Last Wednesday’s murderous attack at the Paris office of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was the work of those who believe that cartoons can be so obnoxious that they justified the slaughter of 17 people, 12 at the magazine itself.
It is clear from the carnage that the perpetrators hoped to silence those responsible for the cartoons that gave offence to millions of Muslims worldwide.
Other critics of extreme Islamism have met the same fate. In November, 2004, the Dutch film maker Theodoor van Gogh was murdered for producing a short film which criticised the treatment of women in Muslim countries.
A year later, cartoons in a Danish newspaper depicting the Prophet Mohammed led to worldwide violent protests, resulting in more than 200 reported deaths, attacks on Danish and other European diplomatic missions and on churches and Christians.
This was not the first assault on Charlie Hebdo. In 2011, the magazine was renamed ‘Charia Hebdo’ for an issue that invited the Prophet Mohammed to be guest editor. Its cover included an image of the prophet with the headline: ‘A thousand lashes if you don’t die laughing.’
Fanatical Islamists did not get the joke and fire-bombed the magazine’s offices. Yet the perpetrators failed to terrify the journalists into submission and the magazine barely skipped a beat, publishing the following week.
This time round, they employed the ‘final solution’ by murdering as many as they could in the hope that extreme violence and terror would prevail.
They have, once again, failed miserably.
Not only is Charlie Hebdo alive and well but the murders have secured its future. It has now been transformed from an obscure magazine — largely unknown even in France — to a worldwide phenomenon ‘liked’ by tens of millions online on social media.
The magazine’s distributors initially planned to print 1m copies of the latest issue put together by survivors of last week’s shootings but said demand from France and abroad forced them to increase that up to fivefold.
The original paper printed 60,000 copies a week, selling 30,000, with the rest left for free in cafes, bars and restaurants around Paris. The latest edition of the journal had a print run of three million.
Yesterday, the paper’s distributors said they would print an extra two million copies of its latest edition to meet demand, after three million copies sold out in France at breakfast time.
You can multiply that by 10 or more, if you take the online interest into account. That’s at least 50m people directly supporting a bunch of obscure journalists bent on exhibiting a peculiar form of Gallic provocation.
It’s as if a scarcely browsed college magazine had suddenly become The New York Times.
The pen has proved mightier than the sword — even the sword of Islam.
The killers have failed doubly. Those who led the murderous crusade against the cartoonists planned to sacrifice themselves and to become martyrs for the Islamist cause. In fact, they have made Christian martyrs out of the journalists they killed.
In cities across Europe and around the world, marchers have taken to the streets to support freedom of speech and to offer condolences to the people of France.
Last weekend in Paris, more than one million people, including 40 world leaders, marched in solidarity and sadness, denouncing the violence, and proclaiming “Je suis Charlie!” and “We are not afraid!”
The reaction to the murders has been the same in many other places. From Boston to Brussels, Dublin to Dresden, tens of thousands gathered in support of Charlie Hebdo.
The sub-text to that is a declaration in favour of freedom of speech, a concept dear to Western hearts but alien to many Muslims.
Salman Rushdie, who is on the al-Qaeda hit list and received death threats over his novel The Satanic Verses, expressed his support for Charlie Hebdo. He told the Guardian newspaper: “I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.”
He may be overstating things a bit. Satire is equally capable of being alienating and infantile.
In any event, freedom of expression is not an untrammelled right, even in the West. It is tempered by laws, convention, commercial interests, reasons of taste and a desire not to cause unnecessary offence.
Censorship is a part of daily life in many parts of the democratic world. On Monday, two political leaders were photo-shopped out of an image of world leaders showing solidarity in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks.
The conservative Israeli daily newspaper HaMevaser, (The Announcer) ran a front-page image of Sunday’s rally in Paris — minus German chancellor Angela Merkel and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo.
In the original photo, Merkel was positioned between French president François Hollande and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. But in the printed version, the chancellor was wiped from the record.
Censorship is also part of the criminal law in many jurisdictions. In Ireland, blasphemy and incitement to hatred are unlawful while in Germany overt Holocaust denial can land you in jail.
Censorship has also been employed as a political tool, most notably in Ireland under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act (since repealed) that forbade radio and TV stations from giving voice to — among many others — Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams.
The media also exercises restraint and newspapers do not publish everything simply because they can. Good taste, sensitivity and the desire not to be gratuitously offensive all come into play in editorial decision making.
Yet, it is incumbent on us all to defend the right to be obnoxious, even while we may disagree fundamentally with the views expressed.
For historical evidence of that, you need look no further than France itself. The novelist Francois-Marie Aroet — known by his nom de plume Voltaire — was a satirical polemicist famous for his attacks on the Catholic Church and the French establishment.
He was a cartoonist with words and he is remembered and revered not only for his plays, poems, letters and essays but for his wit and his advocacy of freedom of expression.
He knew the dangers of satire, once writing: “Qui plume a, guerre a” — ‘to hold a pen is to be at war’. Yet, he persisted, risking persecution, prison or worse because of his beliefs.
His biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall captured his philosophy best, giving voice to it in this way: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” — a quotation sometimes mistakenly attributed to Voltaire himself.
He was funny and satirical to the end. On his death-bed a priest at his side asked him to renounce Satan. Acutely aware that the end was nigh, Voltaire responded: “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”
Dan Buckley
