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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