muckefuck | Les fesses sataniques

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politics,
rant

Les fesses sataniques

I'm having a mixed reaction to the events at Charlie Hebdo. On the one hand, the massacre is horrific and I absolutely don't hold the victims accountable for it. Whatever the provocation, it was entirely the killers' decision to take up arms and needlessly slaughter people. However, baiting Muslims has been the magazine's stock-in-trade for some years now. Despite the outlandish claims of Islamophobes, Muslims are still very much a minority in France and a disadvantaged one, which means this is punching down. So I'm not eager to see these cartoonists acclaimed as free-speech martyrs.

Worse, all they've really gone and proved by pulling the tiger's tail is that if you keep it up long enough, eventually unstable men will take up arms against you. We kind of knew that already, didn't we? Ultimately all this does is play into the hands of extremists on both sides. Seeing those who seek to humiliate Islam taken down a peg is a great recruitment tool for young radicals. Conversely, those demagogues warning of "Eurabia" have further confirmation for their contention that Islam is incompatible with modern civilisation.

So now we have a dozen people dead, thousands more living in fear, and no end in sight to the rising tensions between immigrants and nativists in Europe or elsewhere. I can't and won't criticise these journalists for "getting themselves killed"; that's victim-blaming nonsense. But several of them did contribute to making our world a little bit worse, and for what?

ETA: Given the professionalism of the assassins, Juan Cole posits that this was an al-Qaeda plot to provoke an overreaction that will further alienate young Muslims in Europe.

Sandip Roy shares some of my reservations. Jacob Canfield goes further. ("In summary: Nobody should have been killed over those cartoons. Fuck those cartoons.") Surprisingly good discussion in comments.

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I'm not familiar with the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, so I can't really comment on them.

To me, though, humor makes the world a much better place, so I disagree adamantly with the judgment you make in the last sentence of yr thoughts above.

The real issue, I suspect, is that Islam seems lost in a time warp. Possibly because it's a newer religion than Christianity? I can't really say. Certainly the Inquisitionists took a similarly dim view of jokes made about Jesus and his Dad back in the 15th century. Are we 1400 years after the birth of Mohammad now? Maybe what we're really looking at is developmental phases in the maturing of religions.

Unstable? Surely you are not suggesting mental illness is a factor.

Had they not been distracted by cartoons, these people would have been occupied with their usual pursuits -- burning synagogues, killing Jews, assaulting homosexuals. Oh, and killing any family member who trespasses against their view of honor.

If a bunch of terrorists hadn't martyred them for free speech, they wouldn't be free speech martyrs.

They may also have been assholes. Freedom of speech is frequently tested by assholes. But when it's between assholes and murderers, I'm foursquare on the side of the assholes. (And that famous quote that Voltaire probably never said, but should have.)

The very least the murderers should get for their efforts is a lesson in the Streisand Effect. Shutting up the speech they murdered people to shut up creates incentives in entirely the wrong direction.

Re "if you keep it up long enough, eventually unstable men will take up arms against you"-- I at least don't know of any murders in response to the long, storied, and ongoing history of vile antisemitic cartoons in the Christian and Muslim worlds. I also don't recall hearing of any in response to many decades (at least) of hatefully racist cartoons and caricatures in the US.

I don't agree with you. I think I understand your viewpoint, and I can see some merit to it, but I think it substantially elides the context and circumstances that incubate—I want to argue necessitate—the likes of Charlie Hebdo. And I say so with no regard to the "Eurabia" shit-disturbers.

From my perspective, respect can only be earned. Any attempt to demand it, particularly a demand punctuated by "or else", deserves to be dismissed, mocked, and scorned; the alternative is a hierarchy of cowed subjugation catering to those whose threats are shouted loudest and whose body counts are highest. I contend that a civilised society not only may but must respond to "Shut up or else I will kill you" with "Fuck off or else I will discuss you", then proceed to do so with every variety of discourse and art—including cartoons which may very well be very deliberately disrespectful.

I guess I can see why you think this is "punching down" in the French context, but Muslims are not a minority everywhere, and radical Islam is not nearly as minority a movement as it ought to be by rights.

These guys are not very likely to be mentally ill in any meaningful sense of the term; as a rule the type of unstable person who is as likely to shoot up a McDonald's or a cop car depending on the cultural zeitgeist acts alone.

These kinds of acts are explicitly political theater, meant by radicals to demonstrate the worldwide legitimacy of Islamic law even in Christian lands. It's a revolutionary, ahistorical claim that does no favors to Muslim immigrants attempting to rub along peacefully in Europe, and making excuses for it is not actually helping.

Edited 2015-01-08 12:59 (UTC)

http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks

i totally agree with your response. it's nice to see some subtlety in the midst of a lot of black-and-white 'you're with CH or you're with the murderers' thinking. cheers from paris, by the way.

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