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

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I don't see how spreading the offensive images originating with Charlie Hebdo harms them or their goals.

How else do you harm the goal of silencing through intimidation other than not to cooperate with it, and as far as is possible make the tactic counterproductive?

The people willing to commit murder and assault to limit freedom of expression when it comes to blaspheming against Islam are so far doing pretty well. In a global news story of demonstrated broad and ongoing interest, massive newsgathering organizations that have on occasion been willing to face the risks of going up against nuclear superpowers (CNN, the New York Times, ABC News, and many others) have been intimidated into not showing the central subject of their story at all.

In the last go round, Yale University Press refused to include the Jyllands-Posten cartoons in a scholarly book about the controversy. (I find it impossible to imagine a book about anything else in visual media making such an omission. The importance of being able to show what you're talking about in scholarship is pretty much the entire reason there's such a thing as Fair Use in copyright.)

(And I understand-- I'm not particularly brave, and could surely be intimidated by the threat of being shot or firebombed. Which is why if I hope to have any rights at all, I had better give support to their defense before it gets that far.)

The only way to demonstrate our commitment to free expression to any community is to demonstrate a commitment to free expression. If we're failing to defend someone else's rights to free expression, then we should stop doing that and defend them too.<sup>1

1</sup>Stipulating that I'm a lazy man who only knows what rights violations he reads about in the virtual paper, and generally can't think of much to do to defend them other than shake my head and donate to the EFF. It evidently takes the murder of a dozen people to get me to take the bold and active step of posting to social media. (*gasp*)

Which, again, is why I acknowledge my debt to the people actually engaged in defending the boundaries of our inalienable rights-- and especially those who give their lives doing it-- whether or not I would like them much in particular outside of that.

And we should show, by example, that the way to respond to bad speech is more speech (and other similarly nonviolent activity: support candidates who condemn the speech, vote with your wallet, vote with your feet, demonstrate etc.)-- and that violence against the speakers will be met with outrage and scorn, and redoubled efforts to protect them and their ability to communicate their message whatever we think of them.

Regardless, we should not be less than zealous in asserting those rights against an extreme and direct attack, made with the overt goal of forcing limits upon it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

How else do you harm the goal of silencing through intimidation other than not to cooperate with it, and as far as is possible make the tactic counterproductive?

As I've said elsewhere this presumes that this was, in fact, the sole or chief goal of the murderers. I'm not convinced it is. It was, to quote mollpeartree "an act of political theater" and art is notorious for allowing multiple interpretations (much like the cartoons from Charlie Hebdo).

[lhn.livejournal.com]

When a bunch of writers, artists, editors, etc. at a magazine are specifically targeted for murder, I'd say the most plausible aim is that it's to shut them up and intimidate those like them.

Especially given those years of violence and intimidation focused on a narrow range of subjects, the wide agreement among news organizations that those subjects (and those alone) present a physical danger that they're better off giving a wide berth to (even when they're unequivocally news), and the followup firebombing in Germany and bomb threat in Belgium against those who reprinted the cartoons. Call it a rebuttable presumption.

(I mean, 9/11 could conceivably have been an act of propaganda by the deed by unhinged architecture critics-- the Twin Towers were examples of a particularly cold and inhumane aesthetic that was by 2001 considered counter to desirable urbanism. But I think you'll agree that's a rather less likely hypothesis than the ones involving various goals more germane to violent Islamism.)

If that's not what the killers wanted to communicate (along with "and we should kill some random Jews, just because"), then I'll attribute that to their poor choice in their mode and method of communication. (And encourage the substrain of radical Islam that spawned them to use their words instead, for improved clarity and reduced murder.) But I'm still going to frame my response based on what I consider the likelier intent.