One year on from the terrorist attack, Charlie Hebdo remains misunderstood
How can the drawing of an old, bearded man wearing a cloak stained with blood and carrying a Kalashnikov cause worldwide waves of outrage?
On Wednesday, Charlie Hebdo released its latest edition, marking the one-year anniversary of the attacks on the French satirical magazine. The cartoon on its cover was accompanied by the text: ‘One year on, the assassin is still out there.’ Judging by the reactions it has provoked so far, one year on, Charlie Hebdo is still misunderstood.
Charlie Hebdo is hated and condemned by many, but few of its loudest critics actually understand its cartoons. Debates that followed the Islamist attack that killed 12 people including most of the magazine’s journalists were revived for its one-year anniversary, suggesting many have not even read a single edition of the magazine in its entirety.
The most common misconception about Charlie Hebdo is that it attacks religious individuals. In fact, Charlie Hebdo is a political satire magazine. It does not attack any religion as a personal faith but ridicules every politicised and institutionalised form of it – be it the Vatican or the more extreme case of the Islamic State. Islam is not in the crosshairs; the ideology that exploits it, Islamism, is.
The latest example of this misinterpretation is the Vatican newspaper’s response to Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover, featuring the aforementioned old man; a gun-wielding terrorist with the religious symbol of the ‘all-seeing Eye of God’ hovering above his head.
The newspaper criticised Charlie Hebdo’s mockery of religion and accused the magazine of disrespecting believers’ faith in God. Last year, a few days after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Pope Francis told journalists on his Asia tour: ‘To kill in the name of God is an absurdity.’ Charlie Hebdo agrees – in fact, this is precisely what the cartoonists have been trying to show in their latest absurdist cartoon of God as a terrorist.
Another example of indignant reactions, which have revealed an inaccurate and simplistic understanding of French satire, was the public outcry that followed the release of the Aylan Kurdi cartoon in September. Charlie Hebdo was accused of mocking the death of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, a Kurdish Syrian who’s drowning became a symbol of the refugee crisis.
The drawing, which showed the little boy lying face down in the sand next to a McDonalds sign, was meant to depict the absurdity behind the tragedy: merciless Europeans living in peace, luxury and obesity while refugees silently die on their way to what they see as paradise.
France has a long tradition of absurdist satire that dates back to before the French Revolution and uses deliberately provocative and uncensored images to get across its message. The single most defining characteristic of a satirical cartoon is precisely its visual exaggeration of human features and flaws. Without the blunt, uncut and crass nature of the drawings, they would not qualify as a caricature.
Furthermore, many people have confused absurdism with racism and unjustly labelled Charlie Hebdo as racist. One brief look at its website shows part of the magazine’s mission is to defend ‘a society free of racism’.
There is a profound difference between racist or anti-religious hate-speech and satirical cartoons. While the former attacks and incites hatred against ethnic, cultural and religious minorities, the latter mocks powerful elites which are henpecking societies and cultures, as well as the abstract concepts to which they adhere.
Power can come in many forms: political, commercial and religious. Charlie Hebdo’s favourite targets therefore reach from right-wing politicians and manifestations of capitalist doctrines to authorities of the two most popular and hence powerful religions on the planet: Christianity and Islam.
Literally every word that ends in ‘-phobic’ has been used to describe Charlie Hebdo. Yes, Charlie Hebdo might be many things – indecent, blasphemous and politically incorrect. But some things it is definitely not, namely, xenophobic, homophobic and Islamophobic.
Indeed, it has demonstrated the courage to stand up for the weakest and least privileged members of society by mocking the most powerful and thereby haling them to act.
We should commemorate these courageous cartoonists by daring to keep laughing and making people laugh, at everyone and everything. We should continue to draw, to write and to speak our minds.
And most importantly, we should never stop defending those who risk their lives fighting for these rights such as Salman Rushdie, Raif Badawi and Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. If you feel offended, fight back – but please do so with words, not with Kalashnikovs – and don’t insist that others share your offence.
Julia Ebner is a research assistant at Quilliam focussing on EU counter-extremism efforts. Follow her on Twitter.
50 Responses to “Charlie Hebdo’s critics still don’t understand French satire”
Paul Harrison
Portraying an arab child as a pig/monkey sex offender is not racial?
And the point I’m trying to make is that if they are inciting racial hatred then their intention is irrelevant – when you become part of the very problem that you claim they are trying to address then something has gone very badly wrong.
Do you honestly think Muslims or refugees will view that cartoon and think ‘wow, those Hebdo guys are really sticking up for us by implying a dead refugee child will become a sex offender’? Do you think the right wing viewed that cartoon and thought ‘ what an incredibly clever way to highlight the current plight of the refugees and the way the right portrays them, they really showed us!’? Hebdo knows its cartoons are deeply offensive to many Muslims – moderate and extreme – yet it continues to publish them. The point of satire is to attack the powerful, not the powerless – and no amount of excuses like ‘oh you don’t understand their position’ (exactly how much understanding is there to do when its a dead child portrayed as a sex offender?) or ‘its not a great cartoon’ will change that.
chizwoz
No it’s not racial. Race has no causal influence on behaviour. It’s culture that leads to mass sexual assault, not race. If there was hypothetically a small subsection of Saudi Arabia that was white, but was part of the same culture, their position would likely be the same (because it’s the culture not the race).
You’re confusing correlation with causation.
I think 90% of muslims are used to a culture where insulting their religion is completely unacceptable so they respond to pretty much anything like this with mindless outrage (e.g no-one had actually read the Satanic verses before the protests began. It wasn’t anything Rushie had written they objected to, it was simply the fact he’d written it). So that’s kinda a pointless question at the moment. What I do know is that a future where we teach immigrants that you have no right not to be offended in a free society is infinitely better than a future where we shut down absolutely everything that anyone finds offensive (which is where this logic leads. It never just stays with 1 instance. People who want political power seize upon it and spread it like wildfire.)
Paul Harrison
The cartoon portrayed a dead three year old as a sex offender. How does religion affect the behaviour of a dead three year old? And where did I say that race has an affect on behaviour? I said the cartoon was racist because it used racial stereotypes – the pig/monkey reference for instance.
The portrayal of Mohammed is insulting – its like drawing a picture portraying Martin Luther King as a monkey and then claiming that black people are being over sensitive – i’ll repeat – the point of satire is to attack the powerful not denegrate the powerless. Portraying a three year old as a future sex offender does not attack the powerful – what part of that aren’t you getting. But hey, I enjoyed your massively sweeping stereotype that 90% of Muslims as mindlessly aggressive to any criticism.
I’m sure the immigrants will greatly appreciate you telling them what they are and are not allowed to be offended by from your position of privilege. Perhaps you could tell women that slapping them on the butt and calling them sweet cheeks is merely ironic banter. I personally hadn’t realised we had got to a point where speech is free but expressing outrage is not? When did the rules on that change exactly, I must have missed the memo.
And please don’t pull the ‘this is where this logic ends’ nonsense. That’s like when people claim that allowing gay marriage will end up with the legalisation of bestiality. Its frankly moronic.
Colm McGinn
That would be a great defence in law, “Oh I meant something quite different!”
Of course, that’s the bullshit that exceptionalists use all the time; probably seems more moral to some to ‘defend Western civilisational values’, or ‘we had to destroy the village to save it’
chizwoz
The cartoon didn’t use racial stereotypes. It used cultural stereotypes. I’ve got friends of arabic and middle eastern origin. Except none of them are religious and they’re for all intents and purposes westerners. No-one thinks their race might nonetheless cause them to start sexually assaulting women (whereas if it really was racial, as you suggest, we WOULD be worried about that) It’s not the race, it’s the culture.
I don’t care if the portrayal of Mohammed is insulting. In a free society, you don’t get to never be insulted. I’m insulted by most of what it says in the old testament and the quran. If they think they can try and stop people drawing cartoons, well guess what they’d better be ready to give up their hideous holy books too. You don’t get one without the other.
Your comment about slapping women on the butt shows how you’ve completely failed to understand the principle of free speech. The whole point is that if I say something that people don’t like, they’re entirely free to avoid me and never listen to me again. They literally never need be upset by it again. Physically assaulting someone doesn’t share that property. They have no way of avoiding it so your right to do it really IS infringing on their right to safety.
Expressing outrage is fine. You might have just remembered a tiny detail. These people expressed it with guns.