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| Stéphane "Charb"Charbonnier, slain editior of Charlie Hebdo (courtesy: Business Insider). |
It seems odd to eulogize a man who I had
never heard of before Wednesday, especially considering that I gather from what
little I do know of him that he's not someone I would agree with much
politically. But for "Charb," or Stéphane Charbonnier, editor of the
leftist and anti-religious French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo (and apparent longtime supporter of the French
Communist Party) who was gunned down Wednesday in a brutal act of radical Islamic terror, I will make my best effort.
To declare a communist a martyr for
freedom feels most strange of all. Yet that is exactly what he has become, and
I fully intend to honor him here as such; after three men in ski masks stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices Wednesday with AKs and murdered him, along with nine colleagues and two police, in cold blood while shouting about “avenging” the prophet Muhammad, Charb’s name
transcends his partisan politics, forever on.
Charb—and his magazine’s—crime in the
eyes of these killers was their publishing of cartoons that varyingly satirized
or mocked the prophet Muhammad. One, which graced the cover of an issue in 2011 that had been “guest edited” by the prophet himself, had him threatening the reader with “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” This issue was given as the catalyst for a firebombing of Charlie’s offices very shortly thereafter, the first attempt by radical Islamists to
silence the publication. Unfazed, they issued a follow-up cover featuring a
Muslim man kissing another man in a Charlie
Hebdo tee-shirt that was captioned “love is stronger than hate.”
Others included one depicting Muhammad
being decapitated by an ISIS militant (despite a “don’t you know who I am?”-type
protest), another of him being filmed nude with a caption of “The film that will
set the Muslim world on fire,” and one in which the prophet is judging a “Miss
Potato Sack” pageant (of all Burqa-clad women). True to the magazine’s
anti-religious editorial code, one notably features a Muslim, Christian, and Jewish
figure, all three of whom are together saying that “Charlie Hebdo must be censored.”
While I must admit that a couple of the
cartoons were somewhere in the ballpark of “thought provoking,” at least one
other that I saw was genuinely obscene. Some are at least a tad crude in their
jabs. Understanding Islam as I do, I can see where Muslims could easily become
offended by the material. Without getting into the finer points of each cartoon
Charlie Hebdo ever ran that is
relevant to this attack, I feel inclined to say that personally I more than
likely would not have run these as marquee content.
But it wasn’t my decision, and Charlie Hebdo isn’t my publication. And
that’s the point. Obscene as some and more generally “offensive” to Muslims as
they all apparently were, I don’t know that I consider them to be libelous or
slanderous in a legally punishable way (though I am not an expert in the French
standards for such things). Therefore, there was no reason a private enterprise
could not publish them. Everyone, even a silly, godless French lefty rag, has the
right to a free press, especially in Western civil society. And everyone,
whatever they believe in, has a right to be offended at what comes from a free
press. One thing, however, there is absolutely no right to is form a hit squad
and execute the cartoonists who offended you.
Most religious groups in modern times
seem to understand this. No Christians ever firebombed or shot up the Charlie Hebdo office, nor has anyone
else for that matter. Though he claims to have received death threats, nobodyhas ever actually killed Mr. Andres Serrano after he dunked a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, photographed it, and passed it off as a work of art aptlycalled “Piss Christ” in 1987. Until Wednesday, you could even purchase a printof the work from the Associated Press, who meanwhile enforced a policy of censoring "offensive" images of Muhammad, such as the Hebdo cartoons, or the similar works that incited the Danish cartoon
incident years ago. The AP has just this week quietly suspended selling “Piss
Christ,” just after Wednesday’s attack.
Or, as Kevin D. Williamson wrote in an
excellent piece at National Review Online
Wednesday,
The only group that regularly shows an
unwillingness to step outside of this civility is radical Islam, and “the big
show in terms of violent extremism is the never-ending circus of jihad.” And
once again, while I do not endorse nor would I necessarily ever elected to have
printed any of the cartoons that were put out in Charlie Hebdo, for that magazine to have relented to past pressure
and thereafter not published material critical of Islam (while continuing on as
they were with other groups) would have done its own share of harm; to do so
serves only to widen the gap between the world’s societies Williamson so
wonderfully highlights when he writes “That’s where the world is: Stuff from science fiction coming out of Stuttgart and California [in reference to self-driving car projects being announced], stuff from the Middle Ages coming out of Mecca, Riyadh, Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, Karachi, Kabul…”
In large swaths of his life Charb may
have been at most a distant backbencher in freedom’s House of Lords, but he is
now most assuredly a member. Charb declared for all to know that it would be
liberty or death for him, if it ever came to it; in an interview a couple years
back, he boasted "I am not afraid of reprisals, I have no children, no wife, no car, no debt. It might sound a bit pompous, but I'd prefer to die on my feet rather than living on my knees." It can hardly be said how
unfortunate it is he had to live up to his word.
Freedom forever, there are few things so
fine.
Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier,
dead at 47. RIP.
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| There are few things so fine as freedom (courtesy: Investor's Business Daily). |
-Mitch
Carter, a history/secondary education major at Aurora University, is an
Illinois State Scholar and member of the Kendall County Young Republicans.
