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16
The San Juan Daily Star
January 9-11, 2015
New York Times Editorials
French Humor, Turned Into Tragedy
By ANDREW HUSSEY
I
N September 2012, the satirical newspaper
Charlie Hebdo, defying the advice of the
French government, published several lewd
caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
I was in Tunis that week. There were tanks
and soldiers outside the mosques, and graﬃti in
English, French and Spanish calling for revolution,
declaring war on the West and all those who hated
Islam. A few days earlier the United States Embassy in Tunis had been attacked, and the American
School burned down. And shortly before that, the
American ambassador to Libya had been murdered by a jihadist militia.
I spent a tense half-hour on the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, trying in vain, as a lone and very
visible European, to hail a taxi before the curfew
took eﬀect. I cursed Charlie Hebdo for its willful
and unnecessary provocations over the years: In
2006, the newspaper reprinted cartoons mocking
Muhammad that had first appeared in a Danish
newspaper, and in 2011, its oﬃces were firebombed after it published a spoof issue, “Charia Hebdo,” a play on the word for Shariah law.
But, like everyone else in Paris, where I
live, I was shocked to the core when I heard about
the killings of 12 people at the oﬃces of Charlie
Hebdo, a 20-minute walk from my own oﬃce, on
Wednesday morning.
I first became aware that something was
wrong when I noticed heavily armed police oﬃcers and soldiers at every corner and cars being
towed by military vehicles. I stopped for coﬀee on
the Rue de Grenelle and everybody was talking
at once and staring at the TV as it showed footage
of the massacre, in which two police oﬃcers were
killed, as well as the magazine’s editorial director,
Stéphane Charbonnier, and several cartoonists.
“This is just another stage,” the guy next to
me said.
“Another stage in what?” I said.
“The war against the Arabs,” he replied.
It has to be said that Charlie Hebdo is an unlikely victim of such unjustified violence. For most
Parisians these days, the magazine is a quaint relic of the ’60s and ’70s that has long since lost its
power to shock. Only the day before the killings,
I had noticed on a newsstand a recent front cover
of the magazine that showed a goofy-looking Virgin Mary giving birth to an even goofier-looking
Christ. I shrugged and walked on, reflecting on
how few people read the magazine these days,
how it had only just begun to overcome its money
troubles, and what a museum piece it had become.
To some extent, this was reflected in the
ages of two prominent figures who were killed:
the brilliant and much-loved cartoonists Jean Cabut (or Cabu) and Georges Wolinski were, respectively, 76 and 80. Most important, they belonged to
the generation of May 1968 — the generation that
had revolted against the heavy hand of Charles
de Gaulle’s paternalism with a belief in unlimited
liberty, unrestrained sexual behavior, drug taking
and, above all, the freedom to mock all forms of
moral and religious authority.
Charlie Hebdo’s relentless pursuit of provocation — or “la provoc” in slangy French — belongs to a very Parisian tradition. It dates to before the French Revolution, when it was termed
“L’esprit frondeur,” or “slingshot wit.” (A “fronde” was a catapult used to hurl stones at the king
in times of insurrection.)
What also made Charlie Hebdo, founded in
1970, so French was a militant, aggressive secularism. This again is an old tradition in French culture — historically, a way of policing the power of
the Catholic Church. May ’68 was also the revolt
of the young against the old, and anti-religious satire a key part of that revolt.
But in contemporary France, the young
rebels of ’68 have long since become the cultural
establishment, even if they still espouse the leftist
and libertarian ideals of their younger days. Charlie Hebdo, for all its vaunted anarchism, has been
a member of the establishment for a very long
time.
Or at least this is how the magazine is
viewed out in the banlieues — the enormous and
often wretched suburbs that surround all major
French cities and that are home to a huge immigrant population, mainly from former French colonies in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. What is
seen in the center of Paris as tweaking the nose of
authority — religious or political — is seen out in
the banlieues as the arrogance of those in power
who can mock what they like, including deeply
held religious beliefs, perhaps the only part of personal identity that has not been crushed or assimilated into mainstream French society.
Is Islam to Blame for the Shooting at Charlie Hebdo in Paris?
By Nicholas Kristof
T
he French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo skewers people of all faiths and backgrounds. One cartoon showed rolls of toilet
paper marked “Bible,” “Torah” and “Quran,” and
the explanation: “In the toilet, all religions.”
Yet when masked gunmen stormed Charlie Hebdo’s oﬃces in Paris on Wednesday with
AK-47s, murdering 12 people in the worst terror
attack on French soil in decades, many of us assumed immediately that the perpetrators weren’t
Christian or Jewish fanatics but more likely Islamic
extremists.
Outraged Christians, Jews or atheists might
vent frustrations on Facebook or Twitter. Yet, while we don’t know exactly who is responsible, the
presumption is that Islamic extremists once again
have expressed their displeasure with bullets.
Many ask, Is there something about Islam
that leads inexorably to violence, terrorism and
subjugation of women?
The question arises because fanatical Muslims so often seem to murder in the name of God,
from the 2004 Madrid train bombing that killed
191 people to the murder of hostages at a cafe in
Sydney, Australia, last month. I wrote last year of a
growing strain of intolerance in the Islamic world
after a brave Pakistani lawyer friend of mine, Rashid Rehman, was murdered for defending a university professor falsely accused of insulting the
Prophet Muhammad.
Some of the most systematic terrorism in
the Islamic world has been the daily persecution of
Christians and other religious minorities, from the
Bahai to the Yazidi to the Ahmadis.
Then there’s the oppression of women. Of
the bottom 10 countries in the World Economic
Forum’s gender gap report, I count nine as majority Muslim.
So, sure, there’s a strain of Islamic intolerance and extremism that is the backdrop to the attack
on Charlie Hebdo. The magazine was firebombed
in 2011 after a cover depicted Muhammad saying,
“100 lashes if you’re not dying of laughter.”
Earlier, Charlie Hebdo had published a cartoon showing Muhammad crying and saying, “It’s
hard to be loved by idiots.”
Terror incidents lead many Westerners to
perceive Islam as inherently extremist, but I think
that is too glib and simple-minded. Small numbers
of terrorists make headlines, but they aren’t representative of a complex and diverse religion of 1.6
billion adherents. My Twitter feed Wednesday bri-
mmed with Muslims denouncing the attack — and
noting that fanatical Muslims damage the image of
Muhammad far more than the most vituperative
cartoonist.
The vast majority of Muslims of course have
nothing to do with the insanity of such attacks —
except that they are disproportionately the victims
of terrorism. Indeed, the Charlie Hebdo murders
weren’t even the most lethal terror attack on Wednesday: A car bomb outside a police college in Yemen, possibly planted by Al Qaeda, killed at least
37 people.
One of the things I’ve learned in journalism
is to beware of perceiving the world through simple narratives, because then new information is
mindlessly plugged into those story lines. In my
travels from Mauritania to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan
to Indonesia, extremist Muslims have shared with
me their own deeply held false narratives of America as an oppressive state controlled by Zionists
and determined to crush Islam. That’s an absurd
caricature, and we should be wary ourselves of caricaturing a religion as diverse as Islam.
So let’s avoid religious profiling. The average Christian had nothing to apologize for when
Christian fanatics in the former Yugoslavia engaged in genocide against Muslims. Critics of Islam
are not to blame because an anti-Muslim fanatic
murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011.
Let’s also acknowledge that the most courageous, peace-loving people in the Middle East who
are standing up to Muslim fanatics are themselves
often devout Muslims. Some read the Quran and
blow up girls’ schools, but more read the Quran
and build girls’ schools. The Taliban represents
one brand of Islam; the Nobel Peace Prize winner
Malala Yousafzai the polar opposite.
There’s a humbling story, perhaps apocryphal, that Gandhi was once asked: What do
you think of Western civilization? He supposedly
responded: I think it would be a good idea.
The great divide is not between faiths. Rather it is between terrorists and moderates, between those who are tolerant and those who “otherize.”
In Australia after the hostage crisis, some
Muslims feared revenge attacks. Then a wave
of non-Muslim Australians rose to the occasion,
oﬀering to escort Muslims and ensure their safety, using the hashtag #IllRideWithYou on Twitter.
More than 250,000 such comments were posted on
Twitter — a model of big-hearted compassion after
terror attacks.
Bravo! That’s the spirit.
January 9-11, 2015
The San Juan Daily Star
17
New York Times Editorials
The Blasphemy We Need
By ROSS DOUTHAT
I
n the wake of the vicious murders at the oﬃces of the satirical
French newspaper Charlie Hebdo today, let me oﬀer three tentative premises about blasphemy in a free society.
1) The right to blaspheme (and otherwise give oﬀense) is essential to the liberal order.
2) There is no duty to blaspheme, a society’s liberty is not
proportional to the quantity of blasphemy it produces, and under many circumstances the choice to give oﬀense (religious and
otherwise) can be reasonably criticized as pointlessly antagonizing,
needlessly cruel, or simply stupid.
3) The legitimacy and wisdom of such criticism is generally
inversely proportional to the level of mortal danger that the blasphemer brings upon himself.
The first point means that laws against blasphemy (usually
described these days as “restrictions on hate speech”) are inherently
illiberal. The second point means that a certain cultural restraint
about traﬃcking in blasphemy is perfectly compatible with liberal
norms, and that there’s nothing illiberal about questioning the wisdom or propriety or decency of cartoons or articles or anything else
that takes a crude or bigoted swing at something that a portion of
the population holds sacred. Such questioning can certainly shade
into illiberal territory — and does, all-too-frequently — depending
on exactly how much pressure is exerted and how elastic the definition of “oﬀensiveness” becomes. But our basic liberties are not necessarily endangered when, say, the Anti-Defamation League criticizes Mel Gibson’s portrayal of the Sanhedrin in “The Passion of the
Christ” or the Catholic League denounces art exhibits in the style of
“Piss Christ,” any more than they’re endangered by the absence of
grotesque caricatures of Moses or the Virgin Mary from the pages of
the Washington Post and New York Times. Liberty requires accepting the freedom to oﬀend, yes, but it also allows people, institutions
and communities to both call for and exercise restraint.
In this sense I disagree slightly with Jonathan Chait’s formulation today that “one cannot defend the right [to blaspheme] without
defending the practice.” If I devoted my next blog post to a scabrous,
profanity-laced satire of the Buddha, I would not expect Chait or anyone else to immediately leap to my defense if the Times decided to
delete the post and dismiss me from its ranks of columnists. If I ran
a reactionary website that devoted itself to recycling pre-modern calumnies against Jewish law and ritual, my rights as an American
would not be traduced if people picketed my oﬃces and other journalists told me I had a moral obligation to desist. And similarly,
in a cultural and political vacuum, it would be okay to think that
some of the images (anti-Islamic and otherwise) that Charlie Hebdo
regularly published, especially those chosen entirely for their shock
value, contributed little enough to public discussion that the world
would not suﬀer from their absence.
But we are not in a vacuum. We are in a situation where my
third point applies, because the kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could
… and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be
defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s
greater good. If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill
you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly
needs to be said, because otherwise the violent have veto power
over liberal civilization, and when that scenario obtains it isn’t really
a liberal civilization any more. Again, liberalism doesn’t depend on
everyone oﬀending everyone else all the time, and it’s okay to prefer
a society where oﬀense for its own sake is limited rather than pervasive. But when oﬀenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need
more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for
a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s the
Obama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial
Times and (God help us) the Catholic League today, they’ve criticized the paper for provoking violence by being needlessly oﬀensive
and “inflammatory” (Jay Carney’s phrase), when the reality is that
it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content. In
a diﬀerent context, a context where the cartoons and other provocations only inspired angry press releases and furious blog comments,
I might sympathize with the FT’s Tony Barber when he writes that
publications like Hebdo “purport to strike a blow for freedom when
they provoke Muslims, but are actually just being stupid.” (If all you
have to fear is a religious group’s fax machine, what you’re doing
might not be as truth-to-power-ish as you think.) But if publishing
something might get you slaughtered and you publish it anyway, by
definition you are striking a blow for freedom, and that’s precisely
the context when you need your fellow citizens to set aside their
squeamishness and rise to your defense.
Whereas far too often in the West today the situation is basically reversed: People will invoke free speech to justify just about any
kind of oﬀense or provocation or simple exploitation (“if we don’t
go full-frontal seven times on ‘Game of Thrones’ tonight, man, the
First Amendment dies”), and then scurry for cover as soon as there’s
a whiﬀ of actual danger, a hint that “bold” envelope-pushing might
require actual bravery after all.
It’s safe to say that the late Christopher Hitchens had a more
positive view of blasphemy than the one I’ve sketched above, and a
more capacious view of the situations in which it’s worth praising
and defending. But on this point I’m in complete agreement with these words of his, from a 2006 column that’s made the rounds today:
LETTERS
Palimpsest of
Antidemocracy
It’s anti democratic fraud to hold a no-confidence
status plebiscite, while you know the status quo enjoys
plurality, if not majority, support and you realize as well
the runner-up can claim even less support, to then stab
the electorate with another status plebiscite without the
status quo, that you’re aware would’ve easily won were
all options there.
Why do you so vociferously clamor for statehood while you stand against everything America stands
for? You just want to pilfer the sweat oﬀ the brow of
the American taxpayer and you’ll never have your way.
Puerto Rico won’t vote for statehood, nor will America
give it to you.
We gringos worked hard through the generations
to build the greatest nation the earth ever saw, nobody
gave it to us. You do likewise. It’s a hierarchy of cruel
privilege that keeps you in the sty and the bullets flying.
If you admire us so much, do what we did. Start by paying your “unproductive” workers decent wages. And
you might teach your kids something in public school,
English even.
Ralph Strangway, San Juan
Dr. Ricardo Angulo
Publisher
Manuel Sierra
General Manager
Plebiscite Parable
Dioxana Berrios
“How many of you children don’t want porridge?”
asked the teacher. A little over half the kindergarteners
raised their hands. “So we won’t have porridge,” the
lady added, “That leaves waﬄes or pancakes. So we’ll
vote. 61% of those who didn’t want porridge picked
waﬄes. But that was only 45% of the class. “Why didn’t
you vote?” she asked the kids who abstained from the
second round. “Because we want porridge!” a student
reacted. Indeed, more children wanted porridge than
either waﬄes or pancakes.
Lisette Martínez
Rina Rinaldi, San Juan
Aaron Christiana
Editor
Robert Jones
Asst. Editor
Traffic Director
Advertising Agency Director
Ray Ruiz
Eva Llorens
Maria Miranda
Local News Editors
Peggy Ann Bliss
Legal Notice Director
Entertainment News Editor
Allan Gil
Ismael Reyes
Internal Auditor
Sports Editor
Sharon Ramírez
Legal Notices Graphics Manager
María Rivera
Graphic Artist Manager