Vol. 29 No. 1
RABI-UL-AKHIR 1436 l JANUARY 2015
Charlie Hebdo: Seeing the bigger picture TAAHIRAH JAYES
HE ten satirists, security guard and janitor who worked at the offices of Charlie Hebdo did not deserve to die. It is human nature to be repelled by these acts – and we are. But we know that Cherif and Said Kouachi do not represent the world’s over 1,6 billion or more Muslims. And we also know from a cursory glance at the magazine’s previous covers – one of which depicts the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls as pregnant, wailing yard girls – that Charlie Hebdo does not qualify as mainstream media, as mainstream media want us to believe. So, framing this as an attack on our freedom of expression, as the politicians and media have spun it to be, is problematic for many reasons. The insulting caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (SAW), given the current global crisis that is a Western-led War on Terror with its hallmarks of drone strikes, rendition, interventions, torture and detention without trial of Muslims, which all fuel extremism, is not deserving of death, no – but given the dynamics of the war, it is a particularly cruel, and some might say, unwise, thing to do; more on this later. But after considering deeply what is happening in the world, Charlie Hebdo’s consistent denigrating of the Quran and Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is similar in some ways to the anti-Semitic cartoons of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer between 1927-1932, which drummed up fear and hatred of Jews in the run-up to the Holocaust. Secondly, good satire ridicules the powerful, those who by their very position must be held accountable – simply because, by
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accepting responsibility, they’ve agreed to it. Satire that ridicules religious icons (not even a month ago, Charlie Hebdo ran a cartoon of the Virgin Mary giving birth to Jesus, who was depicted with a pig nose) or ‘humour’ that denigrates those who are already marginalised, is just poor taste. More than that, this kind of no-holds-barred ridicule paves the way for a society that lacks respect for divinity and empathy, where everything and anything is fair game. Nothing is sacred – and cruel insults take on the machismo of backslaps between friends. Moreover, the freedom of expression argument has an iffy barometer, especially in France. As part of its ‘internal security’ enactments passed in 2003, it is against the law in France to ridicule the national flag and anthem. French rapper, Monsieur R, faced prison charges in 2006 for insulting Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle while in the same year, rapper Joestarr had his rap song against then President Nicolas Sarkozy banned. Sarkozy, president until 2012, ordered the firing of the director of Paris Match because he published photos of his wife with another man in New York. While laws protecting the republic are heavy, laws protecting France’s Muslim population (which make up less than 20% of the total) are not. In a law banning religious symbols in public, it is illegal for Muslim girls to express their religious beliefs by wearing the hijab (headscarf) to school. In 2005, a French court ruled in favour of the French Catholic Church and banned an advertisement demeaning the Last Supper, stating that the display was ‘a gratuitous and aggressive act of intrusion on people’s innermost
beliefs’. But, two years later, a French court rejected a case brought by two French Muslim associations against Charlie Hebdo for reprinting cartoons originally published by a Danish magazine that denigrated the Prophet Muhammad (SAW). This is not even mentioning the duplicitous nature of France’s allies, the United States and Britain, when it comes to freedom of expression. Two examples: in 2003, three journalists – Taras Protsyuk, 35, Jose Couso, 37, and Tarek Ayyoub, 35 – were killed in Iraq when US forces targeted the Palestine Hotel where many journalists were staying. And more recently, in the United Kingdom, events in Paris have facilitated the acceleration of the Communications Data Bill which will strengthen the government’s surveillance powers by mandating internet service providers to collect and retain data about their users, including e-mails and other communications, at any time and without a warrant. There is nothing to prevent this draconian piece of counter-terrorism legislation from being used, not only against Muslims broadly, but further down the line and, given a couple of years, against human rights activists or environmentalists who are particularly irksome to governments. This dovetailing of global counter-terrorism legislation with the political agendas of powerhungry governments is already alive and well, according to numerous reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, in countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Kenya and Ethiopia, among others. As Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has said, ‘What happens to the Muslim community, sure enough, sooner or later, happens to the rest of us.’
Make no mistake: I am not defending the killers. Their acts are criminal. But they have taken place within a global context that cannot be ignored – and ‘othering’ those who have been alleged to be responsible without more closely examining the complicity of the powerful in producing men like these – as we know from our very own history – only further polarises society and leads us down a path blinded by moral passion and conflict, where only worse decisions are made. Violence begets violence and so it goes on. Who knows where this will lead us. As we mourn and feel the aftershocks of Paris, France arms its streets with 10 000 soldiers, and Britain rushes through antiterrorism laws that will strengthen airport stop-and-search and passport confiscation powers that harken back to the worst days of South African apartheid. But we must not take our eyes off the Middle East: the continued US drones strikes in Pakistan and the Yemen, which, between them, have killed almost 4 000 people, nearly half of them children, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism; the bombardment of Iraq under false evidence extracted through torture that there were weapons of mass destruction has left a country stunned and paralysed with over one million dead and nobody accountable; the continued crippling occupation of Gaza and the West Bank by Israeli forces, a bombardment last year ironically named Operation Protective Edge, which left 2 100 Palestinians, among them 495 children, dead; and the continued bombing of Iraq and Syria and lack of access for international human rights organisations as winter approaches and people starve. Now is the time for critical
thinking, moderation and calm heads. It is the time for dialogue. The cyclical violence that feeds the War on Terror and the security and media establishments that benefit from it needs to be broken. At its source is the prison camp of Guantanamo Bay – still not closed 13 years after opening in violation of international law and still not having brought any admissible court evidence as to what exactly happened on 9/11. Replicating Gitmo are the over 100 black sites around the world where Muslims have been rendered, tortured and accused of being enemy combatants with no legal rights and in violation of the Geneva Convention. In the War on Terror, extremists are the products of Western foreign policy while the detention centres are its factories. The CIA Torture Report, radically redacted and shortened to a paltry 525 pages out of 6 000 and then smothered by events in Paris, detailed how men were humiliated, subjected to positional torture, blinding light, simulated burials, waterboarding, wallslamming, rape – the list goes on – in order to provide inadmissible data to be used as fuel for the War on Terror. It has left out crucial facts like names and places, and the details of women and children detainees. This report and its hidden contents cannot, and – thanks to a new crowd-funded investigation by the Bureau for Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project – will not be allowed to disappear. It is crucial to understand the nuanced context in which events like the tragedy in Paris have unfolded. Nothing happens in isolation, and nothing is ever what it seems. This article was also published on www.litnet.co.za, an ‘online multicultural journal’.
Special focus on Cancer Awareness Month - February: see pages 10, 11 and 32