Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression by Charb

Author:Charb
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

Organizations misdirecting their indignation

What can I say about those who signed a petition launched the day after the arson attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices, following the publication of the renowned issue “Charia Hebdo”? The petition was headlined “In defense of freedom of expression and against support for Charlie Hebdo!” The 2011 attack on Charlie had received massive media coverage and been broadly condemned, including by Marine Le Pen7 (which, thankfully, did not stop her from filing yet another lawsuit against us a few months later). The condemnation was too broad to suit the tastes of a handful of journalists, sociologists, members of the Party of Colonial Peoples of the Republic, and the Collective Against Racism and Islamophobia.

Their statement begins thus: “We affirm that a Molotov cocktail hurled by night into deserted offices, and causing only material damage, does not deserve greater media and political attention than the very reticent coverage accorded to the burning or sacking of a mosque or a Muslim cemetery.” How do you respond to something like that? These fine folk are basically exactly right. Let me just clarify the facts a bit: the fire was started by two incendiary devices on the same day that Charlie Hebdo’s website was pirated by an Islamist Turk and the staff received a raft of death threats.

The problem with their statement of outrage is its title, which implies that support for Charlie Hebdo somehow represents opposition to freedom of expression. Clearly, not all those who expressed their support for Charlie Hebdo agreed with the newspaper’s editorial perspective, but all had rallied behind an independent journalistic publication that had been attacked in a more or less democratic country. They were defending not Charlie Hebdo but the very principle of free expression. Of course, mosques are well-known havens for freedom of expression, and Muslim cemeteries are hotbeds of debate on major current issues. Charlie Hebdo was guilty of being neither a mosque nor a Muslim cemetery.

The appeal continues: “There is one aspect of free expression that is indeed truly threatened—that of women, for instance, who wish to dress as they see fit, without a secular nation-state imposing a dress code that forces good Muslim women to loose their hair to the wind.” The document goes on to champion the homeless, the unemployed, the working poor, and the “perpetual also-rans in the official public arena.” The petitioners needed a pinch of social agenda to make it easier to swallow this indigestible stew, in which one person’s liberty is assumed to cancel out someone else’s. It would not, unfortunately, mask the taste of propagandist Islamist hogwash.

This valiant team of Zorros for Islam, while rightly critiquing the mainstream press, failed to note that the latter gives far more coverage to the abuse of veiled women on the street than to newspaper vendors who are threatened because they sell Charlie Hebdo. Let them rest assured that, in a country where news vendors prefer to hide their copies of Charlie Hebdo rather than be harassed for trying to sell them, their vision of free expression is on the verge of triumph.

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