Greenwald on Charlie Hebdo

As a follow up to The Disgusting 'Buts', a quote from Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is wrong on the Charlie Hebdo affair; he is another who thinks the Western hegemony narrative is the lens through which these murderous events should be viewed. His comments in Salon are rather more guarded than one might expect; perhaps he's mellowing slightly. Nevertheless, this extract clearly betrays his sympathies:

So you have a magazine that became known in the Western world, regardless of what the reality is, for publishing images that are very offensive and upsetting to the Muslim minorities in the West, and whose cartoonists were turned into heroes and martyrs … who were victims of Muslim violence. I think the reason why people are so eager to turn them into martyrs and heap all sorts of praise and awards on them is because it does make us Westerners feel good about ourselves; it tells us that we’re the victims and the people who we’ve been bombing and invading and torturing and pillaging for the last 15 years are actually the evil ones.

It fuels this whole war narrative that has been sustaining a lot of really bad policies in ways that are quite propagandistic and manipulative, because of the heavy emotions involved.

That 'regardless of what the reality is' is telling; Greenwald is talking about his and his confreres' perception of CH as Islamophobic, not the reality of CH, which, as I wrote before (and GG acknowledges), is somewhat different. I agree a lot with his concerns about the war narrative, and it's obvious that Western intervention has been toxic in the Middle East. I certainly don't feel good about it; I presume he means that it feeds some kind of dehumanisation, an othering, of Eastern culture, and I don't doubt there is still a lot of that going on.

But that issue is being clumsily crow-barred into the CH affair. CH have become victims of the chilling effects of totalitarian religion on public discourse - that is the primary lens through which these events should be viewed. They line up alongside other victims of that narrative, such as Avijit Roy, Washiqur Rahman and Raif Badawi.

Is it too much to hope that Greenwald might recognise that these threats to free speech override his bete noire? After Snowden, you would think he could see that.

UPDATE

Report from the Washington Post on the Award ceremony:



(Photo "Avijit Roy" by Source. Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Avijit_Roy.jpg#/media/File:Avijit_Roy.jpg)