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Charlie Hebdo 2: it's not racist to lampoon Islam
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be the first to commentPosted by Tim Gopsill
Some people on the British left are calling the French magazine Charlie Hebdo racist because of its fatal penchant for publishing cartoon images of Muslims. Naturally, they don’t say that the murderous assault on its office by deranged jihadis that killed 12 people on 7 January was just retribution, nor even that the journalists were asking for it.
They leave that conclusion to the reader.
But Socialist Worker has charged Charlie Hebdo with “the legitimisation of racism in France ... using the vile racist stereotypes of the right”. Respect MP George Galloway calls it a “racist, Islamophobic, hypocritical rag”.
The admirable Norman Finkelstein, the American Jewish academic and polemicist against the state of Israel, says Charlie Hebdo is “not satirical but sadistic”. Satire, he says, is strictly for use against the powerful, while the magazine pokes fun at the weak.
There is no question that Muslim people are among the weakest in French society. Sixty per cent of prisoners are Muslims. Particularly since the 7 January atrocity, there have been continual race attacks by fascist thugs and by police. Charlie Hebdo itself wrote last week: “The first victims of Islamic fascism are Muslims.”
So do these racists take their lead or at least some justification from a bunch of ageing lefties on a niche satirical magazine? And is the magazine Charlie Hebdo really targeting them? It insists it is not, and that it is indeed anti-racist, but it would, wouldn’t it?
The questions stimulated by the massacre in Paris go pretty deep into matters of media freedom and responsibility. If there are limits on what can be published based on real social concern, not whim or prejudice, then where are they?
Charlie Hebdo describes itself as a “journal irresponsable” and officially “atheist”, an upholder of the French political institution of secularism—laicité or “layness”—that excludes religion from state activity, which it sees as under threat from Islamic fascism. Its manner of defending secularism is to pillory its enemies in savage terms. Its target, though, is not Muslim people, whose social plight it recognises and resists, but the religion of Islam. (It goes for other religions and right-wing politicians in France with similar gusto.)
This unfortunately is a distinction that seems to have escaped a lot of people on the British left, despite being the most basic in the business of political activity. You can criticise Israel without being anti-Semitic, can you not? Mugabe’s Zimbabwe without being racist, or the BBC without impugning its journalists. But to criticise Islam, in whose name such monstrous things are done, is to vilify the poor and oppressed of the world, it seems. They have a word for it: Islamophobia.
Charlie Hebdo doesn’t care if it’s called racist; it’s not afraid to stir the shit in areas like race and religion, where discussion on the UK left is muffled by a blanket of inoffensiveness. “Political correctness”, whatever the Daily Mail says, restricts the left, not the right. The British left, and the liberal media, unlike the right, are so proper, inhibited and dull. No wonder they’re baffled by Gallic humourists.
For their part, the French are bemused by the British left’s refusal to confront Islamist (or Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other) bigotry and its acceptance of the state-sponsored spread of religious influence, for example through the encouragement of faith schools. You cannot respond that adherents of Islam are mostly poor and oppressed people, because so were those of the fascist parties of the 1930s. That’s what fascism is for—to divide the mass of the people. And lots of Muslims are successful and rich.
Islam is not a race, yet it is in the name of anti-racism that parts of the left (they know who they are) have managed to construct a whole politics around fighting Islamophobia, leaving those who regard Islam as oppressive and reactionary—whether French cartoonists or uncomprehending comrades at home—as putative racists.
The Islamophiles may have had reason in 2003, when they made their alliance with the mosques to swell the Stop the War campaign. The spectacle of Muslim youth, up for the fight, streaming out of the coaches from the North and Midlands so intoxicated them that they came to believe that the invasion of Iraq, other UK/US imperial designs in the middle east, and attacks on minority communities here at home, were all part of a war against Muslims, so we must take their side.
But these conflicts are nothing to do with Islam. Iraq was a secular state that the Americans prepared to hand to the Shi’ites Muslims to do what they wanted with women, workers or anyone else, in return for control of the oil. “The deal was God for Oil” as the radical American journalist Greg Palast wrote at the time. When the same happened in Libya, and was tried in Syria, you’d think people might discern a pattern.
These imperial adventures involved the creation, funding and arming of ever more fanatical jihadi militias. No room to list them; just don’t tell me the West is persecuting Islam. They can’t get enough of it. Which is the UK’s staunchest middle east ally, even more so than Israel? Saudi Arabia.
The left obviously understands imperialism, and the oil grab, but they’re all at sea over the religion. I was astounded to read, in an email debate, from a member of the Socialist Workers Party (or “Socialist Wahabi Party” as the SWP is known in satirical circles) about this religion “that is as complex, broad, sophisticated and fantastic as all the great world religions.” Highly sophisticated, public beheading and stoning to death.
This is not the first run round this particular block. In 1989 there was the Salman Rushdie fatwa and in 2007 the affair of the Danish cartoons, two high-profile incidences of political opportunism by the most conservative elements in Islam, who concocted the nonsense, unheard of before, about supposed offensiveness, for their own manipulative purposes (to maintain their grip on their communities and keep them away from modern notions like democracy, social justice, liberalism, toleration or God forbid, socialism!)
Even if the theology were legitimate, which I gather is contested, no prohibition on Muslims from making images of the prophet could apply to anyone outside the faith, could it?
DATELINE: 30 January, 2015
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