Charlie Hebdo, satire and freedom of speech

Barely had the soothing bubble bath of festivity begun to dissipate than the world was plunged back into the icy pool of reality once more. Despite the media inundation that followed, the brutal attacks of last Tuesday were not even the most deadly assault of the day - in Yemen a car bomb killed 38 people in an unattributed attack. Even this atrocity paled in significance next to reports of Boko Haram's massacre of around 2,000 in Nigeria.

Make no mistake, this essay is in no way an apologia for the abominable actions of the French Islamist terrorists who murdered 12 people last Tuesday. No one is in any doubt that these were deluded fanatics committing evil acts for which there can be no justification. But here is my hunch...

I would wager that the two men who stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, in their paramilitary apparel and SWAT team efficiency, were not offended by the cartoons being scribbled inside at all.

Predominantly, the extremists of IS have been found to be 'religious novices' and converts, perhaps not even Wahabbist in their mentality; the type of jihadist who purchases 'Islam for Dummies' via Amazon before setting off for Syria, as two men did from Birmingham last year. They have chosen their targets to inspire the maximum impact and the fiercest response, designed to further ostracise ordinary Muslims in the hope that they will soon be driven in desperation to their fanatical cause.

No, the real people who will have been offended by the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed (and the 5 million print run of the magazine funded by the French state), are the ordinary Muslims going about their lives in a climate of steadily ratcheting prejudice and animosity. (It's worth remembering that France is the 'tolerant' nation that passed a ban on the burqa and on praying in the street.)

In the days after the attack, the West has predictably worked itself into a moral lather of overblown piety with, in my view, a paucity of examination of the maze into which we find ourselves running blind. In times such as this we often turn to philosophy as our guiding light, and indeed, the well-known quote from the French philosopher Voltaire was circulated ad nauseum in subsequent days - 'I do not agree with what you have to say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'.

Is this not, noble though it may seem, establishing the exact same rigid fundamentalist immovability that the secular West likes to attribute to and lament about religious fanaticism? The right to freedom of speech is not an 'absolute right', it is tethered to the ground by responsibility and the duty to exercise the right in a way that will not cause unnecessary offence or upset.

The events and subsequent reaction have lent themselves perfectly to an examination of the 'tolerance paradox', whereby a purportedly tolerant person who acts antagonistically towards an intolerant person cannot be said to be entirely possessed of tolerance. The philosopher Karl Popper adduced that we are warranted in refusing to tolerate intolerance, whereas John Rawls believed that it was incumbent upon a just society to tolerate the intolerant or else fail by its own standards.

The problem is the question of who is holding the scales of toleration, whose standard of tolerance are we seeking to judge? For this, in my view, is the crux of the issue in terms of the West's response. In our secular, materialistic culture we have relegated religious faith and political ideology to the sidelines as largely irrelevant eccentricities, leaving a vast valley floor of rational pragmatism in which the only way to rise above the fray is to push ever higher the capacity to shock. Shock value is a sturdy yet fickle currency and the problem persists that we expect it to be adequate tender no matter where we might try and distribute the wealth.

It inconveniences nor infringes upon any Westerner's life for visual representation of the Prophet Mohammed to be avoided as a mark of respect, tolerance and appreciation of the strong beliefs of the millions of Muslims coexisting in our communities. Mocking the leaders of IS and the zealots who hoist themselves up as Islamic figureheads are a different matter; they instill in themselves the hubris of a leader and are ripe for satire's stones to be thrown. Satire can only really be successful if the butt of the joke is a figure of authority or powerful institution; it collapses like a deck of cards as soon as the target is aimed at the powerless and voiceless - in this case, the Muslim community (an increasingly ostracized and antagonised collective across Europe).

This same lack of taste was evident with the recent debacle over 'The Interview', in which Americans beat their chests over their freedom to watch films being threatened by tyrannical North Koreans, as I wrote about here. This is why the oft-made comparison with 'Monty Python's Life of Brian' resoundingly misses the point. Apart from very briefly at the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus Christ is not depicted at all, neither are he or his image the target of mockery. Instead, the Python's satirical venom is spat at the hypocrisy of organised religion and the way human's cleave with credulous zeal to hierarchy and instutionalised forms of power and belief systems.

As I write this I have a tome of a book sitting on my desk spanning the career of Gerald Scarfe’s political cartoons, a wonderful counterpoint to Charlie Hebdo’s crude and mostly tasteless etchings. Scarfe depicts all manner of twisted and scabrous depravities – Margaret Thatcher fellating Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush as a primate surveying the smoking ruins of an Iraqi cityscape, and such like. As close to the bone as Scarfe frequently cuts, never is anyone or thing assumed as the recipient of his inked ire who is not in some kind of power position over a multitude of others.

Charlie Hebdo, in their defiant mocking of the Prophet Mohammed, intended to provoke and upset the Muslim community who have next to no power or representation in our Western society and, since 9/11, have had to endure a bloody smorgasbord of foreign wars and ‘interventions’, along with a rising tide of Islamophobia that gathers legitimacy as extremist attacks continue. The elephant in the room throughout most of the media’s reportage, was the fact that the opinions of ordinary Muslims on whether or not they deemed the cartoons to be offensive were by and large completely ignored.

All of this does not negate the fact that the Muslim community do now, and have done for a while, have some very serious demands to place on themselves in terms of trying to exorcise these demonic elements that have taken root within their faith. Just as the secular West cannot arrogantly expect Muslims to adhere to every facet of our vaunted notion of ‘enlightened society’; so Muslims cannot blindly continue without real and substantial efforts being made to try and reconcile their faith with the 21^st century, as all other world religions have and continue to do so. Primarily this should be focused on a reassessment of children’s education, questioning the literalism of following the Koran, attitudes towards women, and so on.

In the end though, we all suffer from acts of extremism such as this. Regardless of how many gather in the streets, pencils aloft and declaring ‘Je suis Charlie’; at every instance of extremism, governments use it as an excuse to further tighten and enshrine the security state, hacking away at civil liberties under the purported aim of ‘keeping us safe’.  This happened to an astonishing degree in post-9/11 America with the passing of the Patriot Act that ultimately led to the full-blown surveillance of the NSA and GCHQ.

It can already be seen to be happening now. George Osborne gave a commitment to provide "whatever investment necessary" for MI5 to continue their intelligence gathering. Meanwhile, David Cameron has pledged to continue with the passage of the 'Snooper's Charter' into law, which will allow further mass gathering of accessible data communications. So it is, that as we pontificate about the sanctity of free speech, so our freedoms as civilians are compromised by gradual increments that are almost impossible to reverse.

If we accept the unassailable fact that we live in a multicultural society, one that tolerates and accommodates those of all faiths, races and demography, then we have to recognise and appreciate that certain things remain sensitive emotive issues that, if we are to be truly civilised, should be accepted as such. 

Children at school are filled with the humble maxim that 'if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all'. They are taught not to pick on those in the minority or who are different in some way. Why then, as responsible adults, do we abandon these simple humanist principles under the intoxicant of apparent liberality and use the excuse of freedom of speech and the freedom to offend? 

In my view, we subconsciously register just how curtailed we are within our own lives, circumstances and societal systems; in a very real sense we are barely free at all. And so naturally the apparent freedom to say whatever we like and to whomever we like is attractive and hence elevated to an almost fundamentalist principle of Western democracy.

We need to see through this delusion, question it, and reassess our own levels of toleration and understanding. If we fail to do so, then the antagonising of Muslims will continue and worsen, inevitably serving to whip up further extremism, all of which only allows the intolerable carousel of pointless violence to continue to turn.