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Charlie Hebdo

It is all too easy to think of many valid reasons to denounce the murder of 12 staff members of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo. But the event should also give us pause and make us think about what is going on in the minds of the people who do such things and how to prevent them from happening in the future. It may be necessary to label the perpetrators as evil and it is certainly appropriate to call for their quick capture and fair trial. It is likewise necessary to defend the right of anyone to laugh at whomever they want. But it is not sufficient.

We may never know precisely the motives for this massacre. Even if they eventually stand trial, the perpetrators may not say much. So we’ll have to go with the flow: this looks like an act of retaliation against Charlie Hebdo for it satires of Mohammed, Islam and Sharia. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that is correct.

The passionate defense of one’s religion we should all understand. It wasn’t all that long ago that New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani was cutting off funding to the Brooklyn Museum because it displayed an artwork known as “Piss Christ” (and it was eventually attacked and destroyed, in France).* I’m with Mohammad Fadel when he notes here that Giuliani’s attitude was frighteningly hostile, even if the means he had the privilege of choosing were more genteel:

My own folks are fond of the slogan “Never again!” when it comes to people who say they want to be rid of us. And we mean it. But Jews and Catholics in the United States have a lot of levers of power to wield before it comes to murdering our assailants. Even if we are deeply offended, we know that retaliation using political, economic, moral and social instruments will be more effective than violence.

That is what some people doubt. Extremists are extreme: they believe only violence will make their point and enable them to get their way. They feel under attack and want to fight back. They don’t think they are doing evil. They think protecting their own is doing good.

Why should Muslims feel under attack? Let me count the reasons:

1. They are under attack from nationalists, especially but not only in France, who view them as foreigners, alien and undesirable.
2. Aspects of Western culture that we regard as normal (kissing in public, scantily clad women, drinking alcohol) are offensive to many Muslims.
3. Some Western countries, including France, have tried to prohibit some Muslim practices, in particular the hijab but also the call to prayer.
4. They see us as applying double standards: vigorous concern for our own victims of violence, but indifference or worse towards theirs (witness Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen and elsewhere).
5. Muslims share the legacy associated with the Old and New Testaments, but Christians and Jews reject (or ignore) the Quran and the Prophet Mohammed.

So when Charlie Hebdo takes shots at Mohammed, Westerners see it as a joke, maybe one in poor taste, but not something to get upset about. Some Muslims see it as part of a pattern of hostility, and a few want to retaliate but lack imagination and means other than an AK-47 and a rocket launcher.

So what do we do about it? First, we hope the French police catch the perps and see that they get a fair trial and appropriate sentences in a French court. All you need to know about Guantanamo you can learn by imagining what would happen if the murderers were caught, not put on trial but jailed indefinitely and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques. The extremists would certainly gain, not lose, if that happened.

Second, we need to restrain the nativist reactions of non-Muslims, who will be calling for (and voting for) expulsions of foreigners and crackdowns on immigration. That is precisely the wrong direction to go in. I don’t expect any mainstream Muslim organization not to denounce these murders in the strongest possible terms, even if they think Charlie Hebdo went too far in its satire. It is important to make it easier, not harder, for them to stick with the majority view, in France and elsewhere, that free speech has to be protected from murderous thugs, no matter how offensive the scribblings.

Third, we need much more understanding of the Muslims who live among us. Americans think Muslims are 15% of the population. In fact they are less than 1%. In France, they are thought to be 31% of the population but are in fact 8%. I can only imagine what other distortions lie harbored in our brains. Christian/Jewish relations have improved enormously since I was called names on the playground I won’t repeat today (some of you might never have heard them). We need to commit to the same kind of improvements with the growing Muslim population in our midst, ensuring that we know what is offensive and why as well as underlining our own commitment to freedom of speech.

I’ve got no beef with Charlie Hebdo. It was doing what it was invented to do. But let’s try to make things better, not worse.

*PS: Sorry: I confused two old stories here. Piss Christ was attacked in France, but Giuliani’s complaint was about The Holy Virgin Mary, a work featuring a Black Madonna sprinkled with elephant dung and images of female genitalia. A distinction but not much difference.