¡°The decision by PEN American Center to give its annual Freedom of Expression Courage award to the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo has prompted six writers to withdraw as literary hosts at the group¡¯s annual gala on May 5, adding a new twist to the continuing debate over the publication¡¯s status as a martyr for free speech. The novelists Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi have withdrawn from the gala, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.¡±
¡°If PEN as a free-speech organisation can¡¯t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organisation is not worth the name,¡± Rushdie said. ¡°What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.¡±In a letter sent on 26 April to PEN trustees, PEN president and author Andrew Solomon:
¡°The rising prevalence of various efforts to delimit speech and narrow the bounds of any permitted speech concern us; we defend free speech above its contents. We do not believe that any of us must endorse the content of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons in order to affirm the importance of the medium of satire, or to applaud the staff¡¯s bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats. There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, an urgent brilliance in saying what you have been told not to say in order to make it sayable.¡±Glenn Greenwald writes: [The Intercept]:
¡°Though the core documents are lengthy, this argument is really worth following because it highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression.¡±Letters and comments of PEN writers protesting the Charlie Hebdo Award. [The Intercept]
There is courage in refusing the very idea of forbidden statements, an urgent brilliance in saying what you have been told not to say in order to make it sayableBeautifully said. I'd suggest that he simply recycles those lines when discussing next year's recipient, a woman whose speech was punished not just by random nutjobs but by her own government.
This is now a common, and quite potent, tactic: inducing support for highly illiberal western government policy by dressing it up as support for liberal principles. And it highlights the fraud of pretending that celebrations of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are independent of the fact that the particular group they most prominently mock are Muslims, a marginalized, targeted, and largely powerless group in France and the west generally.posted by ChuraChura at 8:24 AM on April 27, 2015 [17 favorites]
The second one is the hardest to explain to a foreign audience, because it features two specificities of the Charlie Hebdo humour that here blend awkwardly. The first is the conflagration of two pieces of news : the crimes of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the attacks on the welfare system in France. The second one is the use of racist imagery in pictures that denounce racism (as seen above with Cabu¡¯s Joan of Ark cover). The French right (and the European right in general) often point the finger at immigrants to explain why the welfare system costs too much. It¡¯s an easy rhetoric because everybody agrees that we spend too much on welfare, but nobody wants cuts to the help they themselves receive, so blaming the usual suspects is a popular choice. Therefore, as Terry Drinkwater summarized on Quora : ¡°Fairly straightforward, innit? The absurdity of raped and pregnant Boko Haram sex slaves acting out the welfare queen stereotype parodies the absurdity of the welfare queen stereotype.¡± What obviously didn¡¯t help the cartoon to be understood as anything but racist is Riss¡¯s rough and dirty style, which owes more to Reiser than to Cabu and Wollinsky. Little can be said about that, as it seems very much a matter of cultural taste. It does increase the insensitivity of the joke, though, admittedly.posted by Atom Eyes at 9:01 AM on April 27, 2015 [10 favorites]
Many of France¡¯s Muslims ¡ª like Abdelaali ¡ª abhor the violence that struck the country last week. But they are also revolted by the notion that they should defend the paper. By putting the publication on a pedestal, they insist, the French are once again sidelining the Muslim community, feeding into a general sense of discrimination that, they argue, helped create the conditions for radicalization in the first place.posted by joyceanmachine at 9:57 AM on April 27, 2015 [17 favorites]
There were also sharp differences Tuesday about the cover of Charlie Hebdo in its first edition since last Wednesday¡¯s attack, which leaked late Monday. In it, Muhammad sheds a tear and holds one of the now-omnipresent signs saying ¡°Je Suis Charlie¡± under a headline reading ¡°All Is Forgiven.¡±¡°I wasn¡¯t shocked by this cartoon, it¡¯s not as obscene as others might have been,¡± said Binakdan. ¡°It was rather well done, way softer than what was published previous. At least they are not showing the prophet making love with a goat.¡±
Others in the Muslim community were less impressed. ¡°My first reaction was angst, this does nothing to make things better,¡± said Nasser Lajili, 32, a Muslim city councilor and youth group leader in Gennevilliers. ¡°I want to make clear that I completely condemn the attack on Charlie Hebdo. But I think freedom of speech needs to stop when it harms the dignity of someone else. The prophet for us is sacred.¡±
In paying the ultimate price for the exercise of their freedom, and then soldiering on amid devastating loss, Charlie Hebdo deserves to be recognized for its dauntlessness in the face of one of the most noxious assaults on expression in recent memory.As Salman Rushdie reminded us, the whole purpose of PEN is to defend freedom of expression around the world.
The Charlie Hebdo attack reminded Fatih Alev, the chairman of the Danish Islamic Center in Copenhagen, of similar incidents in his country. In 2005, satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, including one that depicts him as a terrorist, were published in Danish and Norwegian newspapers. Protests ensued and xenophobic sentiment spread across secular Denmark. In 2010, Danish authorities thwarted a terrorist plot to attack the offices of Jyllands-Posten, the newspaper that published the cartoons in Denmark.Now: that misunderstanding is not their fault! But at the same time, it's not necessarily the fault of the person misunderstood, either. This is a difficult thing to sort out, and assigning blame is not always the best way to do it.
¡°I think it¡¯s not about religious sentiment but cultural ways of perceiving satire,¡± Alev said. ¡°Though I am very religious person, I was not offended [by the 2006 cartoons]. Why? Because I was used to the Danish way of debating,¡± Alev said. ¡°For Muslims in Denmark who were not used to Danish debate, it was a shock. They were very offended. They didn¡¯t understand what was going on.¡±
We don¡¯t have a context for this tradition here, merciless, political satire. One thing I keep noticing is commentators here are pointing out that the cartoons were very offensive and insulting. It¡¯s as if we don¡¯t understand that was by design. Very intentionally offensive, and very clear about why that couldn¡¯t be compromised. That¡¯s the part we don¡¯t get, as Americans. It¡¯s like, ¡°Why did they have to be so mean?¡±Here, by the way, is his response to the killings, as solicited by Liberation.
In the days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks I stalked Paris as if lost, dazed and despondent not only at the senselessness and irreversibility of murder but also at the great gap that had appeared between me and so many people I consider friends and equals: educated, cultivated, sensitive people, defenders of the oppressed and marginalized. Righteous folk.posted by the man of twists and turns at 1:58 PM on April 30, 2015
I heard from them countless variations on the banality that ¡°violence is always wrong.¡± How did I know that this judgment, though perfectly true in itself, was only a banality, the expression of a sentiment that had little to do with pacifism? By the clockwork predictability of the ¡°but¡± that always followed.
But what?
@atawaakul: "The bro with me and myself have given bay'ah to Amirul Mu'mineen. May Allah accept us as mujahideen.posted by Golden Eternity at 9:34 PM on May 3, 2015
Make dua
#texasattack"
Anyhow, it¡¯s weird to have this big rift going on between people I think of as being on the same side. Salman Rushdie and Katha Pollitt are defending the award, and Teju Cole, Sarah Schulman and Rachel Kushner are opposing it. Andrew Solomon and Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN, wrote this op-ed in the Times on Friday, in which they try to minimize the divide. ¡°Our goal has been to avoid a reductive binary; this is a nuanced question, and all of these writers have made persuasive moral arguments.¡±posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:28 PM on May 4, 2015 [3 favorites]
It¡¯s good to have so much thoughtful conversation going on about the complicated dynamic between free speech and hate speech, between fundamentalism and xenophobia. I can¡¯t say I am exactly looking forward to this little dinner party tomorrow night. But at the same time, I¡¯m glad that I¡¯m going. Violence is intended to polarize. I want to try and resist that.
Albaih saw that cover as a missed opportunity. ¡°They could¡¯ve done something that brought everybody together,¡± Albaih told me. ¡°There are a million ideas of what they could¡¯ve done. They could¡¯ve gotten a Muslim cartoonist to do something, they could have done something about we are all the same, they could¡¯ve done something about the unification of France, the republic¡ªa million things¡ªbut instead they kept doing it again.Let me get this straight. He's saying what the surviving Charlie Hebdo could and should have done in the immediate aftermath to the slaughter of their colleagues. Like that's up to him.
And yet I keep thinking of the piece we published on Charlie Hebdo back in January by Thomas Chatterton Williams, a young black writer from New Jersey who¡¯s been living in Paris since 2009. Williams compared his own experience in Paris to that of James Baldwin in the 1950s, and found that not too much had changed. There were still, he writes, reminders of France¡¯s colonial past everywhere one looked, and French people, it seemed, did not always want to look. ¡°To my mind,¡± Williams went on,A couple of months ago I heard an interview on NPR with an African-American womanin addition to the French tradition of anti-authoritarian satiric wit, this is also very much a part of the context of our current crisis, whether we want to talk about it now or not: France has a violent, racist, and unexorcised past. There is no self-respecting way for me to identify with these objects that I sometimes see, just as there is no self-respecting way for me to hear the still-in-use French word for ghostwriter¡ªn¨¨gre (literally an unacknowledged, unpaid laborer: a nigger)¡ªwithout flinching; and there is no self-respecting way for me to gaze on that hideous Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting France¡¯s first black Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, as a monkey.
[...] and there is no self-respecting way for me to gaze on that hideous Charlie Hebdo cartoon depicting France¡¯s first black Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, as a monkey.Absolutely. It is disgusting, vile and contemptible. It is meant to be. It is meant to sicken any decent person.
Quand on dessine en une les lyc¨¦ennes enlev¨¦es par Boko Haram, certains nous reprochent de les faire voil¨¦es. Mais qui les a voil¨¦es?posted by Golden Eternity at 3:17 PM on May 6, 2015 [1 favorite]
¡ª Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) 22 Octobre 2014
The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo has been awarded the Freedom of Expression Courage Award at the PEN American Center gala in New York City. The newspaper was honored months after the massacre at the paper¡¯s offices in Paris, which the gunmen called revenge for cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Charlie Hebdo editor G¨¦rard Biard accepted the award to a standing ovation.posted by Golden Eternity at 7:22 PM on May 6, 2015G¨¦rard Biard: "I perfectly understand that a believer can be shocked by a satirical cartoon about Muhammad, Jesus, Moses or even the pope. But growing up to be a citizen is to learn that some ideas, some words, some images can be shocking. Being shocked is a part of democratic debate. Being shot is not."
To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France's various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering."[Emphasis mine]
Where will the EUR 30 million received b6 Charlie Hebdo since the killing of 7 January go?posted by Golden Eternity at 1:13 AM on May 16, 2015
[...]
Currently, the distribution of the newspaper's shares is as follows: the cartoonist Riss (now director since the death of Charb) holds 40%, CFO Eric Portheault has 20%. And the remaining 40% belong at the moment to Charb's parents.
[...]
During the time he was director of the newspaper, Val would have received a total of nearly 1.6 million euros in dividends according to BFM Business.
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