Charlie Hebdo: Free Speech and its Enemies [3]

Part Three: The Unreasonable Man

This is the final part of what was originally a 3-part essay. Parts One and Two can be read here and here, respectively.

Caroline Fourest is a feminist, writer, and journalist, and co-founder of the French anti-racist, anti-fundamentalist, and secularist magazine ProChoix. Unlike Will Self, she does not cringe with embarrassment before the imperfections of liberal democracy. And unlike Alan Rusbridger, she can find no reason to indulge Islamists like Tariq Ramadan in the name of open-minded toleration. In 2004 she published a book entitled Frère Tariq, in which she painstakingly analysed Ramadan's 15 books and his countless essays and speeches and concluded that, in their desperation for an eloquent spokesperson for a modern and moderate Islam, liberals were being hoodwinked by a duplicitous reactionary.

Two years later, when Jyllands Posten published its cartoons of Muhammad, she was working as a contributor at Charlie Hebdo. As Danish embassies burned, and Will Self was busy with his eccentric observations about what does and does not constitute legitimate satire, Fourest drafted a short manifesto.

Originally entitled Together Against A New Totalitarianism (later translated and re-published as The Manifesto of the 12), it first appeared in Charlie Hebdo on 1 May 2006, co-signed by 11 secularists - one signatory for each of the 12 Jyllands Posten cartoons - some of whom were practising Muslims. It began:

Having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism. We - writers, journalists, intellectuals - call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

Unencumbered by moral relativism, Fourest's lucid analysis derives from a straightforward belief that the ideas of the Enlightenment and the progressive politics they midwifed are worth defending. What was unfolding, her manifesto declared, was to be a bitter struggle for ideas and values in which the excuse-making of apologists would only aid fanaticism at the expense of universalism and liberty:

[N]othing, not even despair, justifies choosing obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others . . . We defend the universality of the freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can be exercised in every continent, with regard to each and every abuse and dogma. We appeal to democrats and independent spirits in every country that our century may be one of enlightenment and not obscurantism.

Having published Fourest's manifesto, Charlie Hebdo was virtually alone in re-publishing the Jyllands Posten cartoons. Death threats followed, and in November 2011, Charlie Hebdo's offices were completely destroyed by a petrol bomb. A year later its editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, explained his refusal to compromise by remarking "I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees". On 7 January 2015, along with eleven others, he did just that.

The Post-Massacre Issue

At this point, the surviving staff could surely have been forgiven for throwing in the towel. Instead they produced a new issue featuring a cover illustration that is striking in its simplicity and humbling in its courage, its humanity, and its generosity: a stricken Muhammad declaring his solidarity with the dead beneath the words "Tout Est Pardonné". All is forgiven.

Two days after the massacre, Will Self had informed readers of his Vice article that: "When the demonstrators stood in the Place de la Republique holding placards that read "JE SUIS CHARLIE", they might just as well have held ones reading: "NOUS SOMMES LES TERRORISTES" "

Charlie Hebdo's post-massacre cover decisively answered his bitterness. The magazine's response to the massacre of its staff and fellow citizens was as dignified as Will Self's was reprehensible and squalid. Writing in Tablet, Paul Berman described the illustration as "a masterpiece . . . inspiring, moving, slightly mysterious, and entirely beautiful."

It is inspiring because, in the face of the ultimate in terrorist pressure, the editors and cartoonists have chosen to go ahead and put the drawing on the cover. The cover of this week’s Charlie Hebdo is the most defiant newspaper cover in the history of journalism—a bolder cover even than the cover of the 1898 Paris newspaper that presented Zola’s article, J’Accuse . . . Zola knew that, by publishing his accusation against the enemies of Capt. Dreyfus, he ran a danger of persecution, arrest, and imprisonment, but probably not murder. The editors, staff, cartoonists, printers, truck-drivers, and kiosk vendors of Charlie Hebdo are in danger of murder. And they are unfazed.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but its conquest. The surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo had seen the power of the weak explode into their own offices and had decided that no, their raison d'être was not for negotiation. Richard Malka, the magazine's lawyer was blunt: "We will not give in, otherwise all this won't have meant anything."

In an interview with CNN, Fourest was similarly matter-of-fact. "After what happened - after this slaughter - it was really impossible for my colleagues and friends to not do a cover about what happened and it could only be a cover about, of course, Muhammad." Pressed by the (somewhat reluctant) anchor to accept responsibility for the subsequent violence that had erupted in Kurachi, where protestors burned French flags, and in Niger, where mobs burned churches and desecrated Bibles, Fourest was unequivocal: "But you understand that, when you put it that way, you are blaming, not the people who are killing because of the cartoons, but you are blaming the cartoonists. This is cowardice and it is exactly what the terrorists want."

When the French-Algerian academic and Guardian commentator Nabila Ramdani appeared on This Week to discuss the new cover, she likewise accused Charlie Hebdo of "inciting violence" and held the staff explicitly responsible for the violent protests that had erupted in the Pakistan and Africa. Michael Portillo responded by saying he was outraged. Were he to have then physically assaulted Ramdani in a fit of offended fury, I wonder if she would have been prepared to accept moral responsibility for her own injuries. If not, then she should be made to explain her apparent refusal to consider African and Pakistani Muslims as moral actors.

Ramdani had already written that the cover "symbolises egalitarian bigotry" (whatever that might be). Not to be outdone, her Guardian colleague Joseph Harker, the paper's assistant comment editor no less, had ruled in the same item that, by depicting Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo was "deliberately offending the vast majority of Muslims around the world . . . adding insult to injury . . . lashing out at potentially 1.6 billion people . . . [and most bizarrely of all] spreading guilt by association".

Nevertheless, even the Guardian finally relented and reproduced a two-inch high image of the cover on their website, albeit with a warning in bold type alerting readers to an appalling affront to decency that awaited them as they scrolled down. This placed them a rung or two above Murdoch's Sky News, which cut away from Caroline Fourest and apologised to its viewers, the moment Fourest attempted to display the magazine's new cover illustration.

Caroline Fourest

It is tempting to argue that Charlie Hebdo's courage and defiance puts an end to all excuse-making, at least from those like Stephen Pollard who need no persuading as to the merits of the re-publication arguments. Would that it were so. The dilemma with which sympathetic editors are faced remains unaltered. We do not yet know what price will be exacted by religious fanatics for Charlie Hebdo's insubordination. Days after the massacre in Paris, a German tabloid which had re-printed Charlie Hebdo's cartoons on its front page had already been firebombed. While it is important to emphasise that editors re-publishing cartoons of Muhammad - or, better still, commissioning originals - bear no moral responsibility whatever for any violence visited upon them as a result, that does not alter the fact that printing such images makes violent reprisal more likely.

Western democracies and those journalists who still understand the need to defend basic liberties are confronted with an impossible, disgraceful choice. Submission to Islamist demands will only inflame an appetite for further concessions. But to resist is to court lethal danger. The staff of Charlie Hebdo have gone back out on a limb. No-one asked them to - they did so on a point of principle they were determined to uphold, and they did so of their own volition. But they are out there on behalf of us all, exposed once more.

I cannot bring myself to describe the reluctance of those who have not followed Charlie Hebdo's example as prudent. To do so would be to reduce what the staff there have done to an act of foolishness. It is too noble for that. But nor is it fair to accuse someone like Pollard of cowardice; only Charlie Hebdo's own staff have earned the moral authority to do that. From anyone else, it is not an approach conducive to persuasion. Ordinary people are bound to be frightened and to feel a responsibility to the well-being of their colleagues. What Charlie Hebdo's staff have done marks them as extraordinary people. As Robert Shrimsley remarked in the Financial Times before Charlie Hebdo's new cover appeared:

Charlie Hebdo’s leaders were much, much braver than most of us; maddeningly, preposterously and — in the light of their barbarous end — recklessly brave. The kind of impossibly courageous people who actually change the world. As George Bernard Shaw noted, the “reasonable man adapts himself to the world while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself”, and therefore “all progress depends upon the unreasonable man”. Charlie Hebdo was the unreasonable man. It joined the battle that has largely been left to the police and security services.

Nonetheless, it surely remains beyond dispute that the more brazen the defiance of fundamentalist demands, the more frequent, and the more widespread, the less risk there is for all involved. While it is relatively straightforward to pick off isolated publications who dare to defy them, terrorists cannot murder the entire Western press. The failure to stand alongside Jyllands Posten made it more not less likely that vengeance would be the reward for the few that did.

But to defend something, it is necessary to understand its value and to refuse to become discouraged by resistance. Having seen his pleas for solidarity roundly ignored, Timothy Garton-Ash conceded defeat. In an essay for the New York Review of Books he concluded that getting journalists to act in concert is as futile as herding cats and he made a confused recommendation (in which I don't think he really even believes) involving linking to controversial material hosted on an anonymous website in Iceland. Defeatism like this gets us nowhere.

It also misses some encouraging signs. It is easy to be cynical about the huge protests, the hashtag activism, the opportunistic gestures of solidarity by world leaders, and so on. But Jyllands Posten benefitted from none of these things. Meanwhile, the number of publications and networks prepared to re-print and broadcast drawings of Muhammad is slowly increasing, and the number of rioters attending furious demonstrations across the Muslim world is diminishing.

There is nothing to be done but to keep repeating that no compromise should be considered. The freedom to criticise ideas in open societies must be universal and indivisible. As the 'Jesus and Mo' controversy last year reminded us, it is not just the liberty of white Westerners that suffers from a craven observance of Islamist blasphemy codes. Liberal, secular, and reformist Muslims, not to mention those wishing to discard Islam altogether, are their first and worst victims. They deserve our solidarity as much as courageous free-thinkers like Stéphane Charbonnier, Caroline Fourest and all of those at Charlie Hebdo, whenever and wherever they choose to take a stand on the matter.

As Fourest observed during her CNN interview, "If we do not show the drawings that the fanatics do not want to see, we are killing ourselves. We are killing our rules of democracy if we cannot show a simple drawing due to fear . . . we cannot live under Pakistani law. We are in France. We are a satirical newspaper respecting French law, and French law is very clear: blasphemy is a right."

Charlie Hebdo: Free Speech and its Enemies [2]

Part Two: Re-Publish or Be Damned

This is the second part of what was originally a three-part essay. Part One can be found here.

I think next week there should be a European media week of solidarity. Every major newspaper, broadcaster and platform should re-publish a selection of the title covers of Charlie Hebdo - as Slate magazine has already done - carefully explaining why we're doing this: We wouldn't usually do this, but we are doing it show that violent intimidation does not pay. That the assassins' veto will not prevail. I think that without that solidarity, fear will have won and the assassins' veto will have won. 

~ Timothy Garton-Ash

Islamism's attack on democracy and liberalism operates in two ways. The first is to menace and terrorise. The second - more insidious and dangerous - is to undermine from within. The latter serves to compromise our ability to resist the former. A combination of the two explains why, in the UK - unlike in France and Germany - very few papers were prepared to re-publish Charlie Hebdo's back-catalogue of Muhammad cartoons.

But it is important, I think, to distinguish between those who resisted the urgings of Garton-Ash, Index on Censorship, and others because they were afraid, from those who have been persuaded - violence or no violence - to see things from the fanatics' point of view.

In a series of tweets posted in the immediate aftermath of the murders [here, here, here, here, here, here, and here], Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, was admirably frank about his hesitancy:

Easy to attack papers for not showing cartoons. But here's my editor's dilemma. Every principle I hold tells me to print them. But what right do I have to risk the lives of my staff to make a point? Because this isn't a mere debate about principles. As today showed, this is about lives. These people are butchers. 

No, Charlie Hebdo didn't provoke anyone. It published cartoons. 

Get real, folks. A Jewish newspaper like mine that published such cartoons would be at the front of the queue for Islamists to murder. None of my points mean we shouldn't or wouldn't publish. I'm simply explaining it's a dilemma and not a simple issue of principle. 

Thing is, every argument people are making to me about why we must print cartoons is not just valid but vital. But so are those not to print.

Timothy Garton-Ash's impassioned plea was made at a Guardian-sponsored event held the evening after the Paris massacre. The event's moderator, the Guardian's Giles Fraser, invited his editor, Alan Rusbridger to respond. Compare his reasoning with that of Pollard:

Well, we talked about this a lot this morning because there was a kind of twitter feeding-frenzy last night I think to provoke people to print more and more offensive material. We did print 4 or 5 of the images from Charlie Hebdo, last night and this morning and that wasn't enough for some people. Some people were tweeting me saying, "Yes, but you haven't chosen the really offensive one" and then they wanted to choose a still more offensive one. And there are some very offensive ones that the Guardian would never in the normal run of events publish. 

It was a replaying of the debate over the Danish cartoons. I didn't want to republish some of the Danish cartoons because the Guardian is the Guardian and the Danish newspaper [Jyllands Posten] is the Danish newspaper and Charlie Hebdo is [Charlie Hebdo]. We completely defend Charlie Hebdo's ethos and values and the right to offend in the way that they did. But it felt to me as though there was a sort of tokenism in demanding that the Guardian should change, and I take [panelist] Sunny [Hundal]'s point here, and I think the thing that is important is that we don't change as a result. 

If they want us to change, and they want us to be more inflammatory, and to contribute to the hardening of attitudes in society, then I think one of the things the Guardian could do is not change, and that it should continue to apply its normal editorial values about what it should publish. And that we will carry on publishing [panelists and Guardian cartoonists] Steve [Bell] and Martin [Rowson]. And that was the decision we reached collectively as a paper this morning.

The aphorism often misattributed to Voltaire holds that "I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it." Usually these noble words are employed in defence of free speech. But in the wake of the Paris atrocities, they were most often heard falling from the lips of those who wished to put as much distance between themselves and Charlie Hebdo as possible, without forfeiting their right to be considered defenders of liberty.

What Rusbridger did not make clear was that the offensive images to which he referred were Charlie Hebdo's representations of Muhammad, and that it was a refusal to publish these pictures in particular that Rusbridger and his staff felt constituted a defence of their paper's values. He went on to point out that re-publication was by no means the only way of expressing solidarity, and that the Guardian Media Group had contributed £100,000 to Charlie Hebdo to help ensure that it was able to continue publication.

Alan Rusbridger

This was undeniably an act of meaningful and generous solidarity and one which would have a practical bearing on the magazine's ability to survive. It is also a change of subject. The images of Muhammad were not incidental to the deaths of nine journalists but the explicit reason given for their execution. The right to draw and print such pictures in a free society is precisely what is - or what ought to be - at issue.

It is clear now that all those - myself included - demanding the widespread re-publication of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons were making a tactical error. It was too prescriptive a demand and it allowed the discussion to get diverted away from the central issue of the taboo which Charlie Hebdo had repeatedly violated and into a separate - and frankly irrelevant - debate about whether the manner in which the taboo had been violated was something others ought to endorse.

If Charlie Hebdo's representations of Muhammad were not to Rusbridger's taste, but he nevertheless felt that the right to depict him was one worth defending, he could have simply commissioned his own. But Rusbridger gives every impression of agreeing with the assassins that satire of Islam's most revered figure is something we would all be better off without. He is consequently far more preoccupied by the need to resist those who would pressure him into re-publishing such images than he is by the threat to free expression posed by masked fascists.

Alan Rusbridger is not frightened. His reasoning doesn't put him in a position where he needs to be, which is probably why he wasted not one syllable on considerations of security or safety. But in 2012 his paper had illustrated an article about Andres Serrano's Piss Christ with a large and prominent photograph of the blasphemous exhibit. This artwork is far more objectionable than anything Charlie Hebdo ever produced, and yet it was - rightly - reproduced with nary a thought for the religious sensitivities of devout Christians. So, contrary to Rusbridger's protestations, the Guardian has already changed - it has made an exception for Islam, and it is an exception Rusbridger is determined to protect even as people are dying for disagreeing.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the vast majority of the opinion and commentary that has appeared in the Guardian's pages since 9/11. In the debates around terrorism and multiculturalism, the paper has been a consistently wretched defender of universalism and secularism, and a reliable platform for Islamists and their miserable apologists to advance a narrative of Muslim victimhood that excoriates Israel and insists on the total culpability of the West. 

Two days later, true to its editor's promise that it would not compromise on this line, the Swiss Ikwanist Tariq Ramadan appeared in the Guardian to lecture us as follows:

To have a sense of humour is fine, but to target an already stigmatised people in France is not really showing much courage . . . media organisations [are] intent on publishing the most offensive Charlie Hebdo cartoons, claiming that it would strike a blow for free speech. I support free speech, but I would urge them to desist, for what they plan to do is not courageous and will do nothing to afford people dignity. It will be another example of targeting all Muslims.

In the fraught quarrel over re-publication, any distinction that has put Stephen Pollard on the same side of the argument as Tariq Ramadan has been false. It is for precisely this reason that those who want to publish pictures of Muhammad but are afraid to do so must speak up, so that the proper distinctions may be made with greater clarity. Pollard understands the value of what Charlie Hebdo have been doing. Alan Rusbridger, hostage to a neurotic tolerance of even the most reactionary Islamic beliefs, does not.

Pollard may be afraid, but his reasoning is not the enemy of press freedom. The termites which have hollowed out the Guardian and Will Self's cranium have not yet been allowed to inflict anything like the same damage on the Jewish Chronicle.

The concluding part of this essay can be found here.

Charlie Hebdo: Free Speech and its Enemies

Part One: All Are Guilty (or Self-Flagellation)

LEFT: "100 LASHES IF YOU DON'T DIE LAUGHING"; RIGHT: "IT'S HARD TO BE LOVED BY IDIOTS"

One of the most pernicious arguments advanced to persuade us that the murdered staff of Charlie Hebdo were unworthy martyrs to free expression - or were even deserving of much in the way of sympathy - has been the notion that they were the victimisers of a persecuted minority:

But the question needs to be asked: were the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo really satirists, if by satire is meant the deployment of humour, ridicule, sarcasm and irony in order to achieve moral reform? Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from HL Mencken's definition of good journalism: it should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted". The trouble with a lot of so-called "satire" directed against religiously-motivated extremists is that it's not clear who it's afflicting, or who it's comforting. 

My objections to this argument, formulated here by the author Will Self in an article for Vice magazine, are great and numerous. For a start, I would have thought it self-evident than anyone who thinks it acceptable to answer cartoons by murdering cartoonists is in pressing need of moral reform, thereby invalidating Self's objection by his own lights.

Furthermore, the job of the satirist is to scorn hypocrisy, double-standards, fallacious reasoning, and pomposity wherever it occurs and without political prejudice. That Self would prefer it if satire were a kind of comedy-activism, preferably mocking only those deserving of his own contempt, is beside the point. H. L. Mencken is of no use to Self here since (a) the quotation he cites is misattributed and originally intended to satirise journalistic moral vanity not endorse it, (b) journalism is not the same as satire, and (c) in any case, journalism ought to concern itself with the pursuit of truth, not the affliction of comfort.

But most important of all, in the service of an argument designed to transform victimisers into victims and vice versa, Self misrepresents the motives of the assassins. It was not the mockery of religious extremists to which they objected, but the disrespect shown to a religious figure they venerated. "We have avenged the prophet!" they cried as they fled the scene of a bloodbath they had committed in his name.

Will Self

Muhammad, Islam's purported seer, claimed to be the vessel of the final and perfect word of god, and he is consequently considered to be a figure of considerable power and authority by Islam's ~1.5 billion Muslims. (He has also been dead for nearly 1400 years, which is about as comfortable as it is possible to get.)

Were Islam a quietist faith, whose adherents wanted nothing more than to be able to retreat from the fallen world, Self's argument that its absurdities are the business of no-one but its adherents might be more persuasive. But Islam is proselytising faith, and in its radical political form - also known as Islamism - it constitutes an aggressive ideology which is expansionist, totalitarian, and revolutionary in character, as well as being both triumphalist and (paradoxically) self-pitying.

Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, the assassins of Charlie Hebdo's journalists, are said to have been the cadres of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and as such would have held extremely definite and retrogressive views about the ways in which, not just journalists, but also women, gays, and non-believers of all stripes are required to behave, and all of which derive from a literalist interpretation of Muhammad's own ostensibly inerrant utterances.

In the Shi'ite theocracy of Iran, the Sunni monarchies of the Gulf, and the nascent Caliphate in Iraq and Syria, radical Islam enjoys the privilege of State power and its cruelty and retrogressive effects on individual rights and liberty are manifest. But in the West's liberal democracies, radical Islam is (mostly) the province of immigrant minorities from North Africa and the Asian sub-continent. An analysis that goes no further than identifying the underdog will spare its ideology scrutiny and ridicule, and insist that it be treated with the deferential respect its adherents demand. Even, apparently, as religious proscriptions are enforced at the point of a blazing kalashnikov.

Those for whom power imbalance is the only prism through which to understand the moral calculus in a given conflict make two mistakes. The first is to place scant significance on what either side is actually fighting for - if one's person's terrorist really is another's freedom-fighter then it makes no difference whether democrats are fighting to overthrow totalitarian State or totalitarians are fighting to destroy a democratic one. The second mistake is a failure to appreciate the coercive power of the weak: the use of arbitrary violence to intimidate, destabilise, and terrify.

To Self such objections appear to be of negligible importance, and he scorns the assistance Charlie Hebdo accepted from the French government in the aftermath of the violent catastrophe visited upon them, as if this tarnishes a claim to ideological purity to which he has already made it clear the magazine is not entitled: "[S]o, now the satirists have been co-opted by the state, precisely the institution you might've thought they should never cease from attacking."

He chides the journalists of Charlie Hebdo for their lack of responsibility, secure as he is in the knowledge that his own sensitivity to the plight of the weak means he will never have to answer to their vengeful hatreds. This strikes me as not just conceited, but also foolish. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that some capricious jihadi might take it upon themselves to demand the suppression of a Will Self novel because it violates this or that medieval edict, and it is not hard to imagine the high dudgeon that would immediately result.

And let it not be overlooked that four Jews were also murdered by the Kouachi brothers' co-conspirator for no other reason than that they happened to be Jews; a reminder that Islamism's murderous rage is by no means confined to those who denigrate the faith. In 2006, Self publicly renounced his Jewish heritage - an ostentatious display of disgust occasioned by some Israeli policy or other that failed to meet with his approval. I'm dubious as to whether this will inoculate him against Islamist anti-Semitism, should he ever find himself at its mercy.

Self is a man whose languid verbosity tends to be taken for wisdom by the unwary. It would be silly to deny the man's talents as writer, but they prop up childish political instincts. His tutorial on the limits of free speech is followed by the news that he won't be conscripted into a defence of "the Enlightenment project". His objection is of the "who-are-the-real-monsters-anyway" variety.

The reasons that a revolution built upon the Declaration of the Rights of Man spiralled into the gory despotic excesses of the Red Terror are complex and fascinating, but for Self they illuminate nothing more than the unfitness of the Enlightenment's inheritors and "boosters" to pass judgement on anyone but themselves. Like the religious fanatics they denounce, the West's fundamentalists of reason are in pursuit of a chimeric utopia "that if it's perfected it will render the entire population supremely free and entirely good."

No source is provided for this ventriloquised hyperbole because, as far as I'm aware, none exists within the realm of sane commentary. Not content to have damned the Enlightenment's messy inception, Self proceeds to deride its progressive legacy:

[S]uch rarefied progress is precisely what is mocked, not only by the murdering of Parisian journalists, but by the drone strikes in Syria, Iraq and Waziristan, which are also murders conducted for religio-political ends. It is mocked as well by the clamouring that follows every terrorist outrage for the suspension of precisely those aspects of the law that exist to restrain our worst impulses; in particular the worst impulses of our rulers: namely, due process of law, fair trials, habeas corpus and freedom from state-mandated torture and extra-judicial killing.

Self opens his article by announcing he wishes to be clear, before demonstrating a thoroughgoing contempt for moral clarity. He describes the premeditated murder of journalists for perceived lapses in taste and propriety as "evil", but with his casual ruminations on responsibility and the nature of satire, he floats the notion - without having the courage to actually defend it - that the murdered journalists and cartoonists were partly culpable in their own deaths.

And he is at pains to remind us that, while we share the Kouachis' capacity for evil, in our moral complacency we may have exceeded it. Terrorists pursue their delusory utopia at our expense using automatic weapons, while we pursue ours at theirs using drone warfare. In Self's mind, Islamist barbarism convicts us all, its chauvinism and cruelty simply reflects our own. All are guilty, so none are guilty; an exoneration of terrorism by default.

Not only does such lamentable moral equivalence fail to distinguish between the firefighter and the fire but, at a time when much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Pakistan are being torn to pieces by religious fanaticism, are the civilisational benefits of universalism, rationalism, and self-criticism really so difficult to discern?

It would be nice if beneath all this contempt there lay some sort of coherent moral argument. Alas, all I can find is the perverse vanity of radical self-disgust. For if the pitiless Deobandi fanatics of the TTP wish to subjugate Pakistan's Swat valley, or if the demonic Takfiri lunatics of the Islamic State wish to enslave Yazidis, crucify Christians, and massacre Kurds, then what right have we to object, still less assist those resisting such violence, when we are burdened with the legacy of Robespierre, Danton, and Saint-Just?

As Christopher Hitchens remarked when he found himself confronted by an argument of comparable masochism at the 2007 Freedom from Religion Foundation:

Well, there you have it ladies and gentlemen. You see how far the termites have spread and how long and well they have dined. When someone can get up and say that in a meeting of unbelievers - that the problem is Western civilisation not the Islamic threat to it - that's how far the termites have got.

This is the first part of what was originally a three-part essay. Part two can be read here, and the concluding part can be read here.

Islam and the Right to Offend

Speakers: David Aaronovitch, Mehdi Hasan
Chair: Charlie Beckett
11 October 2012 in U8, Tower One, LSE.

A con-film about Islam triggers Fundamentalist rage.
"Show us an intelligent film and we'll start the Third World War!"

I give you this point: There is nothing in this film which could destroy anybody’s genuine faith. That I grant you absolutely. Because it’s much too tenth-rate for that.

- Malcolm Muggeridge on Monty Python’s Life of Brian

Last Wednesday's LSE debate on the limits of free speech and the right to offend began with David Aaronovitch screening a series of clips. Among them was an extract from a televised debate about Monty Python’s Life of Brian, during which Michael Palin and John Cleese defended their film in the face of complaints from Malcolm Muggeridge and the then-Bishop of Southwark, Mervyn Stockward.

In 1979, deference to political and religious authority was already beating a retreat, but Muggeridge's point of view still reflected the sensibilities of a significant proportion of the British population. Today his priggishness and pomposity are an embarrassment. Satisfyingly (not least for Cleese and Palin), the existence and continuing popularity of Monty Python’s religious satire are a part of what has made this so. As Aaronovitch pointed out, its closing crucifixion ditty "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", which he claimed was a source of controversy upon its release, was now so much a part of national treasuredom that it merited inclusion in the Olympic closing ceremony.

The iconoclasm permitted by free expression, and the incremental rolling back of religious taboo since someone was last imprisoned for blasphemy in 1921, has allowed for greater freedom to discuss, debate and mock Christian beliefs without infringing upon the believer’s right to hold them. This seems a pretty healthy state of affairs to me.

As the hysterical and sometimes lethal reactions to The Satanic Verses, the Danish cartoons and The Innocence of Muslims have demonstrated, we enjoy no such freedom to discuss Islam in the West. The point about terrorism and death threats is not whether or not they reflect mainstream Muslim opinion (and, as far as I can tell, they do not), it is that they create a disproportionate climate of fear that leads to self-censorship and a consequent strangling of satire and free inquiry.

Aaronovitch’s case was basically a passionate elaboration on the aphorism often attributed to Voltaire: “I disagree with what you say, but I defend to the death your right to say it.” He wants to live, as do I, in a society that permits - and even encourages - discussion and satire of Islam.

Mehdi Hasan does not. Or rather, he intends to be extremely picky about what he deems defensible or legitimate. The limits of his tolerance can be discerned in his description of Tom Holland’s scholarly books and excessively timid documentary about the historical roots of Islam as “annoying and sensationalist, but legitimate.”

Hasan began by striking a conciliatory note, stating that he and Aaronovitch agreed on most of the salient issues - particularly that of legality - and that this would therefore be less a debate than a discussion. He then stepped into Malcolm Muggeridge's perfectly-fitting shoes and laid out almost identical arguments.

He broke his case into four points:

• Free speech absolutism is a myth, as evidenced by the fact that neither the 1st Amendment nor the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provide for unfettered freedom of expression.
• The West holds a double-standard revealed by the strictures of political correctness and a willingness to outlaw hate speech and Holocaust denial.
• Muslims deserve special protection from 'Islamophobia' as a persecuted and vulnerable minority.
  
• The legal right to cause offence ought not to be confused with the moral right or even the duty to do so.

Hasan's first point is of course correct. But the reason for starting any conversation about the need for censorship or self-censorship from an absolutist position is that it forces the censor to justify the exceptions, be they on the basis of national security, defamation, incitement to violence or anything else. To reverse this formula and normalize such exceptions is to move the burden of proof from the censor to the dissenter and to turn the fundamental right to an opinion into a privilege allowed by unspecified others under unspecified circumstances.

As for Holocaust denial, while this regrettably remains a crime in some European countries (albeit for well-intentioned reasons), there’s no equivalence between the ideological falsification of history and the right to criticize or mock religious, philosophical or political ideas. Neither ought to be punishable by law in my view, but they are not the same.

And I have no trouble agreeing that political correctness poses a threat to free speech, albeit of a different and more insidious kind, precisely because its intentions are so noble. The reasons would require a separate post, but the attempt to enforce limits on the use of language has led to the growth of a new kind of intolerance. And it is this intolerance that Hasan co-opts to give his third argument a superficial plausibility.

'Islamophobia' was a term invented at the end of the 1970s by Iranian fundamentalists seeking to make criticism of Islam taboo. Unencumbered by irony, religious hard-liners used the language of political correctness to try and make criticism or mockery of their beliefs analogous to xenophobia. In short, it was intended, not as a shield for the powerless, but as a tool of the empowered.

The term has regained currency in Western discourse post-9/11 as a well-intentioned way of countering anti-Muslim prejudice and discrimination. However, it has inherited all the ambiguities and incoherence deliberately hard-wired into it at inception, the most important among which is the failure to distinguish between criticism of Islam and the irrational fear or hatred of Muslims.

For an equivalence between Islamophobia and xenophobia/homophobia/misogyny to carry any validity in a free speech debate, it needs to be demonstrated that Islam as a religious and/or political ideology is somehow equivalent to race/sexuality/gender.

Hasan's attempt to do just that saw him assert the following:

Some liberals believe that beliefs are different. [That] you can change your beliefs. But you can’t change the colour of your skin or your sexuality. Well, first of all, I would argue, that that is a total misreading of what belief is, and how people hold religious beliefs. In particular, Muslims. My Islamic faith defines my identity far more than my racial or cultural background. David wants to be free to mock my beliefs or my prophet but he would never dare mock my race. As a Muslim, I would rather he mock my skin colour than that which is most important – most dear – to me in my life, which is my faith and my prophet. And I know this may be hard for some of you to accept and to understand, but a prophet who is more dear to me than my own parents. Or my wife. Or my children. That is what it means to me.

Hmm. I’ve always found heartfelt public declarations of love for complete strangers, be they the late Diana Spencer or a 7th century religious figure, faintly stupefying. To my ear, Hasan’s declaration and the pride with which it was uttered made him sound deeply silly. But it also carried a sinister implication. By affirming a greater and more profound love for a figure of religious authority than for his own child, he (inadvertently?) brought to mind Abraham's willingness to slaughter his son at his god's behest. And isn't this subordination of earthbound concerns to blind faith the whole reason we're having this debate? In attempting to explain Muslims' violent revulsion to allegedly blasphemous speech, has Hasan not in fact just highlighted the problem?

That's certainly not an interpretation Hasan would allow. Because the other problem with this argument is that it is framed in terms with which Hasan knows his opponents cannot engage, and implies that it is our ignorance and small-mindedness that is at fault. In doing this, it tramples on the secular principle central to rational debate.

One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment was to provide us with a universal language with which to discuss these issues. By retreating into arguments and language incomprehensible to those who do not share his faith (and, I suspect, many who do), Hasan effectively put the matter beyond discussion. “With respect, David,” he said at one point, “you have very little knowledge of Islam”. And are therefore, was the unspoken corollary, disqualified from comment.

Aaronovitch objected. He pointed out that this claim of devotional identification could be – and had been – invoked by Christians for centuries in the name of censorship and far worse. Were Hasan’s argument to be recognized by the secular world, then it would surely have to apply to all religious beliefs. The Life of Brian would have to be treated with the same hostility as the Danish cartoons.

Not so, Hasan responded, for not only is a Muslim’s devotion to their prophet uniquely and incomprehensibly fierce, but there is a second argument for Islamic exceptionalism. 

This turned out to be the familiar narrative of Muslim victimhood. Western imperialism abroad and domestic discrimination at home mean Muslims require special protections from speech only likely to increase their misery. Muslims, Hasan said, are “a small, weak, marginalized minority community in our midst”.

The previous week I had attended another debate on the same subject, also involving Aaronovitch, during which Myriam Francois-Cerrah made almost identical arguments. Islam and the prophet are at the very “core of my being” she declared, so an attack on the prophet is an attack on her, personally and at the most fundamental level. She then proceeded to run through a laundry list of Muslim grievances for which she feels the West bears responsibility. The clear message to guilty Western liberals from both speakers is that, rather than criticizing the beliefs of a vulnerable minority, the West would be better advised to lapse into a penitent silence.

Aaronovitch later mused on twitter that this kind of thinking reminded him of Franz Fanon's Third-Worldism. Hasan and Francois-Cerras's arguments put me in mind of Edward's Said's disempowering doctrine of self-pity. As if to underline the point, during the LSE Q&A an audience member, presumably sympathetic to Hasan's arguments, gently chided Aaronovitch with an accusation of 'Orientalism' for suggesting that Muslims needed to develop thicker skins.

Aaronovitch said that he doesn't much care for "-isms" and I tend to agree. However, there are some rather important "-isms" which are in danger of getting lost in the mix: moral universalism, rationalism and secularism. At the heart of this whole debate lies the following question: is a commitment to these fundamental principles absolute, contingent or unnecessary?

If we are precluded from challenging Hasan's conception of the prophet, is Hasan then not precluded from challenging the Salafi jihadi’s far more lethal interpretation? If Islamophobia is to be afforded the same status as homophobia, racism and misogyny, then how are non-Muslims and liberal Muslims to confront Islamists claiming a religious mandate for sexist, racist and homophobic practices? Does the constant emphasis on victimhood not provide leverage to extremists seeking to indoctrinate the young and disaffected with fantasies of vengeance and martyrdom? And if membership of an oppressed minority affords special rights, protections and privileges to such groups, then is ‘Sam Bacile’, the 'director' of The Innocence of Muslims not entitled to some as a Copt? Is his hatred of Islam and racist portrayal of Arabs not justified by the oppression Copts have suffered at the hands of both, just as hatred of the West is apparently justified by Occidental ‘neo-imperialism’? It is in thickets such as these that the relativist finds himself entangled when he exchanges rights of individuals for special pleading on behalf of groups.

Defending the right to pillory ideas and to assert the fraudulence of beliefs requires an argument on two fronts: one with religious absolutism and another with postmodernism, relativism, post-structuralism and all the other “-isms” currently dominating liberal consensus, not least in academic circles.

I regret to report that this was best demonstrated, not by either of the debaters, but by LSE and the debate's moderator/chairman, Charlie Beckett. Aaronovitch had intended to include Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons as part of his opening presentation for the purposes of comparison and discussion. But Beckett, we were told, had refused to give him permission to do so. LSE's self-censorship of an utterly harmless satirical drawing was not just a craven gesture; it also infantilized an audience of adults. If this kind of thing, whether the product of fear or of a relativist value system, is de rigeur within institutions ostensibly dedicated to the pursuit of free inquiry, then in answer to Hasan’s fourth and final point, perhaps the right to offend has become a duty, after all.

Hasan made a point of mocking the notion that Charlie Hebdo had displayed any courage. Rather, they had simply targeted an already oppressed minority. So as not to interfere with this portrait of Muslims as the victims of intimidation and abuse, rather than its perpetrators, he neglected to mention that the magazine's offices were firebombed last year for publishing a similar cartoon.

On one level, the decision to publish was a straightforward case of business as usual. As a satirical current affairs magazine, its editor claimed it had a duty to respond to the ongoing fallout of the ‘Sam Bacile’ controversy with its customary irreverence, and that to fail to do so would be both a capitulation and an abdication of responsibility. (Isn’t this kind of stoicism usually grounds for applause?)

But the possibility of violent reprisals and the probability of death threats meant that the cartoons were also a defiant and necessary response to the clerical assault on free expression that has been allowed to gather strength in the West ever since Khomeini first globalised Sharia in 1989. Those of us who care about free expression have a duty to voice and defend opinions that we know in advance will cause offence to some, just as Cleese and Palin did in 1979. It doesn't much matter whether they come from literary giants or genuinely 10th rate film-makers like 'Sam Bacile'. Because it is these opinions, and not just the passage of time as Aaronovitch suggested, that will produce progress. Causing offence is a necessary precondition to the smashing of irrationalist taboos and the widening of legitimate debate.

As a pious and conservative Muslim, Hasan recoils from such a prospect. Unlike Muggeridge, the fragility of his beliefs evidently requires him to shield them from open satire and inquiry. And yet, he chose to conclude his opening arguments with the following rather curious analogy:

David is a very well-known, articulate advocate of the Iraq war. How would you feel, David, if a mob of people turned up across the street from you, set up a little picnic camp and every day, as you went to work, or took your kids to school, or whatever it is, they shouted abuse at you, they shouted all sorts of names at you: Nazi! Warmonger! Blood on your hands! Every day. Every night. I suspect you wouldn’t just say “It’s free speech, it’s fine”…I suspect most people would call the cops and say “This is a public order offence! This is not on! This is not tolerable!"

That strikes me as a pretty clear demand for the peaceful toleration of views with which one disagrees. It would therefore be more productively addressed to those who burned The Satanic Verses and firebombed the offices of Charlie Hebdo than to David Aaronovitch.