The slander on Charlie’s dead
In January, as thousands around the world declared Je suis Charlie, some felt a need to qualify their condemnation of the cold-blooded murder of 12 people, among them eight journalists. They began posting and tweeting what they felt were Charlie Hebdo’s most offensive cartoons and covers, sometimes with commentary but more often intended to speak for themselves: “Look at this. It’s obviously racist. How can you stand with this?”
The PEN American Center’s decision to bestow its Freedom of Expression Courage Award on Charlie Hebdo, which dozens of prominent authors are now boycotting, has reenergized the objectors. Lately, they have been pointing to a cartoon by Ali Dilem — actually published in the Algerian newspaper Liberté, though Dilem draws for Charlie as well — and asking the same questions. And yet again, these well-educated, fiercely anti-racist champions of context and cultural sensitivity and nuance have made themselves look like rank imbeciles.
Dilem’s cartoon depicts four drowning black figures, one a woman with a baby on her back, under the words Regroupement familial en Méditerranée — “family reunification in the Mediterranean.” It is unambiguously on the side of the victims. It is suggesting, as are many, that Europe’s family reunification policies — under which some Africans could theoretically immigrate legally — are too strict, and are forcing people to take desperate and deadly measures. Yet it has been widely interpreted as mocking the victims.
Some object to Dilem’s (and Charlie Hebdo’s) Tintin in the Congo- style physical depictions of the African subjects, and they’re welcome to. They are not welcome simply to invent motives. “It’s a racist publication. Let’s not beat about the bush,” Francine Prose, among the most vocal of the PEN refuseniks, told Katha Pollitt in an astonishing interview for The Nation. She actually compared Charlie (in Pollitt’s words) to “Goebbels’s anti-Semitic propaganda.”
If your own eyes don’t tell you that’s rubbish, you might consider the president of France’s SOS Racisme, who in January issued an impassioned dismissal of the backlash. “Every week in Charlie Hebdo — every week — half of it is against racism, against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim hatred,” he fumed. “I’m telling you — and every anti-racism organization will tell you the same — they were committed anti-racists.”
Which brings us to the PEN boycotters and the cretinous logic on which they rely. Racist or not, essentially they argue Charlie Hebdo was doing satire wrong. “Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire,” an open letter endorsed by 145 PEN members argues. “The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.”
It is unclear what authority the PEN 145 claim to decree that proper satire can only “punch up, not down,” as it’s often phrased. But it is simply not true that Charlie Hebdo punched down: It didn’t mock Muslims, for example; it mocked Muslim fundamentalism, which was hardly a weak, powerless, marginalized entity even before it inspired the jackass Kouachi brothers to mow down 12 people over some drawings.
But let’s say Charlie did “punch down” too often, or published material that marginalized communities might interpret that way. How does that diminish either their right to free speech — the cause to which PEN is ostensibly committed — or their courage in defending it: the quality the award is intended to recognize? How could anyone deny such an award to a magazine that refused to back down in the face of threats, firebombing and mass murder?
That the murdered journalists didn’t punch down, that they weren’t anti-Muslim or racist but rather the opposite, certainly compounds the thoroughgoing humiliation to which a portion of the sophisticated Anglo-Saxon left is subjecting itself. But it would have been awful even if they had been right about Charlie Hebdo.
“The honoured cartoonists … are not markers in an abstract game of sensitivities,” writes Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. “They were elderly artists whose last view in life was of a masked man with a machine gun. If that’s not horror, nothing is horror. If that’s not wrong, then nothing is wrong. If writers won’t honour their courage, then what courage can we honour?”