Je suis Charlie?
August 29, 2015 2:26 PM   Subscribe

Charlie Hebdo editor says the paper is done with prophet Muhammad cartoons - Laurent Sourisseau, "Riss" ""We have drawn Muhammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever they want. It is a bit strange though: we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to," "

Are They Charlie?
But as time went on, visceral reactions gave way to debate. It became acceptable to question the Charlie movement in polite society. Why did the killings unleash unprecedented emotion in a country that is no stranger to terror? What did the magazine stand for? What did proclaiming “Je suis Charlie” or “Je ne suis pas Charlie” mean? The books under review approach those questions from a wide range of perspectives.
Six months on, we are not all Charlie

Salman Rushdie: “We are living in the darkest time I have ever known.”

In the Wilderness About Charlie Hebdo

Free Speech and "Those in Power"
The right to criticize religious tenets held by a minority has again been aggressively challenged in public debate, following the attack on "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris. Jens-Martin Eriksen and Frederik Stjernfelt take issue with the argument that free speech is meant to be used against "those in power", not against minorities.
Charlie Hebdo’s Multi-Million-Dollar Pile of Tragedy Money
In the space of a few months, a publication with a storied past but uncertain future, beset by dwindling revenues and readership, casting around for financial support, has been transformed into a cash cow. People who had scarcely heard of the paper now flaunt the ubiquitous “Je suis Charlie” badge. The post-massacre edition, No. 1178, sold some eight million copies, an increase of more than 13,000 percent over previous levels. Subscriptions have soared to more than 200,000 from about 10,000. Donations have multiplied, from Google, the French government, and sympathizers across the world. One Web site garnered close to $2 million through the contributions of 24,500 individuals. As a result, Charlie Hebdo, irreverent mocker of all forms of power, reportedly finds itself sitting on more than $33 million in cash, a once unthinkable sum. (The owners have put the figure lower, at roughly $18 million, from sales and donations.)
Emmanuel Todd: the French thinker who won't toe the Charlie Hebdo line

Qu'est-il arrivé à Emmanuel Todd?
Les thèses avancées par Emmanuel Todd dans son livre Qui est Charlie? ont provoqué un tollé. Pourtant, elles ne sont pas toutes dénuées de vérité. Décryptage.
Art Spiegelman, Notes from a First Amendment Absolutist, via Drawing the Undrawable
posted by the man of twists and turns (14 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Sorry for the delayed delete. I don't see a way for this discussion to go differently from the previous long fighty threads on this (for example here) and I don't think a month of accusing each other of being horrible racists vs terrorist sympathizers/dupes of theocrats is a positive for the site. -- LobsterMitten



 
Can't we all agree not to be dicks to each other and not to blow each other up and make the whole discussion redundant?
posted by Talez at 3:07 PM on August 29, 2015


I doubt it.
posted by grouse at 3:14 PM on August 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


Completely understandable. They already published an issue with Mohammed on the cover right after being attacked for doing so; that's plenty of demonstration that terrorism will not influence what they're willing to say. It doesn't require them to draw the same thing indefinitely, especially if doing so would give them an anti-Islam reputation and actually weaken their message ("oh, Charlie Hebdo's making fun of Muslims again, no need to listen").

Can't we all agree not to be dicks to each other and not to blow each other up and make the whole discussion redundant?

Apparently not.
posted by Rangi at 3:26 PM on August 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


From Kenan Malik's blog, linked above:
The problem with the free speech debate, Mondal suggested, is that it has become polarized between those who are for and against free speech when in fact the debate about freedom is much more difficult.... I wonder if Mondal would have made the same argument 200 years ago during the debate about the abolition of slavery? ‘Freedom is not a straightforward issue. One cannot simply be for or against the abolition of slavery. We have to be more nuanced in the way we look upon the issue. We cannot simply see it as a matter of an absence of restrictions. Those being offered freedom have to accept their responsibilities too.’
This is an assinine misrepresentation of the point Mondal is making, and that most of us understood who felt that they couldn't say "we are Charlie" in good conscience: That when you make offensiveness without consequence the yardstick of freedom of speech, then freedom of speech privileges the powerful; that having freedom of speech in a practical sense requires empowerment, not just licence.
posted by fatbird at 3:40 PM on August 29, 2015 [8 favorites]


Can't we all agree not to be dicks to each other

The important thing for non-French speakers to remember is that Charlie Hebdo never behaved dickishly to people who didn't deserve it.
posted by Nevin at 4:02 PM on August 29, 2015 [5 favorites]


From Kenan Malik's blog, linked above

Malik is one of many former Trotskyists who have ended up in a weird reactionary libertarianism. Him and pretty much anyone who ever wrote for Living Marxism and still writes for Spiked, it sometimes seems. It's a peculiar pseudo-egalitarianism, which is fiercely committed to denying the historically contingent nature of power and privilege.
posted by howfar at 4:45 PM on August 29, 2015 [1 favorite]


"the right to swing your arm ends right before it strikes my nose"
The Speech we must concern ourselves belongs to those with the power to turn words into action, whether they tell their followers to behead infidels (ISIS) or just throw them out of their homes (Trump), not those who ridicule them. The language that needs restricting starts with "No" and leads to "Open Fire".
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:03 PM on August 29, 2015


Mod note: One comment deleted. Please don't pre-doom the thread by listing all the stuff you hope people won't talk about. Also if we're going to have this thread, it isn't about the original disagreement about the cartoons, we've done that discussion very thoroughly at this point. If you want to have a better discussion about other aspects of the current situation, go ahead and do that.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 5:28 PM on August 29, 2015


The important thing for non-French speakers to remember is that Charlie Hebdo never behaved dickishly to people who didn't deserve it.

I don't even know what this means. Muslims all across the Western world are subject to racial profiling, harassment and discrimination, and disparagement of their faith. What exactly did Muslims do to deserve Charlie Hebdo's decision to participate in this very same activity? People talk all about the terrorism that was committed in the name of Islam in reaction to Charlie Hebdo, but forget that terrorism isn't just limited to physical violence. So far as I'm concerned, people and places like Charlie Hebdo have been terrorizing Muslims for much longer.
posted by Dalby at 5:34 PM on August 29, 2015 [3 favorites]


The important thing for non-French speakers to remember is that Charlie Hebdo never behaved dickishly to people who didn't deserve it.

Is this sarcasm? My detector is broke.

Charlie Hebdo reads like previous racist coworkers who justify ignorance and terrible racism with "I'm an equal opportunist. I hate everybody."
posted by Talez at 5:34 PM on August 29, 2015 [5 favorites]


It's interesting to see where Salman Rushdie has come into this conversation. At the time The Satanic Verses was published, it was perceived by many people as an insider's intellectual critique of Islam, but it was always more complex as a creative work, instead about the difficulties of migrant integration in a post-colonialist culture, from a sympathetic and nuanced point of view. It wasn't difficult to feel solidarity with him after the fatwā was announced and he went into hiding.

But if he places himself amongst the greater 'clash of cultures' coined by the neocons after 9/11 and propagandized through racist caricature, well, it's difficult for me to imagine them together on a bookshelf, and it belies his frustration at the simplicity of fundamentalist thinking. I guess it's like the way I feel about Christopher Hitchens. I like his ferocious intellect when it was not so inextricably bound with imperialist racism and hegemony and blind to privilege (although it's possible I was blinkered). It's hard to defend the proponents of Manifest Destiny across the colonial landscape, who as fatbird mentioned often can't separate "freedom" from "license."
posted by krinklyfig at 6:34 PM on August 29, 2015


Charlie Hebdo appeared to have tried to focus its ridicule toward the religious leaders and people with power within the churches... how successful they were is up to debate (so go ahead, debate it).

But if you want to see many Americans' version of the 'clash of cultures', here it is. Now there's an All American political cartoon, which leads one to wonder how much Freedom of Speech will survive if they win their battle against 'political correctness'.
posted by oneswellfoop at 6:55 PM on August 29, 2015


The question seems to be about which institution wins in a clash: theocracy or civilization. It seems to be theocracy because they use guilt so effectively on the undecided, and has evolved in the absence of civilization, and is adept at bringing it down or under their control.
posted by Brian B. at 7:19 PM on August 29, 2015 [2 favorites]


Oy, time to dance on people's graves yet again.

I don't think Metafilter can do this. Immediately we have the same simple narrative that the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were racists, against Muslims, hated everybody, were somehow on the side of "the powerful". Nothing seems to ever touch people's convictions that they know what CH was without having read it.

CH was not made by racists, but by leftists, very secularist, very much against the right wing— one of their favorite targets was Le Pen. They were not against "Muslims", they were against religious extremists. One of their most eloquent writers (who survived the attack) was a Moroccan ex-Muslim woman, Zineb El Rhazoui; their copy editor (who was murdered) was Algerian. Their offices had been bombed before, so I think speaking of "offensiveness without consequence" is insultingly cruel to their memory. And they paid the consequences: they were machine-gunned to death.

Luz (who drew the defiant "tout est pardonné" cover after the attack) is leaving the paper, stressed out by the event, by media scrutiny, by having to live under police protection. Oh wait, we're supposed to turn off any sense of empathy for the victims, because they advocated "license".

People who are "against CH" are not defending Muslims; they're picking a side in a fight within Islam— the side of religious repression. Are you also against the Muslims who defended CH or who satirize jihadists?

(Doing some Googling, I see that el Rhazoui was threatened with suspension, then reinstated— part of the squabbles over the new financial state of the paper. Now that's sad— el Rhazoui is one of the people worth fighting for, one who has every right to speak up against the way she was treated by the religion of her upbringing.)
posted by zompist at 7:27 PM on August 29, 2015 [12 favorites]


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