Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression (6 page)

All that’s missing are Jewish fundamentalists to complete the circle. There is indeed such a thing as “Judeophobia,” but the term is highly ambiguous. It’s not clear whether it connotes hatred of the Jew who is born of Jewish parents, who belongs to Jewish culture and the Jewish people; or the Jew who is an adherent of the Jewish religion. Yes, Jewish people / Jews are a pain. They only have one word for two distinct things. Just as not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Europeans are Christians, not all Jewish people are Jews. So how the hell do you poke fun at Jewish religious extremists without conflating them with the Jewish people as a whole? By depicting them precisely. It’s not that complicated. No more complicated than distinguishing between jihadist and Muslim, Muslim and immigrant, Muslim and Arab, Arab and North African, and so on.

But the grand plan of the enemies of Islamophobia is to place anti-Semitism and criticism of anyone who claims to follow Islam on the same footing. Making fun of an Islamist terrorist would be the same as insisting that Jews are inferior or noxious beings. The Internet is infested with commentary insinuating that the liberties cartoonists take with Muslims (and I repeat, drawing a Muslim with a Kalashnikov doesn’t mean that all Muslims carry them), they would never dare take with Jews. Well, exactly. Not if we’re talking about the Jewish people. Just as you wouldn’t ridicule the Arab people because they are Arabs, you wouldn’t ridicule the Jewish people for being Jewish.

On the other hand, we certainly do equate Jewish religious extremists who, for instance, stalk Palestinians in the West Bank by bulldozer and machine gun with jihadists who stalk infidels in Iraq or Syria. We don’t draw an Arab in Muslim dress if we want to represent an Arab, and we don’t draw a Jew in a rabbi’s clothes if we want to represent a Jew. There is no correspondence between racism or anti-Semitism and the critique of religious extremists. But the inventors of Islamophobia won’t budge; they absolutely insist that Islamophobia be treated as anti-Muslim racism equivalent to anti-Semitism, which is anti-Jewish racism.

And idiots aren’t the only ones preaching in favor of this recognition. On September 20, 2012, the admirable reporter Alain Gresh published a lengthy article in
Le Monde diplomatique
in which he excoriated
Charlie Hebdo
for its “irresponsibility.” According to him,
Charlie Hebdo,
a liberal, anti-racist publication, was playing into the hands of the right and extreme right. He wrote, in part:

Charlie Hebdo
might indeed have said all this about Judaism (the religion), with the caveat that we would have been talking about Jewish religious extremists and not about all practicing Jews. But was there an international terrorist movement in 1931 that claimed to act on behalf of Orthodox Judaism? Were there Jewish jihadists threatening to establish the equivalent of sharia law in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, and Iraq? Did Rabbi Bin Laden send a biplane crashing into the Empire State Building? I’m no historian, but I don’t think so. Jewish fundamentalism was not to 1931 what Muslim fundamentalism is to the twenty-first century. And no, Islamophobia is not the new anti-Semitism. There is no new anti-Semitism, only racism—ancient, disgusting, and immortal. Racism that victimizes people of Muslim origin, for sure. Today, in France, the most violent racism is directed against the Romas. Do we need to call it “Romaphobia?” Don’t be stupid. It’s racism directed against the Roma.

Why this grim determination to pair anti-Semitism with Islamophobia? The only outcome of such an association would be to make the word “racism” obsolete.

On March 16, 2007, long before Alain Gresh wrote his article, Plantu, our fellow cartoonist at
Le Monde,
who was deeply involved in the campaign against censorship, was invited to a debate convened by the UN in Geneva. There, as reported by Agence France-Presse, he called for a “blasphemy ceasefire.” According to Plantu, the ceasefire would have to be equally respected by “Middle Eastern artists who draw Jews or Israelis with hook noses.” Reading statements like this, you have to kind of hang your head and wonder if it’s time to change jobs. For Plantu, it would seem, criticizing religion is the equivalent of racism. Plantu equates cartoonists who draw Muhammad with those who participated in the Holocaust drawing
contest
¹¹
organized by Iran at around the same time. In Plantu’s opinion, Middle Eastern artists confuse anti-Semitism with blasphemy; two can play at that game by claiming that the Holocaust is a religion and for that very reason its occurrence cannot be denied. And while we’re at it, why not say that there is just as much evidence of the existence of God as there is of the occurrence of the Holocaust. That sound you hear? It’s the Holocaust deniers rubbing their hands together in gleeful anticipation.

Sadly, the religious propagandists seeking to make blasphemy a crime in France are not alone. The state itself sometimes sets a bad example. While the word “blasphemy” does not appear in the statutes, and neither do “Francophobia” or “republicophobia,” there are laws that criminalize and punish anti-republican or anti-French blasphemy.

In protest against the decree of July 21, 2010, which outlawed the desecration of the French flag, and against the law of March 18, 2003, which outlawed any public affront to the national anthem or the tricolor flag, in January 2011
Charlie Hebdo
called on the citizenry to rise up against censorship. We asked them to ridicule, destroy, or soil the symbol of the Republic. This was an invitation not to destroy anyone’s property, but to demonstrate that a secular republic may not decide for its citizens which symbols are sacred and which are not.

I recall that on March 6, 2010, the Nice branch of the retail chain Fnac held an amateur photography contest. To illustrate the theme “politically incorrect,” one contestant took a picture of a man wiping his ass with the tricolor flag. The photo was honored by the jury and published in the March 19 edition of the free handout
Metro
. The Police Commissioner, the President of the right-wing UMP party, the General Council, and veterans’ organizations protested. Attorney General Michèle Alliot-Marie and Minister of the Interior Brice Hortefeux also expressed their righteous indignation.

On May 25, 2010, Louis Nègre,
the UMP
¹²
senator for Alpes-Maritime, announced that he had filed a bill that would criminalize the desecration of national emblems. On July 1, 2010, it was reported in the press that two Fnac executives had received notices of termination for grave misconduct. According to company management, they were charged with having “validated” the scandalous outcome of the photography competition.

On July 23, 2010, the decree outlawing desecration of the flag was published in the government gazette:

On September 27, 2010, the Human Rights League announced that it had filed an appeal against the decree with the Council of State. The League believed that the decree was “a violation of the Constitution and of the principle of freedom of expression.” The League apparently never received a response.

On December 22, 2010, for the first time, a man was found guilty of desecration of the French flag under the terms of the decree. A first offense was not too costly—Mr. Saïdi was given a suspended €750 fine for having broken a flagpole bearing the tricolor flag at the prefecture, the provincial government headquarters in Nice. The previous day, Mr. Saïdi, an Algerian who had gone there to renew his working papers, blew a gasket when he was asked once again to come back another time. He grabbed the flagpole set up in the lobby, snapped it in two, and threw it at the functionary, missing him. Two police officers subdued him—with some difficulty, it would seem.

The Alpes-Maritime prefecture logically charged him with “destruction of public property and damage to a symbol of the French Republic.” Since it was now allowed to do so, it threw in the charge of “desecration of the tricolor flag.” The functionaries involved also filed charges. And Mr. Saïdi, in addition to being found guilty of desecration, copped a four-month suspended jail sentence for insurrection.

Was the flag desecration decree necessary to bring the hothead to justice? Clearly not. Damage to public property and insurrection would have sufficed. But in the atmosphere that had been deliberately created by the government of the time by promoting a debate on national identity, the opportunity to prosecute a foreigner—better yet, an Algerian—for desecration was too good to pass up. The prefecture, an instrument of the discriminatory policies of the Sarkozian state, needed to test out this new weapon, which will also be used sooner or later against naughty French citizens.

Funny, no one was outraged when the National Front co-opted the national colors for its logo. My blaspheming friends, you’d better act quick if you want to have your fun. In the stunted, fearful, sclerotic, mean-spirited, and bitter France of today, pissing on the flame logo of the National Front will soon be designated a desecration of the flag and cost you €1,500.

Charlie Hebdo
has never been charged under the law criminalizing the desecration of the flag. It would appear that the law has not been applied since the Saïdi affair, but it’s still on the books and the reactionaries will resort to it one of these days, since there’s no law preventing them from running for office and getting elected. Come to think of it, apparently, it’s not showing a lack of respect for the Republic to risk putting the keys to the Élysée palace in the pudgy hands of the extreme right.

Here’s another, equally absurd illustration of the campaign to recognize republican blasphemy, modeled on religious blasphemy.

On September 17, 2010, four Islamists dressed in black are haranguing a crowd in central Limoges. One of the men has a megaphone, while two of his pals hold up a black banner on which the profession of the Muslim faith is inscribed in white Arabic script. The speaker, sporting a beard and a white skullcap, brandishes a copy of the French Penal Code while denouncing its “3,000 pages,” which supposedly protect individual rights. And yet, among these 3,000 pages, “not one line protects the rights of Muslims.” “In France, you have the right to be Islamophobic,” he concludes, outraged, as he hurls the Penal Code to the ground. “Since the book doesn’t protect us, we will not respect it. Until it has been amended, this book, and no other, deserves to be burned!” Rather than burn it, he kicks it away. The event was recorded, and the video is surely still hanging around somewhere on YouTube.

What became of the firebrand? His name is Mohamed Achamlane, and he was the leader of a tiny Islamist group calling itself Forsane Alizza—the Knights of Pride—that was dissolved in February 2012. He committed acts far worse than throwing books on the ground, and was brought to justice. But for his lack of respect for the Penal Code, as well as for leading an invasion of a McDonald’s restaurant on June 12, 2010, and calling for a boycott of the chain, which he accuses of supporting Israel, he was found guilty on June 9, 2011, of “public incitement to national, racial, or religious discrimination.” He was given a four-month suspended sentence and a €2,000 fine. To be sure, his conviction was not based exclusively on the act of throwing the Penal Code to the ground, but he was also found guilty of that crime, although no one could quite identify the statute criminalizing blasphemy against the Penal Code.

Honestly, how can anyone be convicted for kicking a book, whatever kind of book it may be? Whether it’s the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, the Penal Code, a Codes Rousseau guidebook for student drivers, the Yellow Pages, or even the second volume of the adventures of
Valérie Trierweiler,
¹³
it’s only a few sheets of paper stained with ink. It’s particularly moronic to burn a book, but sanctifying symbols—be they republican, religious, or other—is not an especially sound practice either.

In October 2010, a resident of Bischheim, in the department of Bas-Rhin, filmed himself making paper planes from pages torn from the Koran, then launching them toward glasses intended to represent the towers of the World Trade Center. For his final act, he burned what remained of the Koran and then urinated on it to extinguish the flames. The author posted the video on the Internet. He, too, was prosecuted for public incitement to national, racial, or religious discrimination. He was found not guilty, the court having determined that the video did not go beyond “the limits on freedom of expression” and that the author had vilified “terrorist acts that cannot be attributed to the Muslim community.” Phew.

If the legal system is able to distinguish between Muslims and terrorists who claim to follow Islam, why are the majority of anti-Islamophobes unable to do likewise? By the same token, it would be nice if the French legal system could see that when a French flag is burned or soiled, it is not all of France that is being impeached. And even if it were, for pity’s sake let’s stop persecuting blasphemers!