Street scene in France yesterday
Dear friends,
I have not been posting on political issues, but thought I might post an alternative wider view on the killing of 12 people at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, and then the next days the killings in retaliation and hostage taking because I have hardly seen this perspective on the news media and discussions on the Net.
On Amy Goodman’s DemocracyNow.org, she has had two different Muslim French people to argue while of course this killing was so wrong as to beyond speech even. Human beings like us, beloved by friends and family members, precious and destroyed. It was a travesty of Islam, one man, a Muslim French cleric said. He also talked about the how Muslims do poorly in French society, and attempted to show Charlie Hebdo was not aimed at everyone: he had some numbers to show hardly ever is a Jewish person or even mocked, rare Christians, though by no means wide statistics. Everyone talked in terms of impressions. He was strongly debated with when he argued it was the afflicted being afflicted. The other man, a Muslim French scholar, likened Charlie Hebdo to South Park (they mock sheerly to mock; they provoke without a serious agenda) and talked (as one should have heard elsewhere) of the hundreds of people murdered by drones, since 9/11 other mass murders involving the deaths of Muslims, the incident at Norway, what has happened in Afghanistan and Iraq. Gilbert Ashcar, yet another called the two days the result of clashing barbarisms.
What struck me was the sight of France as combed with fiercely armed soldier-police, not as feroicious and not as heavily armed as we saw Boston, but along the same lines. There does not appear to have been a curfew (as there was in Boston in the night and day), so the situation again was not as bad, but the French police-soldiers did not hesitate to kill as a kind of retaliation. So we had police-soldiers killing suspects — who did flee; another situation emerged in a Jewish supermarket where hostages were taken and four died. These scenes really taking place are of murder begetting murder in the context of world-wide murders. Boko Hamar murdered hundreds of people the other day, nearly 2000 in one report; the head of that state supported by the US does nothing. He’s complicit.
There was a bombing in an old NAACP building in Colorado two days ago; no one killed but it got hardly a mention anywhere in the public media; Al Sharpton brought it up on his half hour on MSNBC.
The role of satire could be said to be the irritant, and the cartoonist himself murdered as well as the long-time chief of the magazine, but it is true (as these two murders show) that the Hebdo slaughter was a professional job — so it could be the organization supporting these men wanted to ratchet up the conflict in France which has a strong anti-immigrant party and where many Muslims are assimilated. To give Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff some credit on PBS they had a 20 minute segment on how badly Muslims are treated in Marseilles where they are a very large minority and they interviewed a French man who inveighed against feeling swamped (a la Mrs Thatcher) and Muslim woman who in a supermarket has been the target of hostile gestures, and mockery partly because she wears a burka and is originally French; that is, she is a convert to Islam.
Finally anti-semitism. If it’s true Hebdo almost never satirized Jews, the context here is this past summer’s slaughter of Palestinians. Just now Israel is withholding huge taxes from the Palestinian people for themselves because they have dared to be recognized as a state. Art Seigelman was on Amy Goodman and he could not come up with one satiric cartoon on Jews: he made a forceful presentation on the importance of cartoon satire.
Goodman has someone on her hour who appears to know the Hebdo cartoons well and he said the day after Charles de Gaulle’s funeral Hebdo mocked it as one person died yesterday (like one satiric jibe headline two summers ago on the fuss made about “Kate’s” or the Duchess of Cambridge giving birth to the presumed heir to the British throne: “Woman gives birth”), then the offices were briefly closed.
Satire set this off but was it about satire?
Just an alternative view I have not heard much; only on two nights DemocracyNow.org (Goodman had Tarif Ali talking too) and on one segment on PBS reports.
Miss Drake
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Charlie Hebdo certainly did satirize Catholicism and Christianity. I remember from my student days a comic-style publication by the editors, entitled “God exists–he smokes Pall-Malls” which satirized the entire bible. Google Charlie Hebdo Jesus — images and you will get quite a few covers, usually specific to Catholicism (e.g. the Pope, the Trinity, etc.), and often extremely offensive. In 2012 some Catholic organizations got up some petitions against one cover as “Christianophobic”–http://www.intoleranceagainstchristians.eu/case/caricature-of-holy-trinity-in-journal-hurts-feelings-of-christians.html). They are less likely to satirize Jews or Protestants because these are smaller minorities in France than the Muslims, and also less in the news. But some of the activity in recent years was specifically in response to the 2005 fatwa against the Danish cartoonist who depicted the Prophet, out of solidarity among satirists against death threats.
Thank you for the information. Off the blog I got one reply saying there has been a large emigration from France of Jews into Israel and elsewhere in the last few years. There were examples of sheer South Park humor in these conversations.
One of the people on one of my listservs wrote: ” As we post on the net, we are all Charlie.” We are all also Ahmed.
From a friend: “We heard mention that many Jews (thousands) are leaving France, apparently the largest exodus since WWII.
Last month there was a hostage taking in Sydney, Australia, in a café, but a seemingly mad religious fanatic. … In October there was a shooting Canada at the National War Memorial in Ottawa where the guard, a young reservist, was killed. The shooter then ran into the Parliament building where the Marchal at Arms managed to shoot him. He had a gun under his black robes! There was another incident a few weeks before near St. Jean, Quebec, where some people were run down. These incidents are apparently blow back for Canada’s current involvement in Iraq. Canada did not participate in the 2003 invasion. But it turned out that these self-styled jihadists were amongst the dispossessed. In the Ottawa incident the young man was Canadian born.
In Mexico, the problems are somewhat different, but there is the horrific reality of the drug wars. When one sees the extent of poverty in Mexico and understands that many here really have no future compared to what we enjoy, one can understand their becoming involved in the cartels … there is a connection between drugs and religion. It’s the underside of our racist and exploitative capitalist system that has come to life.”
I was wondering if these attacks from Hebdo were religious-oriented as such — aimed at religions. For myself I can see why someone somewhere might be brave enough to attack religious thought, doctrines as such (for the harm they do) but on the places I looked this was not said. Not confirmed or denied.
My first reaction to “Je suis Charlie” was, I am NOT Charlie. Those dead people are Charile. At a time in my life when I needed it, Charlie really opened my eyes to the importance of thinking through just about every received idea I had acquired in my (then) 21 years. And also, the process of acknowledging bodily functions! I recall a cartoon by Reiser (long dead) about sexual harassment that affected and educated me–though in itself it was endlessly politically incorrect.
I have never been keen on South Park but I have seen that comparison, too. I guess I liked the drawing in Charlie better.
I am not Charlie, but I needed Charlie and I think the world does, too.
There is an interesting video on the NY Times of an editorial meeting when they had decided to publish the Danish cartoons. They had a lot of ideas for the cover but ended up choosing one specifically because it showed the Prophet covering his eyes with his hands (saying “It’s awful to be loved by idiots!”) and therefore did not actually breach the prohibition on showing his face. Another one they liked though was the Prophet laughing uproariously at a newspaper and saying “The Danes never made me laugh before!”–which got in a nice dig at Scandinavians as well as at the fatwa. They later did cartoons showing the prophet naked, but they were satires of that anti-Islamic Youtube film portraying the Prophet as a womanizer, that aroused so much anger in the Muslim community. They would mock just about anything, but I think they did not want to be anti- anything, except rigid thinking.
Well you make the question seriously one about satire — or humor. You’re right that each individual is an individual. In the case we had real bodies in a real brick-and-mortar building so killable in public — the gunmen wanted a public circus; in that sense it resembled 9/11.
Maybe it says something about me that I’ve never watched South Park. Nor the Simpsons. I haven’t read newspaper cartoons since a child — yes I see them in the New Yorker, or a couple of other publications, but mostly they are very mild social humor.
I cannot say that I have been brought to consciousness politically (that includes feminism) by satire or humor. An earnest story with a persuasive argument that brings me in to see myself and to know that others too see what I am seeing; books which have given me language to discuss my sexuality (especially) without the old shame, self-hatred and fear of others. My analogy was a three-word dry mock not a picture.
Much of the world does not like to read long pieces so cartoons are significant and pictures are allowed to say things words can’t but they remain ambiguous in ways that words do not have to be.
What was the role of satire or humor here? For myself out of the alternative views I posted I see it as an excuse for a group of people to take advantage of a situation to ratchet up anger and hurt and despair, misunderstanding and prejudice — in other words that professional job paragraph I wrote. I was appalled by Cameron’s strident speech using the incident; Obama’s representatives; I cannot right now recall Angela Merkel’s reaction (mind going blank just this moment), but it seemed to me a rare morally and socially right one.
To concede that there are cartoons that stay with me. Here’s one from the New Yorker I remember since I saw it and I put somewhere on this blog once.
But do you really get what it means? If I show it to others, do they get it’s about the false equation of power with overt sexuality? And I dislike that equation; it angers me because it seems to me a stupid and pernicious idea which encourages and pressures women to dress sexily on the supposition this is what gives them power when all it does is cater to men’s sexual appetites.
Bob L:
“It appears you’re mistaken when you say Jews are not satirized by Charlie Hebdo. I heard several discussions by Frenchmen on TV in recent days mention that Jews, like Muslims and Christians, were the subject of provocative cartoons.
An article in The Forward today notes the following:
“In 2013, Stephane Charbonnier, the editor and one of 10 staff members (along with two police officers) murdered, penned a series entitled “One Commandment A Day: The Torah Illustrated by Charb,” coarsely depicting Jews perverting their religious values in ordinary interactions and through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Ne pas opprimer les faibles” (Don’t oppress the weak) is illustrated by a Jewish man firing an assault weapon into the back of a Palestinian woman. “Here, take that Goliath!,” he says.
That’s followed by “Ne pas se venger” (Don’t take revenge), in which the woman is lying prone, bleeding profusely, as the man gestures, “Don’t make a big deal about it. No hard feelings.”
http://forward.com/articles/212292/why-charlie-hebdo-must-be-free-to-offend-all-ev/#ixzz3OS22qCnv
Perhaps I’m mistaken, but from a distance it seems to me that Charlie Hebdo’s primary target is privileged, bullying self-righteousness, wherever it appears. Public incitements to hate are banned in France, and some wonder why a well-known Muslim “comedian’s” anti-Jewish taunts are not allowed, but Charlie Hebdo’s mocking of Islamic icons is. But the motivations are quite different. The paper’s satire is intended to break into hypocrisy and bring people back to their best selves.
Bob
Another friend: yes, I agree wholeheartedly that the commando (did I read 80,000 police officers? Is that possible?) response was highly similar to the Boston marathon bombing–and highly chilling. My thinking is that the police would have preferred to capture them alive, if only to obtain information about who they were working with, but it is possible that they simply wanted to kill them–I did think of that young woman with a baby in the backseat killed in her car for ramming a barricade outside the Capitol.
We now know that twice a week on average white police officers murder black people, mostly black men; the only difference that day was the shooting dead happened in the middle of DC and the victims were a panicked young woman and (nearly) her baby (Miriam Carey). I remember how people defended that murder — oh look she’s a terrorist.
This from The New Yorker. By no means does The New Yorker get it right all the time (I was very upset to read the Talk of the Town column after the killing of Michael Brown), but this one seems to me spot on:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies
Let us not get caught up in our own ethnicities. An ideal: at home nowhere and at home everywhere.
Yes, I like this from the New Yorker article:
“We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world, but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.”
Ironically, I have just been readings some of the comments of the surviving Charlie Hebdo staff, who are bemused to say the least about all this support for a newspaper that was pretty widely despised a week ago, and in fact cultivated an attitude that if it didn’t upset people it wasn’t doing its job. I suspect that these men were the last who would want to unite France in any way whatsoever by their martyrdom.
A cortege at Ferney: Voltaire yesterday:
http://www.ledauphine.com/ain/2015/01/11/le-cortege-de-10-000-participants-a-defile-pendant-deux-heures