Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression (4 page)

Monsieur Zaoui Saada tops the list. He may not be the best known of our detractors, but he is certainly the most pugnacious. He is the leader (both President and Secretary-General) of the United Arab Organization, which is itself a “branch” of the Algerian Democratic Rally for Peace and Progress. Yup, all that.

He made his name in 2006 by suing
Charlie Hebdo
for the crime of “incitement to discrimination, hatred or violence toward a group of persons by reason of their origins, ethnicity or religion, and incitement to crimes and misdemeanors.” Take a deep breath—there’s more. He also sued us for “insult to the memory of the Prophet Muhammad, and direct insult to the Muslim community.” These lawsuits were an explicit response to the publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons. He sought €200,000 for each of his organizations, and €20,000 for himself by reason of “moral wrong.” It’s true that, given his personal intimacy with the Prophet, he must surely have been more deeply affected than any other Muslim by the unacceptable violence of a dozen humorous cartoons. Mr. Zaoui Saada was awarded nothing, other than a few lines in the press.

In December 2012, Mr. Zaoui Saada again drew attention to himself by suing
Charlie Hebdo
for publishing, in its September 19 issue of that year, several drawings mocking both
Innocence of Muslims,
an anti-Islam “film” available online, and the over-the-top response of a few Muslims to that pathetic turkey. Under the title “Intouchables 2,” the cover art of that issue of
Charlie
shows a Muslim in a wheelchair being pushed by an
Orthodox Jew.
⁶
This time, Mr. Zaoui Saada’s two organizations and Mr. Saada in his own right sought a total of €782,000. Every drawing that seemed to portray the Prophet, explicitly or otherwise—including one making fun of the director of the anti-Islam movie—was targeted for prosecution. Even an absurdist cartoon of an enraged Salafist pointing at Bugs Bunny and exclaiming: “Another insulting representation of our Prophet!” Thanks to the publicity we reaped from the professionally indignant, we had to go to a second printing of that issue, which was released on a Friday. Yes, the Muslim day of rest. Believe it or not, Mr. Saada used that as another pretext to justify his lawsuits.

On trial day, Mr. Saada, represented by his lawyer, did not appear in Trial Chamber 17 of the Paris Magistrate’s Court. We were given to understand that Mr. Saada, a “management consultant” in the civilian world, was detained elsewhere. In prison, to be precise. Accused of attempted extortion against a retired company director from the town of Jonzac, in the department of Charente-Maritime, Mr. Saada found himself in provisional custody. Mr. Saada’s lawyer did not even bother showing up to the second hearing in Chamber 11. One can only imagine the disappointment of the billions of Muslims offended by the
Charlie Hebdo
cartoons, whom Mr. Saada claimed to represent.

Another notable avenger against
Charlie Hebdo
was the renowned Karim Achoui. An attorney disbarred in 2012, he was frequently referred to as an “underworld lawyer” by a mainstream press that often forgets that even mobsters enjoy the right to a defense. Deprived of his primary source of revenue, Karim Achoui was a latecomer to the cause of defending Islam. In 2013, he founded the Muslim Legal Defense League, an organization dedicated to fighting Islamophobia. He claimed at the time that hundreds of jurists and attorneys had signed on to his struggle. He even boasted of having recruited a former government minister, Roland Dumas, although the latter never publicly confirmed his involvement.

Immediately after establishing his organization, of which he appeared to be the sole representative, he announced his intention to sue
Charlie Hebdo
for incitement to racial hatred. On August 9, 2013, on
Marianne
magazine’s website, Achoui described his action as “a community struggle for individual freedoms.”

His target was the front page of the July 10, 2013, issue of
Charlie Hebdo,
drawn by Riss. The drawing depicted the violence perpetrated by the Egyptian army against the Muslim Brotherhood. It showed an Islamist vainly trying to use a Koran to shield himself against gunfire. The text said, “The Koran is a piece of shit—it doesn’t stop bullets.” Faced with physical violence and the prospect of death, the believer who had once sought to impose his religious vision on an entire nation comes to the tragic understanding that God is not as powerful as he’d thought. Apparently, that was not how Mr. Achoui chose to interpret it. The only thing he saw was “The Koran is a piece of shit,” and he cited that phrase alone, deliberately removed from its context and interpreted literally, as the basis for his lawsuit. A good soldier in the fight against Islamophobia is sometimes forced to dumb it down.

As director of publication for
Charlie Hebdo,
I received two summonses for the same drawing from two different legal jurisdictions and for two separate complaints. I was charged by the Paris Municipal Court with incitement to hatred on the basis of religious affiliation, and by the Strasbourg Magistrate’s Court for blasphemy. Provincial law in Alsace and Moselle indeed allows plaintiffs to sue citizens for blasphemy in the departments of Bas-Rhin, Haut-Rhin, and Moselle. Can a “racist” cartoon in Paris constitute blasphemy in Strasbourg? In theory, it can. And in practice, too.

Article 166 of the local penal code lays it out: “Anyone who disturbs the peace by using indecent language to blaspheme against God in public, or publicly insults a Christian denomination or religious community established on Confederation territory and recognized as a corporate body, or the institutions or rituals of these denominations, or who, in a church or other place consecrated to religious assembly, commits insulting or abusive acts, shall be punished by a maximum of three years’ imprisonment.”

How is such a thing possible in a secular republic? In 1905, Alsace-Moselle was exempt from the law establishing the separation of church and state because the territory was German at the time. In 1919, when France recovered Alsace-Moselle, which had been annexed by Germany under Bismarck in 1871, nothing was done to adapt local legislation to French law. The salaries of priests, pastors, and rabbis are paid by the state, and the maintenance of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish facilities is underwritten by local governments. Moreover, “religious instruction” at school is compulsory.

Karim Achoui took good note of the fact that Islam was not among the religions recognized under Alsace-Moselle law, which had gone unamended since 1871. It would be logical for Islam, supposedly the second religion of France, to be treated on an equal footing as Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism under Alsace-Moselle law. By suing
Charlie Hebdo
in Strasbourg, Karim Achoui’s principal aim was not to prosecute the newspaper but to highlight the incoherence of local law. Karim Achoui was open about his readiness to use the suit against
Charlie Hebdo,
which he knew to be lost from the outset, in order to raise an application before the Constitutional Council for a preliminary ruling on the conformity of a legislative provision with the Constitution. His goal, announced on the sectarian website Oumma.com, was to “reform and revise the law of 1905,” which, according to him, was “an insult to the 5 or 10 million Muslims of France.” Since neither the provincial law of Alsace-Moselle nor the law on the separation of church and state recognize the existence of Muslims, a new law therefore had to be considered that would take the faith of these millions of believers into account. At least that’s how I understood it.

We never had the chance to argue this issue with the Muslim Legal Defense League before the bench, either in Paris or in Strasbourg, because that assemblage of eminent lawyers never managed to file the necessary paperwork with the courts in question, or even to respond to the judges’ summonses. Too bad. Our lawyer would have enjoyed having his own opportunity to point out the absurdity of the sectarian laws of Alsace-Moselle and to call for their repeal. Karim Achoui had kicked up a lot of fuss for nothing. At least he managed to get himself voted 2013 “Person of the Year” by the readers of Oumma.com!

Sadly, there’s more percentage in believing in God than in believing in Karim Achoui. The last time I visited the Muslim Legal Defense League’s website it was still under construction. The League is apparently no more skilled at IT than it is at the law. Its Facebook page is nothing more than one big infomercial to the glory of a disbarred lawyer.

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 Pen
⁷
(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.

On a different tack, let’s not forget al-Qaeda. Or to be precise, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which since 2010 has published a magazine for young Western militants,
Inspire,
online and in English. It was in this magazine that the two young Chechens who committed the Boston bombing attack of April 15, 2013, found the recipe for their explosives. The magazine does not limit itself to inciting Muslim simpletons of the West to murder infidels; it also offers practical advice. Take a few planks, stud them with a bunch of long nails, and head for the nearest highway overpass. Chuck your handiwork onto the road, stand back, and admire the results: heaps of scrap metal and corpses in the name of Allah. You have just taken your first action for jihad. True story. The magazine has published similar pranks and tips that are too numerous to list here.

In its March 2013 edition,
Inspire
published an announcement containing the names of eleven persons accused of “crimes against Islam” and who were wanted “dead or alive.” I found my name among them, misspelled but accompanied by a photo of my mug, looking terrified. It was from a press photo taken the day of the attack on
Charlie Hebdo
. Funny. I’m in good company in the announcement—sort of. There is the inescapable Salman Rushdie; Geert Wilders, leader of the extreme right in the Netherlands; Flemming Rose, culture editor of the Danish daily
Jyllands-Posten,
at whose initiative the Muhammad cartoons were published; Terry Jones, an American pastor and total nutjob who has burned Korans; and some other lucky laureates. In order to ensure that the loons who read
Inspire
understand what is expected of them, a smoking gun is pictured to the left of the Nazi pastor’s head and a pool of blood to the right. This subtle montage is entitled “YES WE CAN,” with a subtitle below:
“A bullet a day keeps the infidel away.”
And at the bottom: “Defend Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him.”

The struggle against Islamophobia can be waged in many different ways (I far prefer the half-baked efforts of Karim Achoui, even if
Inspire
does comedy better), but the goal is always the same: to prevent the infidel from blaspheming. Yes, I know, it’s disingenuous to put citizens who take us to court and criminals who threaten us with death on the same footing. But if my hyperbole can make those who call
Charlie Hebdo
a racist newspaper see how easy it is to make shameful comparisons, it will not have been in vain.