Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression (5 page)

Here’s another argument that has been made against the freedom of expression practiced by the artists of
Charlie Hebdo:
Through the magic of social networking, the drawings you publish in your newspaper, which sells a bare handful of copies in France, will be seen by millions of Muslim web surfers. When a little drawing beats its wings here, it unleashes a shitstorm of hatred on the other side of the world. You must remember that, in this day and age, whenever you express yourself, like it or not you are speaking to the entire planet. You need to be careful. You have to act
responsibly
.

On a visit to Cairo in September 2012, Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault and Minister for Foreign Affairs Laurent Fabius described
Charlie Hebdo
as “irresponsible” because several of our drawings had addressed the grotesque Internet-based film
Innocence of Muslims,
which I already mentioned, and the angry demonstrations it had provoked in the “Muslim world.” Following their lead, many political and religious dignitaries denounced
Charlie Hebdo’
s irresponsibility. Making fun of such a wretched movie, of the disproportionate reaction of a handful of angry Muslims, and of the media saturation around it—and all with a few strokes of a pencil published in a French newspaper sold exclusively at newsstands—was “adding fuel to the fire.”

The television networks aired interviews with French expatriates who blamed
Charlie Hebdo
for the threats directed at them and their families. Security for French embassies in so-called Muslim countries was beefed up, and French schools overseas were closed for a few days.

Charlie Hebdo
had become more dangerous than al-Qaeda. Better yet,
Charlie Hebdo
justified the existence of terrorist groups claiming to be Islamic. Drawings hastily condemned as Islamophobic legitimized the activities of murderers.
Charlie Hebdo
had acted provocatively; it was only natural to anticipate a violent reaction.

The newspaper, which does its best to adhere to French press law, had suddenly been enjoined, including by French government ministers, to respect unwritten international laws promulgated by a few purportedly Muslim wackos. What conclusions are to be drawn from these events? That we have to cave to pressure exerted by terrorists? That French law should conform with sharia? But with which version? Clearly, the strictest. It’s less risky.

If tomorrow some terrorist claiming to be a Buddhist wreaks havoc on the planet, we will be asked above all not to portray the instigators of such violence for fear of stirring up the fury of Buddhists the world over. And if the next day a vegetarian terrorist threatens to kill anyone who dares assert that our taste buds delight in meat, we will be required to respect the carrot just as we are required to respect the brotherhood of prophets of the three monotheistic religions.

We are asked to respect Islam, but respecting Islam is not the same as fearing it, even if there’s no crime in fearing it. There is no respect for Islam in conflating it with Islamic terrorism.

The people who start howling the minute
Charlie Hebdo
publishes a drawing of a self-styled Islamic terrorist toe a particular line. They suggest that by caricaturing an Islamist terrorist, the cartoonist is really symbolizing all Muslims. So long as the terrorist is identifiable as a Muslim, the cartoonist must be mocking all Islam. If you draw a jihadist doing what jihadists do, you are dragging the billions of faithful through the mud. If you draw Muhammad denouncing the extremists among his followers, you’re insulting all Muslims. The terrorist must be stripped of any element that could identify him as a Muslim, while it is quite simply forbidden to represent Muhammad at all. If portraying an Islamist terrorist as grotesque is Islamophobic, that’s the same as saying that all Muslims are terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists.

Those who accuse
Charlie Hebdo’
s artists of Islamophobia every time one of their characters sports a beard are not only dishonest or of gratuitous bad faith, but they are also revealing their support for so-called radical Islam. When you draw an old man engaged in pedophilia, you are not casting aspersions on all old men or suggesting that all old men are pedophiles (or vice-versa), and other than a rare few idiots, no one would accuse the cartoonists of
Charlie Hebdo
of that. The drawing is just an old pedophile, nothing more.

The front page of the 2006
Charlie Hebdo
issue featuring the Danish cartoons and signed by Cabu is a perfect example. A bearded fellow in a turban holds his head in his hands. He is either fuming or weeping—perhaps both. In a speech bubble, he says: “It’s hard to be loved by assholes…” The title above the drawing explains: “Muhammad fed up with the fundamentalists.” The drawing explicitly shows Muhammad complaining about the attitude of fundamentalists, yet
Charlie Hebdo
was virulently criticized for suggesting that all those who worship the prophet of Islam are assholes. The cartoons in
Charlie Hebdo
are not merely misinterpreted by illiterates, but deliberately twisted by wise guys to distort their meaning.

Since, by their lights,
Charlie Hebdo
is an Islamophobic newspaper, and therefore racist, our detractors sometimes alter a drawing to make it conform to their conception of the publication. A drawing from October 2013 made the rounds of social media. Signed by Charb, it depicted the head of Minister of Justice Christiane Taubira on the body of a monkey. The drawing was indeed mine, but it had been stripped of its essentials. I’d made it to denounce the attitude of a National Front candidate in the municipal elections who had attached a monkey’s body to the Minister’s face in a photo on his Facebook page; I’d called it “Rassemblement Bleu
Raciste,”
⁸
and included the National Front’s tricolor flame emblem at the bottom left. These two identifying markers had been removed from my parody of the National Front poster. By whom? The first person to distribute the drawing without its text and flame was the singer Disiz, in 2013.

Disiz had contributed to a rap song that had been used to promote the launch of a film called
La Marche,
which was strongly inspired by the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism. Thirteen rappers had collaborated in writing the song, including Akhenaton, Kool Shen, Soprano, and Nekfeu. The latter had composed the following verses: “There’s no one lamer than a racist / These theorists want to silence Islam / What’s the real danger: terrorism or
Taylorism?
⁹
/ My boys get up
early,
¹⁰
I’ve seen them hustle / I call for a public burning for those dogs at
Charlie Hebdo
.”

Charlie Hebdo
had been firebombed in 2011 after it published an issue entitled “Charia Hebdo” to lampoon the possible establishment of sharia law in Tunisia and Libya. Nekfeu’s poetic invitation was thus a call for a second arson attack on the newspaper for religious reasons.
Charlie Hebdo
responded to Nekfeu, but it was Disiz who retorted by posting the doctored drawing on Instagram, claiming that
Charlie Hebdo,
a rag well known for its Islamophobia, was also racist. Disiz concluded his polemic with a charming warning, again on Instagram, to the cartoonists at
Charlie Hebdo:
“Even if you were mutes I’d silence your voices. Wanna know how I’d do it? Well, I’d cut off your hands…”

Something similar happened with a former
Charlie Hebdo
colleague who now makes his living denouncing the newspaper’s racism (which obviously started the day he left) with remarkable bad faith. He, too, has found it useful to back up his statements by publishing drawings completely out of context. For instance, a drawing of a particularly nutty (but real) Belgian Islamist, about whom a
Charlie
reporter had written a lengthy exposé, was reprinted without the accompanying text and denounced as representing the “typical Muslim.”

What’s in it for people who seem to be sincere in their fight against racism to hold
Charlie Hebdo
up as a racist publication? A newspaper that champions voting rights for immigrants, legal status for the undocumented, anti-racist legislation…Shouldn’t we be on the same side? Yes. But that would be forgetting that it’s not the struggle against racism these folks are really interested in; it’s the promotion of Islam.

Happily, not everyone is as reckless as
Charlie Hebdo
when faced with the threat of being fingered as an Islamophobe or blasphemer. For instance, the 2012 celebration of the contemporary arts festival in Toulouse known as Springtime in September: Moroccan artist Mounir Fatmi presented his work
Technologia,
a video projection on the Pont-Neuf that included verses from the Koran. Because “sacred texts,” Koranic suras, had been projected (accidentally, it turns out) on the pavement of the Pont-Neuf, a tiny group of self-styled Muslims protested on the pretext that it was an insult to their religion to trample underfoot verses of the sacred text. A passerby was punched for having walked over them. An imam was called in to restore calm, and a dozen police cars took up positions at the perimeter of the sacrilege.

The artist was dumbfounded. “This project, an homage to my Arab-Muslim heritage that has been purchased and presented by the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar, has never had any problems until today.” After an emergency meeting at city hall, attended by Muslim representatives, the artist decided to call it quits. “As the appropriate conditions for the exhibition of my piece are not in place, thereby preventing it from being interpreted and, above all, understood, I prefer to shelve it.” At the same time, Paul Ardenne, the director of Springtime in September, was cowering in his boots: “In the current, hypersensitive context, it’s better this way.”

In caving to an extremist minority that represents no one but itself, you acknowledge its power. These radicals co-opt the voice of Islam, and everyone pretends they are right. It would seem that in France, then, Islam is no longer embodied in its millions of adherents who are a pain in no one’s ass, whether they practice their religion or not, but is officially represented by a handful of loudmouths. And it’s not Muslims who are to blame for this, but a bunch of overfed middle-class morons terrified by the very idea of Muslims and, naturally, deeply intolerant of and highly sensitive to any speech or act that might be interpreted as Islamophobic.

What do the work of Mounir Fatmi and the cartoons of
Charlie
have in common? The outrage of a few dipshits.

Eminent, terrorized intellectuals, moralizing old clowns, and half-witted journalists have, in all earnestness, openly questioned whether it was wise to publish the cartoons of Muhammad “in the current environment.” In Toulouse, a work of art that in no way contravened the rules of Islam was canceled because it was potentially Islamophobic. The time for debating the limits of freedom of expression has passed. The time for discussing whether such or such drawing is in good taste or bad has passed. The censors no longer want anything to do with this whore called free expression. No discussion whatsoever! But they’re right to flaunt their barbarous stupidity, since it works. Self-censorship is becoming a major art form in France.

Mounir Fatmi was afraid that his work would not be understood—but by whom? Those blowhards will never understand anything; there’s nothing to explain! So long as the biggest jerk in the Taliban is unable to understand my art, I refuse to express myself—is that it? The Koran is not only the holy book of the Muslims; it is also simply a (copyright-free) book and thus the heritage of all humankind.

To suggest that only the imams and faithful are permitted to mention the Koran, the prophet, or God without lapsing into Islamophobia is to play right into the hands of the most radical Islamists. And in giving credence only to the voices of extremists, we are doing nothing but creating hatred of Islam.

The term “Islamophobia” has become so popular that the Catholic extreme right, which sees Islam as both a “false religion” and as intolerable competition, has tried to co-opt the idea. In demonstrations against certain theatrical productions that have presented Jesus in a manner contrary to canon law, as well as in marches against marriage equality, chants have been heard denouncing “Cathophobia.” Just as there are Islamophobia and Islamophobes, why shouldn’t there also be Cathophobia and Cathophobes? Having very frequently published images of Jesus, the Pope, the saints, and the whole gamut of liturgical paraphernalia,
Charlie Hebdo
has been sued a good dozen times by the General Alliance against Racism and for Respect of French and Christian Identity (AGRIF), an organization of Catholic fundamentalists who long maintained close ties with the National Front.

AGRIF fights racism…anti-white and anti-Christian racism. It has accused
Charlie Hebdo
of anti-French racism, among other things. How do Catholic fundamentalists define anti-French racism? Easy. By depicting the Holy Virgin in positions described nowhere in her official biography, we insult France. Indeed, ever since Louis XIII consecrated his person and his country to the Mother of God, France and the Virgin have been indivisible. To make fun of the Virgin is to make fun of France and all the French.

That was before the invention of Islamophobia. Today, the artists and editors of
Charlie Hebdo
are not so much anti-French racists as they are Cathophobes. If it works for Muslims, there’s no reason it shouldn’t work for Catholics and, more broadly, for Christians. Yes, Christianophobia is a scourge besetting the “eldest daughter of the Church” (but not exactly, since it was not the Kingdom of France but the Kingdom of Armenia that was the first to convert to Christianity).

On October 29, 2011, Catholic fundamentalists from the organization Civitas concluded their national demonstration against Christianophobia in front of the Théâtre de la Ville, in Paris, to protest the production of the Romeo Castellucci play
On the Concept of the Face, Regarding the Son of God,
which they considered to be blasphemous. They were joined in solidarity by a small group of Muslims. It was a blast to see (I was there) the many Catholics of Civitas chanting “Hail Mary, full of grace” on their knees amid clouds of teargas to the left of the theater, while across the street, on the traffic island in the place du Châtelet, bearded men egged them on with banners printed with such slogans as “Hands Off Issa!”—“Issa” meaning Jesus in Arabic. While Muslims do not consider Jesus to be the son of God, he is nevertheless a major prophet for them.

The problem was, the Civitas militants were separated from their Muslim friends by a cordon of riot police, who prevented all contact between them. The praying Christians were seized by a vague sense of disquiet upon noticing the bearded Muslims. Many failed to understand that the Muslims were there in support of their protest and wondered aloud what those “towel-heads” were doing there. Were they hostile? No, they were not. But the sentiments expressed that day by some Catholic fundamentalists were not so much Islamophobic as out-and-out racist. Never mind. The Catholic extreme right does not need the support of Muslim fundamentalists; it only needs their vocabulary. If Islam picked up a few characters from Christianity to bolster its own legitimacy, in return, Catholic fundamentalists centuries later have picked up a few propaganda gimmicks from their Muslim counterparts.

Catholic fundamentalists await every triumph by Muslim fundamentalists in their fight against Islamophobia with both voracity and jealousy. On February 7 and 8, 2007, in the lawsuit brought against
Charlie Hebdo
by three Muslim organizations for having republished the Danish cartoons, the plaintiffs called only one witness: a Catholic priest. Could be an alliance in the making.

Catholic fundamentalists, as well as others reputed to be more moderate, have been sulking since 1905 over the adoption of the law separating church and state and dreaming of their revenge. What jurisprudence delivers to Muslims, it could deliver equally to other believers.

The terms “Cathophobic” and “Christianophobic” have yet to achieve the media success enjoyed by “Islamophobic” because there is a real difference between anti-Muslim acts and those seen as anti-Christian. There are far more anti-Muslim acts, even though there are fewer Muslims than Christians in France, and there’s not much evidence of discrimination against Christians because of their religious beliefs. But there’s no reason to despair; if you rehash a lie often enough, it ends up becoming the truth.