Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Trois

“I refuse to say ‘Je Suis Charlie’ because I don’t do the offensive things they do.”

As have covered this question in a previous blog post, at least as far as I myself am concerned, there is little for me to add here, except to take exception to Professor Fincke's assertion that those of us who refuse to say "Je Suis Charlie" possess a "self-righteous lack of introspectiveness."  How exactly would Professor Fincke propose to measure the introspectiveness of millions of people he hasn't met?  Is it not possible that people with whom one disagrees, even vehemently, may be just as introspective as one is oneself?

More to the point,is introspection necessarily a virtue in this case? Secularists in the West often know far too little about the religious traditions they criticize both in other parts of the world and even in their own.  Fincke's own repetition of the ills of slavery, misogyny, narrow tribalism, violence, and homophobia the Abrahamic faiths supposedly bequeathed to the world ignores the definition of "sacred text" believers in these faiths actually use. For Jews, holiness rests not only in the Torah, which on its surface seems to support the continued existence of slavery, but also in an accumulated rabbinical tradition spanning centuries that ended slavery once and for all centuries before abolitionism emerged as a social and political movement in the late eighteenth century.  Similarly, for Muslims, the Quran is supplemented with and interpreted by the Hadith--interpretations, teachings, and sayings that go back to the Prophet--without which the Quran cannot be fully comprehended.  What offends religious Jews and Muslims about the kinds of cartoons Charlie Hebdo publishes of religious figures is that they do not simply mock us personally--we are thick-skinned enough to take that--but at the way they distort and oversimplify traditions so broad that they ought to be, and often have been, conceived of as civilizations rather than mere religions.  Indeed, these traditions encompass so much of life that only in relatively recent centuries has anyone attempted to wall them off into a small box called "religion".

Fincke is perhaps on more solid ground when he criticizes the cries of "context" from religious pluralists who argue for a more nuanced understanding of scriptural passages that seem to condone evil, while ignoring the context of the Charlie Hebdo pictures that merely "play in bigoted tropes".  But context often gets lost when works from one culture are consumed by another, as happens with ever-increasing speed in a world of wireless phones and computers.  What is satirical in its home context may not appear so to people a world away, and yet people from a world away may now be as close as next door.  

Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke, Part Deux

“Freedom of speech shouldn’t give you the right to insult people’s religions.”


Since the Charlie Hebdo attack, such figures as Pope Francis have come out with the argument that freedom of speech does not encompass the right to criticize other people's religions or to engage in what another faith considers blasphemous.  Fincke is right to point out that freedom of speech not only does but must encompass this right.  If racially or ethnically offensive hate speech receives protection in a free country, so too much speech that is offensive to people on religious grounds.

That said, to defend a legal or constitutional right to engage in offensive speech is not the same thing as to say that such speech is in and of itself right.  Moreover, in both racial and religious contexts (which, in the case of the depiction of Muslims in Western media, often overlap), the line between offensive speech and an outright threat cannot always be drawn with certainty.

Let us take one example more familiar to American audiences: the practice of cross-burning by the Ku Klux Klan.  Cross burning is clearly offensive to African-Americans in the United States in no small part because of its frequent use as an intimidation tactic.  The extent to which the practice is constitutionally protected depends a great deal on the circumstances in which a cross is burned.  When the Klan (or other hate groups) place a cross on someone's lawn in order to intimidate him or her into accepting white supremacy, this is not "speech" but merely a threat, does not receive constitutional protection, is rightly regarded by most Americans today as odious.  When performed as part of Klan ceremonies, away from the eyes of people who would perceive it as a threat, cross burning has received, and should receive, constitutional protection.

But is there a middle ground between these two situations?  And if so, what should be done in such instances?  What would we make of it if a local Klan group decided to put a burning across atop a car and parade through town with it?  One could not call this an act of intimidation against a specific individual in the same manner as a cross burning on someone's lawn, but intimidation is nonetheless the clear message of such an act: its message is "Blacks, and supporters of Black people's rights, beware."  I would argue that such conduct does not constitute speech and does not merit constitutional protection; one does not have a right to intimidate a whole class of people any more than one has a right to intimidate an individual.

How does this apply to the situation of Muslims who see cartoons as offensive as those recently printed in Charlie Hebdo?  To many Muslims, grotesque depictions of the Prophet Mohammed are not simply mockery of their religious beliefs but attacks upon them.  Their purpose is viewed not merely as satirizing religious figures but as an attempt to make all Muslims seem narrow-minded, backward, bigoted, Other, and by extension to make exclusion of Muslims from the body politic seem justifiable. Charlie Hebdo has published cartoons satirizing Mohammed in the context of a wider French and European culture that has seen a spike of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment in recent years.  Controversies concerning the wearing of the veil in French public schools are the obvious case in point.  While French secularists may see laws prohibiting religious garments in schools as necessary to protect a cherished principle of laicite, France's Muslims see the same laws--often selectively applied only against them--as attacks on their ethnic identities and, in the case of female students donning the veil, as attacks on their notions of modesty. This context makes the line between insult of a religion's belief or of major religious figures and advocacy of discrimination against a religion's adherents much harder to draw.

In the end, one can affirm the principle of freedom of speech while maintaining that some instances of speech are grotesque, gratuitously insulting, and unworthy of responsible and enlightened discourse.  To say so is not to give in to terrorism.

“Even if we should honor the legal right to blaspheme, it’s still morally inappropriate for being so disrespectful.”

This argument--substantially similar to the one I made in the above entry--has come to be a focus of discourse around the Charlie Hebdo attacks.  Fincke deals with it by arguing, in essence, that the right to satirize is sacrosanct--that they "play a vital role in puncturing the air of reverence around religious figures."  Comedy and satire do not have a moral obligation to avoid the topic of religion altogether, but the line between satire of a religious figure and demonization of an entire religious tradition is blurry at best.  Where does satirizing racism, sexism, or Islamophobia end and engaging in actual racism, sexism, or Islamophobia begin?

Charlie Hebdo and Professor Fincke

The recent attacks on French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo have tended to push other stories concerning religion and world affairs into the background.  Much of the discourse around the Charlie Hebdo slayings has centered around questions of the media's responsibility in to the attacks, to the point that the media coverage of the attacks has become a news story in and of itself.  Recently, professor or religion, history, and philosophy Daniel Fincke has posted on his blog Camels with Hammers his responses to what he sees at sixteen of the worst memes to surface in the wake of Charlie Hebdo.  Fincke's perspective is atheistic and vigorous in its defense of freedom of expression. Nonetheless, I feel that his points merit some discussion, and in some cases, dissent.  So I am devoting some blog postings to discussions of these memes, dealing with one or two per post.

1. “Why are people insisting we show the images? We can stand up for free speech without approving of or republishing images we disagree with.”

Fincke, and many others, have argued that it is cowardly for news outlets to refuse to republish the satirical cartoon in Charlie Hebdo that led Al Qaeda of Yemen to kill Hebdo's journalists.  Those who make this argument claim both that failure to republish these cartoons is irresponsible journalism at best and giving in to terrorism at worst.

It is certainly within the purview of news organizations to republish the cartoons, but I think many news outlets have been wise not to.  Last week, Judy Woodruff of the PBS News Hour made the best case against showing the cartoons on air by noting the network's policies with respect to foul language and racially offensive epithets.  The network chooses to maintain certain standards of civility on air, and in those interests bans, or at least severely curtails, the use of such words.  I doubt many people would argue that the media are irresponsible when, in the course of reporting on a politicians use of a racial epithet, they choose not to use the epithet itself.  Woodruff also noted that the cartoons in question are readily available on the internet and that interested viewers could find them at their leisure, without PBS's having to air pictures of them.

It is not giving in to extremist Muslim terrorism when networks choose to accord to Islam the same standards of civility they give to racial or ethnic groups, or to non-Muslim religious groups.  While freedom of speech may allow for the publication of uncivil speech or writing, the media are not required to echo such incivility to infinity.

2. “Charlie Hebdo’s murdered staff aren’t heroes and martyrs. They were just insulting marginalized people and disrespecting religion.”
To deal with this meme, one must first start with a working definition of what it means to a martyr.  A martyr can be understood as someone who suffers, even to the point of death, for a cause, whether wittingly or unwittingly, or it can be understood more narrowly only as someone who does so wittingly.  While the writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo may or may not have been aware that publishing these cartoons was like drawing a target on their backs, it is doubtful that their main motivation in publishing was to court martyrdom for the cause of freedom of expression.  It is far more likely that their aim was lucre and notoriety. It does nothing good either for the cause of freedom of speech or for the full integration of Muslims into the social order of the west, which prizes freedom of speech, to make martyrs of Charlie Hebdo's journalists.

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