Global Losers
IDEAS matter — enough to kill for
The world is focused on France’s murdered cartoonists, and their ideas — particularly, the idea that Muslims should be able to handle caricature just as everyone else does. But the attackers weren’t motivated just over images of the Prophet Mohammed. They and their cohorts around the world are on a jihad against all the ideas that Europe and America — and especially our leading cities — stand for.
Here in New York, since 9/11, they’ve targeted Times Square, Herald Square, the subways, the airports and other landmarks and critical spots.
Consider what happened in another global city weeks before the Paris attack. At Christmas, British journalists noticed a change outside Buckingham Palace and other royal London residences. The Queen’s Royal Guards (the guys with the big fur hats) are no longer doing sentry duty in pairs outside the palaces’ iron gates. The sentries are now posted behind the bars.
Why? The obvious reason. The brightly uniformed Guards aren’t drawing pictures of Mohammed. But they’re highly symbolic, and standing ducks for angry killers.
Nearly two years ago, two British men claiming to act for Islam murdered British soldier Lee Rigby on a London street outside a military barracks. And last fall, yet another selfproclaimed terrorist killed a guard at Ottawa’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier before heading into Parliament meaning to slay more.
It may seem prudent to pull the Guards now before an attack — especially since a murderer could kill and injure many bystander tourists. But pulling back the Guards ends a British tradition: the idea that the public can get close enough to touch a living symbol of the mighty British Empire.
You say the British Empire is not mighty anymore? The millions of tourists coming from all over the world to see the Changing of the Guard would disagree — as would the hundreds of thousands of people who struggle each year to get into Britain to stay.
The Guards represent the idea of British economic, cultural, intellectual, artistic and military power — so pulling them back represents a retreat from good ideas. It is not . . . a good idea.
The cartoonists, editors, columnists, office manager and police officers who died last Wednesday died for the same good Western ideas — as did the four hostages who died in a kosher supermarket during Friday’s hostage raid.
Consider the cartoons. Some have called them “puerile” — but that misses the point of French cartooning.
Deciphering French cartoons — about politicians, celebrities, religious figures and often all three — is one of the hardest things to do as you try to learn the French language. To understand many cartoons, you have to understand centuries of culture and history as well as plays on words. But the cartoons are uniquely funny.
The cartoonists didn’t have to take on prominent figures to make people laugh — or to make a point. Consider a cartoon that Jean Cabut, one of last week’s murdered artists, drew five years ago for the city of Paris. At the time, Paris was launching a publicservice campaign to get disaffected youth to stop brutally destroying its bikeshare bicycles (Velibs).
The ad Cabut — or “Cabu” — drew was a masked wrestler rip ping apart a municipal bike. “It’s easy to break a Velib’,” the fighter confided as spectators looked on. “It can’t defend itself.”
Simple — but not so simple. At the time, lots of people in Paris were saying that the people who wage their bizarre jihad on the bikes were motivated by poverty, racism, lack of opportunity and the like. “It is an outcry, a form of rebellion; this violence is not gratuitous,” transportation sociologist Bruno Marzloff told the Times.
Cabu knew otherwise. A person who needs to smash a piece of public infrastructure — and a symbol of modern Paris, at that — to feel better about himself is nothing more than a coward and a loser who is afraid to pick on someone his own size — and afraid, too, to engage in the civil society that makes the West work.
The bitter neverdowells who kill people because they can — and wrap themselves in Islam as they do so, because they have no other way to make anyone care what they do or say — aren’t just afraid of Royal Guards, cartoonists or bikes.
They’re afraid of police officers — particularly minority police officers like Ahmed Merabet, a firstgeneration Frenchman who chose to be part of society rather than rail against it.
They’re afraid, too, of regular people who feel safe and secure enough in their diverse society to go to a kosher supermarket during a manhunt.
“Terrorists” — a word that gives too much credit to people who do what anyone do, but most people don’t, which is kill for attention — aren’t mad at cartoons.
They’re mad at all of us — and how we succeed in our many different ways, whether as cartoonists or policemen or office managers. So we’re all Charlie Hebdo, after all.