[Reader-list] Leigh Phillips: Lost in translation: Charlie Hebdo, free speech and the unilingual left

[Patrice Riemens]

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Lost in translation: Charlie Hebdo, free speech and the unilingual left

In the 48 hours after the Paris massacre, much of the anglophone activist
and academic left were quick to sneer at public displays of solidarity
with the murdered cartoonists and journalists of the French satirical
newspaper Charlie Hebdo and criticized the vigils, demonstrations and
editorial cartoons from other artists as siding with racists.

Of course the killing of journalists is a bad thing, so the argument goes,
but come on, Charlie Hebdo is “a racist publication.” So what do you
expect? is the implicit, victim-blaming conclusion.

The millions of people, atheist, Christian, Jew and Muslim — including
trade unionists bearing the drapeaux rouges of the communist CGT union and
activists from far-left groups such as the Parti de Gauche and the Nouveau
Parti Anticapitaliste — who spontaneously filled the streets of towns and
villages across France in solidarity with the slain journalists and in
defence against this manifest attack on freedom of speech, or who changed
their social media avatars to a black square with the words Je suis
Charlie were, in the words of prominent British socialist commentator
Richard Seymour writing in Jacobin magazine and on his own blog,
“platitudinous,” “mawkish and narcissistic” and engaging in a “blackmail
that forces us into solidarity with a racist institution.”

Elsewhere many leftists such as Jon Wilson writing on LabourList have
declared “Je ne suis pas Charlie” and that this is about Islamophobia and
war. Those who stand up for freedom of expression today, they argue, are
at best unwittingly performing an ideological service to militarist elites
and at worst actively lining up with the war party just as liberal hawks
such as the late Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen and Paul Berman did
after Sept. 11, 2001.

The last few days have been a humiliation for the anglophone left,
showcasing to the world how poor our ability to translate is these days,
as so many people have posted cartoons on social media that they found
trawling Google Images as evidence of Charlie Hebdo’s “obvious racism,”
only to be told by French speakers how, when translated and put into
context, these cartoons actually are explicitly anti-racist or mocking of
racists and fascists.

The best example here is the very widely shared cartoon by the slain
editor Stéphane Charbonnier, known as Charb, of a black woman’s head on a
monkey’s body above the phrase Rassemblement Bleu Raciste (Racist Blue
Rally). The French are aware that the woman in the cartoon is the justice
minister, Christiane Taubira, and that the red, white and blue flame in
the cartoon is the logo of the Front National, which had recently gotten
into hot water for publishing a photograph of a baby monkey and the words
“At 18 months” next to a picture of Taubira and the word “Now.” The Front
National’s slogan is Rassemblement Bleu Marine (Navy Blue Rally), a play
on the name of their leader, Marine Le Pen. It is obvious to any French
person familiar with the political context that the cartoon is mocking the
racism of the Front National and indeed Taubira herself, in the wake of
the massacre, has mounted repeated defences of Charlie Hebdo.

Another would be the cartoon of pregnant Boko Haram sex slaves under the
slogan “Hands off our benefits!” which many English leftists held to be a
self-evidently racist commentary on the Muslim “demographic threat,” when
the cartoon is actually a clunky “first-world problems” commentary on
complaints over the French government restricting child benefits for top
earners, suggesting that rich French people really have nothing to
complain about compared to people’s travails in northeast Nigeria.

In an extremely widely shared post (Over 90,000 shares as of the time of
writing) Jacob Canfield at The Hooded Utilitarian showcased a series of
Charlie Hebdo cartoons and declared, “Its staff is white. Its cartoons
often represent a certain, virulently racist brand of French xenophobia.
While they generously claim to ‘attack everyone equally,’ the cartoons
they publish are intentionally anti-Islam, and frequently sexist and
homophobic.”

First of all, its staff is not all white, not that a small newspaper with
a tiny all-Caucasian employee roll is automatically a signifier of racism
in any case. Copy editor Moustapha Ourrad, for example, was among those
murdered by on Wednesday. Next, the cartoon that Canfield feels is
homophobic, of a male Charlie Hebdo writer kissing an imam under the words
“Love is stronger than hate,” was the cartoon that filled the front cover
in 2011 the week after the paper’s offices had been firebombed by
Islamists, completely destroying all their equipment, for printing an
edition “guest edited” by the Prophet Mohammed to celebrate the election
of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamists of the Ennahda party in
Tunisia. This was also the time of growing conservative opposition to gay
rights, culminating in the country’s massive right-wing Catholic
anti-gay-marriage protests of recent years. Five months earlier, the
government had crushed legislation to legalize same-sex unions.

In this context, the cartoon can only be seen as expressly
anti-homophobic, giving a big, wet, cheeky kiss to the likely homophobic
Islamists who had tried to kill them. (One friend told me after I
explained the context behind this cartoon that it was still problematic
because “at a time when Muslims in Western countries are the target of
Islamophobic prejudice, we should be sensitive to their religious
sensibilities. A cartoon of two men kissing is offensive to them.” To my
mind, if there’s anything homophobic going on here, it’s the idea that
gays should hide themselves so as not to offend those who maintain a
hatred of homosexuals.)

How can we trust these leftists’ critical analyses of other events in
foreign lands such as Ukraine, Syria or Mali if it turns out they haven’t
done their due diligence as researchers when it comes to the far more
accessible French context? These otherwise well-meaning but
non-French-speaking knights-in-social-media-armour have embarrassed
themselves by spouting off about things they know not quite enough about.
This is not clear-headed thinking. This is not leftist or anti-racist
thinking.

It is an illogical, self-destructive, identity politics mess where all
accusations of racism are instantly believed and anyone who raises
questions is racist themselves. Accusations of racism (indeed any
accusations) must be substantiated by the accuser, not automatically
presumed to be true. Automatic presumption of racism without
substantiation is not anti-racism; it is cowardice and vanity, as it
suggests the individual is more interested in ensuring he or she does not
appear racist rather than in actually countering racism.

But this episode is about more than just the willful ignorance of a
unilingual left luxuriating in its whipped-up dander; there are deeper
worries about how such left and liberal critics are approaching freedom of
speech in general. The whole affair is quite the nadir for the
identitarian left, an object lesson in how its current tendency toward a
censorial, professionally offence-taking prudishness is limiting the
left’s advance, cutting us off from how most ordinary people live their
lives and navigate prejudice, and a breach with hundreds of years of
leftist thought and practice with respect to the enduring question of
freedom.

Charlie Hebdo is, above all, a child of the upheaval of May 1968. It was
founded in the wake of the publication ban on its predecessor, Hara-Kiri
Hebdo, after the latter cheekily poked fun at the right-wing president and
hero of the Resistance, Charles de Gaulle, upon his death.

It was born a left-wing publication, indeed a far-left publication,
brimming with insolence and bile for capitalist, governmental and clerical
elites. In the English-speaking world, malheureusement, we don’t really
have a tradition of satirical newspapers quite like Charlie Hebdo or its
rival Le Canard Enchainé (The chained-up duck), which combine cheeky
editorial cartoons with investigative journalism and opinion. The closest
approximation would be Private Eye in the United Kingdom. But the format
has spread throughout the francophone lands, with imitators in Belgium,
Switzerland and French-speaking Africa, both sub-Sahara and the Maghreb.

Charlie also embraces a politics of anti-clericalism — a species of
militant secularism that targets priests, monks, nuns, bishops, popes,
rabbis and, latterly, imams and mullahs specifically as individuals
(believed to be pompous, hypocritical figures preaching a morality that
they do not observe themselves) and not just as representatives of a
religion — that dates back to the original Jacobins in the French
Revolution. Anti-clericalism has also existed in varying forms in Spain,
Latin America, Québec, Russia and contemporary Iran.

The targeting of Catholic priests by anarchist revolutionaries during the
Spanish Civil War and Orthodox priests by Bolsheviks were two of its most
violent expressions. But anti-clericalism never really existed in the same
way in the Protestant (and thus anglophone) world due to the break with
Rome in the 16th and 17th centuries and Protestantism’s transformation of
an individual’s relationship with the church hierarchy and God himself.
Related to this, the paper’s style of comedy, gouaille — a bawdy,
impertinent, insolent, often obscene humour corrosif — is a part of a
Parisian tradition that finds its origins in the time of the French
Revolution as well, and which Arthur Goldhammer, the translator of Thomas
Picketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, explains well: “It's an anarchic
populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect
itself as venerable, sacred or powerful.”

It’s not witty. If anything, it’s rather juvenile. In mocking the idea
that there should be no graven images of Mohammed, one of Charlie’s
cartoons was of a naked prophet with a star instead of a bumhole under the
slogan “A star is born.” It’s puerile, infantile, not infrequently
unfunny. It’s fart jokes. It’s whoopie cushions. It’s Monty Python’s
masturbation-themed and Vatican-mocking “Every sperm is sacred” sketch.

Leftists must make a distinction between blasphemy and racism. The two are
not the same thing. No one has the right not to be offended. This is not
an arcane point. After decades of legal abeyance, blasphemy and “religious
insult” laws are making a comeback.

Meanwhile, for the most part, Charlie Hebdo’s politics have been
progressive. SOS Racisme, the main anti-racist NGO in the country, has
partnered with Charlie in the past in campaigns against anti-immigrant
politics, such as a joint campaign in 2007 against DNA testing for
migrants aiming to be reunited with their families. Following the
massacre, the organization offered its support to the newspaper and
denounced the attack as an assault on free speech. The editor murdered
this week by the Islamist gunmen, Charb, was a long-time member of the
French Communist Party, supported the new far left Front de Gauche,
opposed the adoption of the proposed neoliberal European constitution in
2005 and illustrated Marx: A User’s Guide, the 2014 book by the late,
brilliant socialist author Daniel Bensaïd. One of those killed, Bernard
Maris, was on the scientific council of ATTAC, the NGO critical of
corporate-led globalization; ran for the Greens; was a critic of EU
austerity and the eurozone; and wrote for a number of other left-wing
publications.

The paper has no set editorial line per se, and its journalists frequently
disagree publicly, but among the favourite targets of its cartoons and
journalism are the far right and other partisans of anti-immigrant
politics, corporate malfeasance, banker shenanigans, cuts to public health
care, tax havens, and the arms industry. A scoop in Charlie from last
November, for example, revealed threatening text-message extortion of an
assistant of a right-wing senator already indicted in an investigation
into municipal vote buying. The paper is a furious opponent of the Israeli
government’s regular assaults on Gaza. It defended Roma against government
round-up and deportation. Charlie Hebdo is part of the “mental furniture”
of the left in France.

As Charb wrote in Le Monde in 2013, “It’s no secret: the current editorial
team is split between supporters of the left, the far left, anarchism and
environmentalism. Not everyone votes, but we all popped the champagne when
[conservative president] Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated in May 2012.”

Of course, nothing stops one from being racist and otherwise left-wing,
just as there are sexist animal rights campaigners and homophobic trade
unionists. But describing Charlie as a “racist publication” makes readers
think that the paper is akin to the house journal of the National Front.

Charlie, like many organizations, is a jumble of good and bad politics. In
the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers, like Christopher Hitchens, the
editor at the time, Philippe Val, took a “clash of civilizations” turn
that infused the paper. If the mockery of imams was just in keeping with
the anti-clerical tradition, and obscene cartoons also targeted the
Catholic hierarchy, there now seemed to be an undue emphasis on Islam. It
also — like many on the French left, even anti-war campaigners — backs the
contemporary ideology of laïcité. Strictly translated, laïcité is the
French for secularism, but the translation doesn't do it justice. It's a
sort of state-enforced anti-religionism rather than a simple government
neutrality in the face of different faiths as exists in the U.S. (but not
in Canada), but typically focused overwhelmingly on Islam.

They are right, those who say it is hypocritical to be raising the banner
of freedom of expression today if one did not raise it in the face of the
headscarf and burqa bans. (Formally, in 2004, it was the wearing of
“conspicuous religious symbols in schools” that was restricted and, in
2010, face coverings in public, including motorbike helmets and
balaclavas, were outlawed, but everyone knows who was being targeted). But
the obverse of this is also correct: If you opposed the headscarf and
burqa bans, then today you must rally to the defence of freedom of
expression with respect to Charlie Hebdo.

There is hypocrisy elsewhere as well. If Charlie typically rested
unbothered by accusations of Islamophobia, its famed fearlessness reached
its limit when cartoonist Maurice Sinet (nom de plume Siné) faced
accusations of anti-Semitism. In 2008, Siné wrote in a column about
rumours that President Nicolas Sarkozy’s son was to convert to Judaism
prior to marrying the heiress of household appliance multinational Darty,
joking, “He'll go a long way in life, that little lad.” He was prosecuted
for incitement to racial hatred, as the sentence allegedly linked
Jewishness with financial success, although the judge dismissed the case.
Siné was in any case fired by Val, a decision that was defended by a
series of right-wing intellectuals and attacked by their left-wing
counterparts as a betrayal of free speech.

As a result of Philippe Val’s post-9/11 Hitchensian tubthumping, as we in
English might describe his stance, a number of journalists felt they could
not in conscience continue to work for the newspaper and quit, publicly
criticizing the paper. Many people who claim to “criticize everything”
actually don’t criticize everything equally, and in fact do single out
certain racialized minority groups for unique opprobrium and so genuinely
are prejudiced in some way. Many of the current wave of New Atheists such
as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher are examples of this: they
claim to be criticizing all religions, but in fact reserve special
criticism for Islam.

Even if no one particular Charlie cartoon can be said to be racist, and
even if the paper also published covers depicting Pope Benedict kissing a
Vatican Swiss Guard, a Palestinian woman being shot by an Israeli settler
shouting, “Take that, Goliath!” as part of an anti-Zionist series entitled
“The Torah Illustrated by Charb,” and many other cartoons that the Jewish
Daily Forward newspaper categorises as anti-Semitic (Honourably, The
Forward has actually re-printed one of these “anti-Semitic” cartoons, in
solidarity with Charlie after the massacre), overall, the paper’s hard-on
for ridiculing Islam above all other targets fits with this
“equal-opportunity offence” narrative. Some friends of mine say they
stopped reading the paper around this time. One Catalan friend told me,
“Charlie Hebdo used to be left-wing. It’s made my stomach turn for some
time though.”

However, there is a difference between a left-wing newspaper gone rotten
and a racist publication. For all of Hitchens’ support for the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq, I couldn’t at any point suggest he was a racist.

I offer all this history as background, as additional context that has
been ignored by the “Je ne suis pas Charlie” critics. But I’ll go further:
It shouldn’t even matter.

Even if Charlie Hebdo were a racist publication, the murders would still
be an assault on freedom of speech, and leftists should still rise up with
all the indignation that so many French people have righteously displayed.
Not because, as elites have it, the Paris massacre is an attack on
“Western values,” values that plainly do not exist outside of hackneyed,
hypocritical bromide, but because freedom of speech is a left-wing issue.
Indeed, it is the most important issue we should concern ourselves with.
Everything else we ever do depends on this foundational freedom.
It is vitally important to be on guard against the certain wave of attacks
on Muslims across France and the rest of Europe in the coming days and
weeks.

It is vitally important to be on guard against the certain wave of attacks
on Muslims across France and the rest of Europe in the coming days and
weeks. Already at the time of writing, there have been some 15 violent
reprisal incidents against Muslims since the murders in Paris, including
shots fired and three training grenades tossed at a mosque in Le Mans,
shots fired at a prayer hall in Port-la-Nouvelle, and a bomb blast at a
kebab shop in Villefranche-sur-Saone.

We must also be prepared to mobilize against the predictable, fresh round
of efforts by elites to expand the security and surveillance state.
Already, a panicked EU is to seek new anti-terror powers in the wake of
the attack.

It is also worthwhile to recall how the Paris massacre fits within a wider
story of a continued Western imperialist project in the Middle East.
Although Western military intervention in Muslim countries undoubtedly
produces “blowback,” whoever did this is not merely “reacting to Western
imperialism.” They are autonomous actors. To reduce these murderers to
automatons responding to military interventions in Iraq (a war France did
not participate in) or Mali actually erases subaltern agency and thus is
its own species of “noble savage” racism. Historically, anti-imperialist
Arab resistance was primarily secular and socialist, not Islamist. We are
abandoning our progressive brothers and sisters in these countries who are
caught up in their own civil war that intersects with and is exacerbated
by the Western War on Terror. The targets of political Islam, remember,
are primarily other Muslims, such as in the case of December’s Pakistani
Taliban attack on a school in Peshawar in which 141 were killed, 132 of
them children. The same day, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula killed 25,
including 15 children on a school bus, in Yemen. Rather than reinforcing
Western imperialism, acts of blasphemy can — depending on how they are
mounted — be an aid to secularists who are fighting Islamist reaction.

Author Kenan Malik puts it well when he writes how the Charlie massacre
connects to the front lines of struggle for free speech in the Middle East
and within Muslim communities in the West. “What is called ‘offence to a
community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities.
There are hundreds of thousands, within Muslim communities in the West,
and within Muslim-majority countries across the world, challenging
religious-based reactionary ideas and policies and institutions; writers,
cartoonists, political activists, daily putting their lives on the line in
facing down blasphemy laws, standing up for equal rights and fighting for
democratic freedoms.”

Likewise, Iranian-French graphic novelist and author of bestseller
Persepolis Marjane Satrapi defended Charlie in an interview with the New
York Times, arguing that criticizing the paper was “the wrong
conversation.” “I wasn’t always in love with what they did, but I was in
love with the idea we had one magazine that was this subversive,” she told
the U.S. daily. “People have the right to have a different point of view,
and to provoke. If we allow acts like this to create a climate of fear, we
will have lost our freedom.”

And indeed, many Muslims see the attack on Charlie as akin to the
attempted assassination by ISIS of the Syrian revolution’s
activist-cartoonist Raed Fares. While Western leftists scoffed at what
they felt was the mawkish Princess-Di-style sentimentality of the Je suis
Charlie meme, many Muslims in France and worldwide were perfectly happy to
embrace the slogan. While the delicate flowers at the CBC and the Guardian
were fretting over whether to reprint Charlie Hebdo drawings, Arab
editorial cartoonists in Lebanon, Qatar and Egypt were made of much
tougher stuff.

It is also necessary to point out the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of the French
president marching along other world leaders in defence of freedom of
expression when in September, domestic authorities banned protests against
Charlie cartoons as well as Palestinian solidarity marches during the
Israeli assault on Gaza last year. The West’s strategic ally, Saudi
Arabia, on Friday mounted a public flogging of the jailed liberal blogger
Raif Badawi, a double standard that Arab cartoonists have lambasted.

Many of those among the elite who today make reference to freedom of
speech made no such reference when U.S. forces bombed the offices of
Al-Jazeera in Kabul and Baghdad, when NATO targeted Serbian TV, or when
seven Palestinian journalists were killed by the IDF last year. Leaked
documents appearing in Britain’s Daily Mirror suggest that in 2004, George
Bush and Tony Blair considered bombing the Qatar headquarters of
al-Jazeera, a building where 1,000 people work. As the Dutch-born Charlie
Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Holtrop said upon seeing world leaders march in
Paris in solidarity with his slain colleagues, “We have a lot of new
friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth, and Putin. We vomit on all these
people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

But the hypocrisy of elites over freedom of speech does not make freedom
of speech something leftists should oppose or be unconcerned about. Indeed
we should expect liberal democracy to be incapable of defending basic
liberal principles. The left should not fight elite hypocrisy with its own
version of hypocrisy.

There is a worrying trend on the left to dismiss freedom of expression as
part of the colonialist project, to repudiate free speech as a meaningless
elite piety. In recent years, the liberal-left, particularly in the
anglophone world, has taken to demanding the censorship of “offensive” or
“triggering” speech, and student unions, theatres, universities, schools,
municipalities, art galleries and other public venues have increasingly
shut down a wide range of speech acts. Even many traditional civil
liberties groups appear to be cowed. Demonstrators go beyond protesting
those they oppose, and now try to actively prevent them from speaking, as
in the case of efforts to disinvite Bill Maher from UC Berkeley last year
— ironically during the 50th anniversary of the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement protests. In 2014 in the United States, campus protesters
prevented commencement addresses by former secretary of state Condoleezza
Rice, attorney general Eric Holder, and IMF head Christine Lagarde.
According to campus free speech group FIRE, 39 protests have led to the
cancellation of protested events on campuses since 2009. All this is
contrary to traditional leftist defence of freedom of speech and must be
strongly opposed. The politics of the speaker should make no difference
here.

We counter bad arguments with good ones. The minute that we begin
embracing censorship, it will be our own ideas that sooner rather than
later will be deleted by the censors. And the irony is that while these
calls to censorship frequently come from the “social justice left,” it is
precisely as a result of the liberal foundation of freedom of expression
that the women’s movement, the civil rights struggle and gay liberation
have achieved all that they have.

Today, we cannot denounce the Conservative government of Stephen Harper
for muzzling climate scientists or efforts by energy giant Kinder Morgan
to restrict the freedom of expression of anti-pipeline protesters if we
don’t also stand up for the right of those we disagree with — and in
particular those we strongly disagree with — to speak.

Speech acts whose content we agree with are easy to defend, so defending
them is not really defending free speech at all, but rather just asserting
our own speech. This is just as arbitrary as the vis et voluntas, or
“force and will,” attitude that King John took to executive decisions
before he was forced signed the Magna Carta, the first civil liberties
charter and founding document of all our freedoms, 800 years ago this
year.

It is worthwhile recalling how Noam Chomsky in 1979 not only signed a
petition in defence of the freedom of speech of French Holocaust denier
Robert Faurisson, but also, because the grand old man of the left so
believes in this ideal, wrote an essay, “Some Elementary Comments on the
Rights of Freedom of Expression,” that was printed as a preface in a book
by Faurisson. Today’s leftists spurning free speech are dwarfed by
Chomsky, a moral giant who was even willing to defend hate speech.

“Even if Faurisson were to be a rabid anti-Semite and fanatic pro-Nazi —
such charges have been presented to me in private correspondence that it
would be improper to cite in detail here — this would have no bearing
whatsoever on the legitimacy of the defence of his civil rights. On the
contrary, it would make it all the more imperative to defend them since,
once again, it has been a truism for years, indeed centuries, that it is
precisely in the case of horrendous ideas that the right of free
expression must be most vigorously defended; it is easy enough to defend
free expression for those who require no such defence.”

The left would do well to remind itself that freedom of speech is not a
pick-and-choose buffet dinner. Throughout our history, from Robespierre to
Stalin, every time we have spurned this freedom as a bourgeois bagatelle,
as a trinket to be set aside for the sake of solving allegedly more
worrying social injustices, disaster has swiftly struck.

Freedom of speech is no liberal bauble. It is the first freedom, upon
which all other liberties depend.

Longue vie à Charlie Hebdo.