perhaps-too-cultured response became nugatory one January morning in 2015, when two Islamic fundamentalist terrorists entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo, inadequately guarded by the French police, and with cold-blooded cruelty murdered eight staffers as well as a policeman. (They then murdered a helpless Muslim policeman lying wounded on the street outside.) And yet this terrorist atrocity left an honest observer with a somewhat uneasily divided conscience: on the one hand, the Charlie cartoonists were undoubtedly martyrs to free speech, freedom of expression, and the essential fight against fundamentalisms of all kind. On the other…well, a small irreverent smile came to the lips at the thought of the flag being lowered, as it was throughout France, for these anarchist mischief-makers, and they would surely have roared at the irony of their being solemnly mourned and marched for by former president Nicolas Sarkozy and current president François Hollande. (The cartoonists didn’t just mock those men’s politics; they regularly amplified their sexual appetites and diminished their sexual appurtenances.)
To resolve these two sides of Charlie —the heroic martyrs, the ongoing mockers; the men of the world, the frightened marginalized victims—is the purpose of the book you hold now. In it the great Charlie cartoonist and editor Charb—exasperated, logical, intelligent, above all humane—takes apart all the noxious myths that had circulated about Charlie Hebdo in the past and that have accumulated in the year since the killings; the myth of its “Islamophobia,” for instance. Charb explicates the difference between mockery and assault in a rational manner made almost unbearably poignant by the cost he and his friends would pay to the wholly irrational.
Throughout, his arguments have a simple distinction at their core—that criticizing an ideology, including a religious ideology, however vociferously, is different from inducing hatred of a people or persons. There is a huge space between an insult and a threat, and it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other. In an open society, we all have to put up with insults. Islam, an ideology like any other—as is Communism or Liberalism or Judaism—can be criticized and mocked like any other. Charb reminds us that “the fashion of adding ‘-phobia’ to the end of every other word is perfectly ludicrous. ‘Homophobia’ and ‘negrophobia’ are used to describe the hatred people may feel not toward an ideology or a religion, but toward human beings, pure and simple.”
In other words, saying that someone’s religion is ridiculous is different—discernably, measurably, significantly different—from saying that some group should be exterminated. Mocking your prophet is not at all like threatening your person. Blasphemy is ridicule directed at an ideology; hate speech encourages violence directed at individuals. Judeophobia—the mockery of the religion of Moses of the kind that Voltaire engaged in at length—ought to be protected, no matter who engages in it, just as South Park ’s mockery of Mormonism should. But Jews and Mormons must not be threatened, either in the practice of their faith or in their confidence in their own continued well-being. Blasphemy is just the fanatic’s name for criticism. Charb writes, wisely:
A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning for him. A nonbeliever, no matter how hard he tries, cannot blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.
The crucial distinction we must defend is between acts of imagination and acts of violence. The imagination sees and draws and describes many things—pornographic, erotic, satiric, and blasphemous—that are
To resolve these two sides of Charlie —the heroic martyrs, the ongoing mockers; the men of the world, the frightened marginalized victims—is the purpose of the book you hold now. In it the great Charlie cartoonist and editor Charb—exasperated, logical, intelligent, above all humane—takes apart all the noxious myths that had circulated about Charlie Hebdo in the past and that have accumulated in the year since the killings; the myth of its “Islamophobia,” for instance. Charb explicates the difference between mockery and assault in a rational manner made almost unbearably poignant by the cost he and his friends would pay to the wholly irrational.
Throughout, his arguments have a simple distinction at their core—that criticizing an ideology, including a religious ideology, however vociferously, is different from inducing hatred of a people or persons. There is a huge space between an insult and a threat, and it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other. In an open society, we all have to put up with insults. Islam, an ideology like any other—as is Communism or Liberalism or Judaism—can be criticized and mocked like any other. Charb reminds us that “the fashion of adding ‘-phobia’ to the end of every other word is perfectly ludicrous. ‘Homophobia’ and ‘negrophobia’ are used to describe the hatred people may feel not toward an ideology or a religion, but toward human beings, pure and simple.”
In other words, saying that someone’s religion is ridiculous is different—discernably, measurably, significantly different—from saying that some group should be exterminated. Mocking your prophet is not at all like threatening your person. Blasphemy is ridicule directed at an ideology; hate speech encourages violence directed at individuals. Judeophobia—the mockery of the religion of Moses of the kind that Voltaire engaged in at length—ought to be protected, no matter who engages in it, just as South Park ’s mockery of Mormonism should. But Jews and Mormons must not be threatened, either in the practice of their faith or in their confidence in their own continued well-being. Blasphemy is just the fanatic’s name for criticism. Charb writes, wisely:
A believer can blaspheme only to the extent that the idea of blasphemy holds any meaning for him. A nonbeliever, no matter how hard he tries, cannot blaspheme. God is sacred only to those who believe in him. If you wish to insult or offend God, you have to be sure that he exists. The strategy used by minority group activists masquerading as anti-racists is to pass off blasphemy as Islamophobia and Islamophobia as racism.
The crucial distinction we must defend is between acts of imagination and acts of violence. The imagination sees and draws and describes many things—pornographic, erotic, satiric, and blasphemous—that are
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