mafia chief. She's bare chested, wearing fish net stockings, sitting on a toilet blowing an old man.

    I have every right to do that. The mafia chief is very wrong to have one of his employees kill me, which he will. But I still have been a tremendous asshole.

  • Captain Blicero says:

    @Skipper- your comment is nonresponsive. You just rephrase Ed's point without addressing Alex's concern.

  • I'll de-lurk for this one. I'm one of your French readers. And I was a Charlie Hebdo reader for over a decade, though I quit buying it four or five years ago.
    The shock value of the cartoons is what people saw first. But once you started reading the editorials or articles, it got serious.

    In the nineties, it was one of the few outlets that offered content critical of capitalism. I quickly grew used to the dick jokes and various bad taste humor. It was funny most of the time, even when not too refined.

    The tone was left-wing/ atheist/ green. It was diverse depending on the writers, with actual internal debates once in a while.

    I think it went beyond just dicks crudely drawn or blasphemy. Maybe Wonkette would be a better comparison than Bill Maher.

  • Some of these cartoons were pretty racist, such as the one mentioned in this interview:

    http://www.leninology.co.uk/2015/01/the-massacre-islamophobia-and-free.html

    However, I agree with your basic point. I do think there is more going on then a simple revenge killing against a racist magazine. As Seymour argues in the interview above, there is the larger context of the GWOT, which has stirred up the Muslim community. Also, Middle Eastern governments have tried to rile up their publics against this and other magazines which defame Islam, because they are "safe" targets to vent the anger of a restive Arab public, which otherwise might turn its attention to their very unpopular governments. There is also the question of whether this massacre was a false-flag operation. Who benefits from this crime?

  • Funny thing is the issue that was released the day of the attacks was mocking a new book coming out in france set in 2022. The book was about France being controlled by a radical muslim government. But the narritive is now they were "islamophobes" or the most righteous heroes of freedom.

    Crass, distasteful, unfunny, unnecessary are all legitimate assessment s of the cartoon. Thats fine but I dont think that drawing Muhammad in if its self should be considered out of line. The impressions I get from the tumblr crowd is that its never okay for a non muslim to satirize islam via Muhammad drawings. Tumblrs turrning into a collective Bill Donohue for a religion most of the users dont even follow.

    @Skipper
    Stop using these analogies… Can you not see how they actually reinforce the idea that Muslims are more prone to violence?

  • Well said — to both Ed and Francis above.

    By the same token, The Satanic Verses is generally agreed to be rather silly and not Salman Rushdie's best work by a long way. That doesn't mean Rushdie deserves to die for writing it.

    Freedom of speech means nothing unless it includes the freedom to say things people find distasteful. There are laws against incitement to violence and (in some jurisdictions) racial hatred, and we can have a reasonable debate about where the boundaries should lie; but killing people because you dislike what they have to say is not a valid part of that discussion.

  • The Satanic Verses is generally agreed to be rather silly and not Salman Rushdie's best work by a long way.

    Who agrees with that? Not me. It's my favorite Rushdie novel.

  • I tend to believe the suggestion I've seen in a couple of places that the killers' purpose is to incite hatred and fear of Muslims and increase discrimination and attacks against them, to increase the interest of young Muslims in joining extremist organizations. I don't feel like treating these Charlie Hebdo people as heroes. They had their own reasons, which I do not know, for publishing this stuff, and they should have known they were running risks by doing it. Deadly risks, these aren't the first killings with this pretext.

  • "…they should have known they were running risks by doing it. Deadly risks, these aren't the first killings with this pretext."

    Ah, and that is the rub.
    Criticism of Islam shouldn't be like playing chess against a wookie.

    @ts46064: "The impressions I get from the tumblr crowd is that its never okay for a non muslim to satirize islam via Muhammad drawings."
    Yet the tumblr crowd would see no problems with a drawing of Jesus blowing Santa?

    On Australia's ABC "The Spirit of Things" the presenter asked a guest doing a Ph.D in Islamaphobia where criticism ended and Islamaphobia began. The guest eventually said that they naturally bled into each other, so couldn't give a definitive answer. Which leaves a huge question mark over how strong the thesis is to start with.

  • The boring one,

    Look, is this really so hard to understand? I would not myself draw a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. By the same token, I would not walk alone through a bad neighbourhood of Lima at 2am. But if somebody does just that and gets brutally murdered for it, then the immediate reaction of "well, he was kind of a dick" does not leave not much room for interpretation of what is going on here. That is the kind of thing one says two weeks before the murder or half a year later, but not when everybody is trying to understand what just happened and what to do about the circumstances making such murders possible.

    Also, I would not really trust the judgement of Glenn Greenwald in these matters. He seems pathologically unable to differentiate between criticism of Islam (a religion with followers from all races, and whose tenets people at least in principle could decide to follow or not to follow) and racism (which is, in case that needs to be spelled out, hatred of a specific race, the latter a trait that people are stuck with from birth); and he seems pathologically unable to assign any volition or agency to Muslims that goes beyond "everything bad they ever do is a direct consequence of Western imperialism, always, end of story".

    If I would for one second believe that he would listen I would ask him how many of the antisemitic cartoonists whose works he reposted were horribly massacred by fundamentalist Jews. That would be a rhetorical question, by the way, because I think we all know the answer.

  • c u n d gulag says:

    Jeff Dunham?

    How about Tosh?
    I can't stand him and his "humor." *
    But I still wouldn't kill him.

    *Yes, I know I'm old, youngsters, and don't "get" his "humor." To me, he's offensive and not funny. But, whatever gets the float-ball in your toilet tank to do its job…

  • c u n d, I'll die before I'll be lectured to by a guy who thought… wait, which Yankees had you mixed up? I can't remember and it kills me I can't mock you about it now.

    But I need to lecture you: Nobody calls what Daniel Tosh does "humor." That was his real offense, as was Mencia's et al. before him.

    To Ed, re: "what is the real value of this?" Likely very little… but that doesn't make it less worth defending, for purely instrumental reasons—not intrinsic ones. Consider it the corollary of Sturgeon's Law: if 90% of everything is crap, you need to create space for ten times the amount of stuff you actually want to keep around.

    (Which, not that it needs to be belabored, but the upshot of which is the whole point of the open and free society that we are constantly told is What the Terrorists Hate. One logical implication of which—that shutting down the open society in the name of not letting the terrorists win is, in fact, precisely letting the terrorists win—is entirely lost on one half of our polity, and another—that shutting down all the impolite, sacrilegious, and smutty talk that's the very hallmark of an open society is doing the precise same thing—is lost on the other half.)

    … also to Ed, up yours. Now I gotta look up who Jeff Dunham is? 100% I'm not going to be happier for having done so.

    And, finally, to everyone in the thread above who's apparently felt free to bring your pearl-clutching, blue-haired concern for manners into the filthy-mouthed, sharp-elbowed, blasphemous cesspool that makes this comment section worth coming to in the first place? Do you all suck your mother's cock with that mouth?

  • c u n d gulag says:

    Pat,
    When was I mixed-up about some Yankees?
    I wish you could remember.

    I'm getting older an more forgetful.
    But, if I'm starting to forget Baseball and Yankee history, then it's time for "The Old Fart's Home" for me!

  • "how many of the antisemitic cartoonists whose works he reposted were horribly massacred by fundamentalist Jews. That would be a rhetorical question, by the way, because I think we all know the answer."

    Haven't seen the works. Give me a hint. Were the cartoonists Palestinian?

  • I mean, honestly, the cartoonists were setting themselves up to be martyrs. It was pretty clear by doing what they did, even at the time, that their lives would be threatened by religious nutjobs. The cover was basically a "Come at me, bro!" to Islamists everywhere. And it got them, and a bunch of other people, killed. Does tragedy have to involve some aspect of surprise? Because this was a train-wreck anybody could see coming from a mile away.

  • @GeoX: I must admit I haven't read The Satanic Verses, that's just my understanding of the majority opinion among critics and the public. Midnight's Children on the other hand is fantastic.

  • The boring one says:

    Alex SL,

    I don't think that we are disagreeing that much. First, I didn't mean to appeal to Greenwald's authority. I just meant to give a reference for where I first read the argument. Second, I think that you are right that very often, if not most of the time, a claim about victims having themselves increased the probability of their victimization is just an attempt at reducing the severity of the crime (I never understood how that is supposed to work). My two points were just about your last sentence: "The observation that the cartoons may have been silly and provocative is at best totally irrelevant, at worst victim blaming, but in either case a distraction." My points were, first, that /Ed/ is not blaming the victims (even if some people may take Ed's post to justify victim blaming). Second, that the observation is not irrelevant for the question of whether one should reproduce the pictures.

    We might disagree on whether Ed is blaming the victims (although that might be the result of us simply having different definitions of 'blaming the victim'; mine, for instance, does not depend on when the statement is uttered, before or right after or a long time after the crime). But we probably both agree that the quality of the cartoons matters for the question of whether one should reproduce them.

  • The boring one says:

    Upon rereading my comments, I realize that I counted a lot, which may seem aggressive ("There are so many things that are wrong with your position: 1. … 2. …"). That was certainly not my intent. I just tend to number my points for ease of back-reference and because it makes clear where a new, independent point begins (achieving the same effect without numbers, I noticed, increases the length of comments inordinately).

  • I read a quote from Michael O'Donoghue recently – "Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor." The head of Charlie Hebdo has been quoted as saying that, at the risk of sounding pompous, he would rather die on his feet than live on his knees. He and the others knew what risk they were taking. A stated goal of the magazine was to make Islam as banal as Catholicism. France, AFAIK, has a complicated and historically informed image of itself as a nation simultaneously Catholic and secular; when CH mocked the Church (which it did often), Opus Dei did not send albino monks to murder them. I realize that the reality of being a French Muslim is very different from that of being a French Catholic. However, the issue of 'but they were intentionally crude and offensive!' is, to me, entirely beside the point. Encyclopedia Dramatica and 8Chan put out material just as bad, if not worse. Defending freedom of speech for speech we approve of is the easy part.

    If someone wrote a cartoon in which Gore Vidal was murdered on the orders of the Archbishop of Canterbury for writing "Live From Golgotha", many people would be offended. Should anyone be punished for it? I think not.

  • The boring one,

    Sorry then, I know that I have a tendency to come across as too aggressive.

    Still, it is very hard to avoid at least the appearance of victim blaming if at this moment one decides to focus on the provocativeness of the work of the people who were killed. A disclaimer on the lines of "but I am totally against rape, but…" would justifiably not be taken seriously either if put at the beginning of a piece by somebody who then discusses at length the skirt of the rape victim…

  • "…if I paint a giant-lipped Obama eating a watermelon and someone murders me, it is possible to believe that I did something offensive but that doesn't give another person the right to shoot me."

    It is also possible to note that one of those things is infinity times worse than the other, and that it is possible to be much more angry about the murder than the racist drawing without being a racist oneself. Too much of the "Yes, but…" I've read from liberals on this matter treats Muslims as if they have no moral agency – you made fun of their religion, so they *had* to kill you, what did you expect? Muslims can and should be held to the same standard of self-control as members of other religions, who don't get to kill people who piss them off.

  • "I apologize for the limited content this week"

    But since your judgment failed you at the end, might just as well have made these brain-free posts all week long.

  • "If someone wrote a cartoon in which Gore Vidal was murdered on the orders of the Archbishop of Canterbury for writing "Live From Golgotha", many people would be offended. "

    No, because very few people globally know who and what the Archbishop of Canterbury is – and those who do would find the idea of him giving orders based on any form of belief to be quite incredible. The Church of England just doesn't do hardcore belief these days and is held together as much by indecision and procrastination as anything else.

  • c u n d gulag says:

    Pat,
    Thanks.

    But I knew, and know, that Ol' Honus played at the beginning of he 20th Century – for the Pirates.
    And I saw Ernie Banks play once – in September of '69 I think – at Shea.

    I hated the Mets!
    But who turns down a ticket from one's Uncles who's a Met fan, when his team is in the middle of their first – AMAZING :'-( – run for the pennant?

    It was early when I wrote my comment, and my writing was garbled.

    But, thanks enough for caring to check it out and correct me! :-)

  • Alex, it's hardly victim blaming to state that I think their "statements" were juvenile and roughly the level of satire one might find on talk radio. That makes someone killing them over the cartoons even more ludicrous and incomprehensible.

    You might prefer to wait two weeks or six months to say this, but I was reacting to the very predictable tendency in the media to lionize these guys because of the circumstances of their death when I get the very distinct impression, reading statements made by the Hebdo staff themselves in the past few years, that other media outlets did not exactly extend them a great deal of respect in the past. This is a magazine that was printing a weekly run of 10,000 issues and next week they're printing a million. Suddenly they're everyone's favorite journalists and martyrs, whereas before the terrorist attack no one was rushing to their defense.

    Reminds me of when I was in high school and the least popular kid in class killed himself and suddenly everyone claimed to be his best friend. I was like, where were all of you a month ago? All of these strong expressions of support for Charlie H. that have happened since the murders probably would have done more good *before* it happened than after most of the key figures are dead.

  • "A stated goal of the magazine was to make Islam as banal as Catholicism."

    Which is pretty much impossible for an organization of non-Muslim Frenchmen and makes me think that these guys were either idealists or idiots, because if not they were trying to "reform" something from the outside. Almost by definition, that's not a possibility; you have to be on the inside to "reform" something. All you can do from the outside is try and force it to go one way or another or fight to destroy it entirely, if you have the power to do that. Certainly you can try and "persuade" the insiders to change. But by showing them their idols giving blowjobs to sailors? How well is THAT going to work..?

    The problems I see here are:

    1. The current violent groups inside the Muslim umma are a problem that can really only be solved BY Muslims.

    2. If the West can't help with that – and given the fairly fraught history between the West and Middle Eastern, African, and Asian Muslims that's a possibility – at least the most sensible course would seem to be "don't do anything stupid".

    3. And anti-Muslim speech has, in the past decade or so, been used as a driver for stupid ideas like invading secular Middle Eastern dictatorships and creating failed states out of them that are then overrun with jihadi groups that the secular dictator was, at least, keeping oppressed.

    Which doesn't justify killing people making anti-Muslim statements. But which DOES put them in the "Well, this is kinda stupid…" category and acknowledging that seems to me a pretty big no-brainer. Accepting that walking into the bear pit is a dumb move doesn't seem to me to invalidate the point that "bears are dangerous creatures".

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