A Compendium of Charlie Hebdo Posts

An index to some good pieces on Charlie Hebdo...

Pieces previously discussed, by Stephen Law and Kenan Malik.

Daniel Fincke's excellent analysis of the worst responses to CH:

Charlie Hebdo assumed disproportionate risk because they kept their head up where it was a target when the rest of the media ducked. That made it so that the extremists could say, “We can finish the job and make it so no one satirically depicts Muhammad if we can just pluck off those few heads remaining!”

Jason Rosenhouse, 1, 2 and 3:

Claiming that publishing satirical cartoons constitutes openly begging for violence is awfully close to claiming that violence is an appropriate response to blasphemy.

Jerry Coyne, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons weren't racist:

But of course even if CH was racist, sexist, and homophobic, that doesn’t excuse what happened.

Taslima Nasreen, Cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo and me:

The murder of so many talented people by a few insane and barbaric men to please their God and their prophet, in order to get into paradise, is an offense to human decency.

Accusations of racism are generally beside the point when discussing Charlie Hebdo and their attackers; the cartoonists were murdered for blaspheming the prophet, not for racism (or sexism or anything else).

Nabila Ramdani made this error on PM last night (@15mins), when she complained that the cover depicted above was stigmatising but when challenged simply said this was because it depicted the prophet, and that offended her. How could a mere depiction of a supposed Mohammed (no-one knows what he looked like), which does not denigrate the prophet, stigmatise? Remember, it's the mere depiction that is blasphemy. She describes images like the one above as 'a vicious stereotype', and I fail to see how it is. If the cartoonist depicted the prophet as a Frenchman, would that avoid the charge of stereotyping, and therefore be acceptable to Ramdani? I doubt it. She constantly slides between her subjective offense at the image and the objective racism of the image. This is unacceptable behaviour. The religious frequently claim offence at some arbitrary sleight whilst denouncing non-believers as less than human and destined for some unpleasant eternal punishment. That should be considered more hateful than any blasphemy, but in the skewed worldview of the religiously sympathetic it is considered de rigueur.

Ramdani said that because people would respond negatively to blasphemy, this is a good reason not to publish; but if blasphemy is a tool, or is used as a tool, to prevent examination of some ideology's core beliefs and to buttress its authority, that is the very reason why such images must be published.

Therefore, a discussion needs to be had about the role of blasphemy in western societies. My view is that blasphemy itself needs to become as taboo to proclaim as the contents of blasphemous views currently are to the religious; just as we now wince at the n-word and frown on anyone who drinks and drives, so we should come to find bizarre anyone taking blasphemy seriously. Ramdani should be embarrassed to suggest that blasphemy is a good reason to curtail publication in a free press. Sadly this is far from being the case at the moment, when many countries still have blasphemy on the statute books.