Les fesses sataniques

[muckefuck]

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.

Comments

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

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.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It begs the question to assume the cartoons and articles published by Charlie Hebdo were humorous as opposed to simply mean. There's been an awful lot of implied violence toward minority communities in our bloody history under the guise of "humour". Do you really think coon jokes and minstrelry "make the world a much better place"?

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

It begs what question? Have you seen these cartoons and articles?

One of the purposes of humor is to defuse implied violence. Thus we have comedians like Chris Rock and Dave LaChapelle. Yup. I think they're really, really funny even though they're filled with rage and white culture is often the butt of their humor. I guess I'm white (although by the quaint judicial codes of pre-Civil War Louisiana, I'm actually an octaroon.)

I may well have thought coon and minstrel jokes were funny if I'd been an adult back when they were the rage. Cultural mores shift over time. I think the wholesale bowdlerization and condemnation of the past because it doesn't share the enlightenment of the present is pretty fucking bizarre. That doesn't mean I don't support the more enlightened views of the present.

There's no way I can spin the bombings in France as anything other than an action by a particularly creepy fundamentalist faction of Islam that I would cheerfully obliterate if I could. Fuck 'em. Seriously.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

I have seen the cartoons since I work at a library that immediately ordered a copy of the issue in question when it was first published. It is a testament to the power of terrorism to silence speech that so few people have. Can you think of another instance where an attempt at censorship hasn't resulted in the wider dispersal of thing being censored?

The cartoons are quite mild compared to Piss Christ etc. that Christians are considered inbred boobies for even hemming at.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I immediately flashed on the Piss Christ, too. Funny.

And have since tracked down a few of the Charlie cartoons. I wouldn't describe them as particularly inflammatory. Mileage varies on that one, I suppose.