He worked there from 1992 to 2001,
before walking out, angered by “the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion
practices” of a certain Philippe Val [former CH editor - trans.] Since then,
Olivier Cyran has been an observer from a distance,
outside the walls, of the evolution of Charlie
Hebdo and its growing obsession with Islam. He
went over this long-term drift on the occasion of an opinion piece in Le Monde, signed by Charb
[Stéphane Charbonnier, one
of the cartoonists murdered in January 2015 - trans.] and Fabrice
Nicolino.
Postscript 11 January 2015: to all those who think that this
article was validation in advance of the shameful terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo
(that they were asking for it), the editorial team of Article 11 would
like to give a hearty middle finger to such vultures. To make things absolutely
clear, please see this
text.
*
Dear Charb
and Fabrice Nicolino,
“We hope that those who claim, and will claim tomorrow, that Charlie is racist, will at
least have the courage to say it out loud and under their real name. We’ll know
how to respond.” Reading this rant at the end of your opinion piece in Le Monde[1],
as if to say “come say it to our face if
you’re a real man”, I felt something rising within me, like a craving to go
back to fighting in the school playground. Yet it wasn’t me being called out.
Which upright citizens you hope to convince, moreover, is a mystery. For a good
long while, many people have been saying “out loud” and “under their real name”
what they think about your magazine and the effluent flowing out of it, without
any one of you being bothered to answer them or to shake their little fists.
And so Le Monde has
charitably opened their laundry service to you, for an express steam-cleaning
of your rumpled honour. To hear you talk, it was urgent: you couldn’t even go
out in Paris without a taxi driver treating you like racists and leaving you
helpless on the footpath. I understand your annoyance, but why did you have to
go give yourself another black eye in a different publication than your own?
Don’t Charlie Hebdo,
its website and its publishing house give you space to express yourself to your
heart’s content? You invoke “Charlie’s” glorious heritage of the 60s and 70s,
when it was political censorship and not haunting disrepute that gave your
magazine something to worry about. But I doubt that, at the time, writers like Cavanna or Choron would have
asked for help from the posh press to make themselves respectable.
If it also occurred to me, in the
past, to scribble out some furious lines in reaction to some of your exploits,
I never dwelled on the subject. Doubtless I would not have had the patience or
the stoutness of heart to follow, week after week, the distressing
transformation which took over your team after the events of September 11,
2001. I was no longer part of Charlie Hebdo when the suicide planes made their impact on your
editorial line, but the Islamophobic neurosis which bit by bit took over your
pages from that day on affected me personally, as it ruined the memory of the
good moments I spent on the magazine during the 1990s. The devastating laughter
of “Charlie” which I had loved to hear now sounded in my ears like the laugh of
a happy idiot getting his cock out at the checkout counter, or of a pig rolling
in its own shit. And yet, I never called your magazine racist. But since today
you are proclaiming, high and loud, your stainless and irreproachable anti-racism,
maybe it’s now the right moment to seriously consider the question.
Racist? Charlie Hebdo was certainly no such thing
at the time when I worked there. In any case, the idea that the mag would
expose itself to such an accusation would have never occurred to me. There had,
of course been some Francocentrism, as well as the editorials of Philippe Val.
These latter were subject to a disturbing fixation, which worsened over the
years, on the “Arabic-Muslim world”.
This was depicted as an ocean of barbarism threatening, at any moment, to
submerge the little island of high culture and democratic refinement that was,
for him, Israel. But the boss’s obsessions remained confined to his column on
page 3, and overflowed only rarely into the heart of the journal which, in
those years, it seemed me, throbbed with reasonably well-oxygenated blood.
Scarcely had I walked out, wearied
by the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion practices of the employer,
than the Twin Towers fell and Caroline Fourest
arrived in your editorial team. This double catastrophe set off a process of
ideological reformatting which would drive off your former readers and attract
new ones - a cleaner readership, more interested in a light-hearted version of
the “war on terror” than the soft anarchy of [cartoonist] Gébé. Little by little, the wholesale denunciation of
“beards”, veiled women and their imaginary accomplices became a central axis of
your journalistic and satirical production. “Investigations” began to appear
which accepted the wildest rumours as fact, like the so-called infiltration of
the League of Human Rights (LDH) or European Social Forum (FSE) by a horde of
bloodthirsty Salafists[2].
The new impulse underway required the magazine to renounce the unruly attitude
which had been its backbone up to then, and to form alliances with the most
corrupt figures of the intellectual jet-set, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Antoine Sfeir,
cosignatories in Charlie Hebdo of a grotesque “Manifesto of the Twelve against
the New Islamic Totalitarianism”[3].
Whoever could not see themselves in a worldview which opposed the civilized
(Europeans) to obscurantists (Muslims) saw themselves quickly slapped with the
label of “useful idiots” or “Islamo-leftists”.
“Shari`a Hebdo”
cover: Mohammed, editor-in-chief: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”
To Charlie Hebdo, it’s always been good form
to scoff at the “fat idiots” who like
football and watching TF1 [television network]. A slippery slope. Belief in
one’s own superiority, accustomed to looking down on the common herd, is the
surest way to sabotage one’s own intellectual defences and to allow them to
fall over in the least gust of wind. Your own, although supported by a good
education, comfortable income and the pleasant team spirit of “Charlie’s gang”,
collapsed at a stupefying speed. I remember a full-page article by Caroline Fourest which appeared on June 11 2008. In it, she recounted
her friendly meeting with the Dutch cartoonist Gregorius
Nekschot, who had gotten some grief for representing
his Muslim fellow-countrymen in a particularly hilarious way. Judge for
yourself: an imam dressed as Santa Claus buggering a goat, with the caption:
“We have to share our traditions”. Or an Arab, slumped on a couch and lost
in thought: “The Qur’an doesn’t say if you have to do anything to be on the
dole for 30 years.” Or even the “monument to the slavery of white indigenous
taxpayers”: a Dutch person in foot shackles, carrying a black person on his
back, arms crossed and sucking on a pacifier. Foul racism? Oh come on, it’s
freedom of expression! Certainly, Fourest granted,
the slightly coarse humour of her friend “doesn’t
always travel well”, but it must be understood “in the Dutch context which is ultra-tolerant, even angelic, towards
fundamentalism.” Whose fault is it if Muslims leave themselves open to gags
with export difficulties? That of Muslims themselves and their over-angelic
allies, obviously. As Nekschot himself explained to Charlie Hebdo’s readers, “Muslims must
understand that humour has been part of our tradition for centuries.”
No-one in your office up and quit
after this insufficiently-noticed page, which after all did no more than
sanctify a process which had begun six or seven years earlier. Birds of a
tolerant feather flock together. But when I read this in your Le Monde article: “We are almost
ashamed to remind you that anti-racism and passion for equality of all human
beings are and will remain the founding principles of Charlie Hebdo”,
the only information I got from it is that your team are not completely immune
to shame. Really?
After Val and Fourest
left in 2009, called to higher things - one as head of a public radio network,
the other to the podiums of official anti-racism - we might have wondered if
you would continue to follow their lead in their absence. The least we can say
is that you have remained faithful to their line. You’ve absorbed it down to
the core, it seems.
Today, those flies which Tignous never fails to add buzzing round the heads of his “beards” are more than ever attracted to
your imagination, as soon as you “laugh
at” Muslims. In a video posted on the Charlie
Hebdo website at the end of 2011, we saw you, Charb, imitate the Islamic call to prayer, to the rapt
giggles of your little buddies. What a hilarious new version of the Qur’anic
recitation for your magazine’s deadline; Michel Leeb
[famous French impressionist - trans.] could not have done better. What
collective poison would you have had to stew in to
get to this point? From what psychological depths did you drag up the nerve to
“laugh” at a cartoon representing veiled women baring their buttocks as they
bow in prayer towards “Mecca-relle” [a pun on maquerelle, the madam of a brothel - trans.]? This pathetic stream of crap isn’t even
shameful; its stupidity embarrasses you, even before it reveals your state of
mind, your vision of the world.
It is this drawing by Catherine that
comes to my mind, but I could point to so many others amid the torrents of
Islamophobic sewage that you others, producers of humour inflated by the winds
of fashion, flush from your tanks every week. That drawing accompanied a
pseudo-investigation into “sex jihadists” in Syria[4].
This “scoop”, we learned a little while later - it’s true that it seemed
plausible on first reading - was a tissue of stupidities belched out for
propaganda purposes[5].
Let’s note that you haven’t even taken this mess off your website; apparently,
some subjects lend themselves better than others to retraction. When you’re
laughing at veiled women, you can let yourself go, allow yourself some
confusion between exciting yet weakly-sourced information, and barracks-room
banter.
But I’m not writing to talk about
good taste; rather, about this country which you’ve made a nastier place to
live in. A country which now forbids a woman to work in a crèche on the basis
that the piece of cloth she wears will traumatise the kids. Or a tertiary
student, wearing a bandanna judged to be too wide, is excluded from her college
with the blessings of a UMP [conservative - trans.] mayor, the socialist Minister of Education, and the
rabid press[6].
Where you’re hard-pressed to find a café counter or a table of literary
notables which, without a moment’s notice, won’t erupt in the kind of joke which,
at “Charlie”, makes you soil yourselves laughing on deadline day. Where every
woman who covers her hair is considered the vanguard of a fifth column, to the
extent that she’s forbidden to participate in a school outing or to do
volunteer work to feed the homeless[7].
I know that, in your eyes, these
vigorous measures are crucial for the survival of the Republic and of
secularism. Recently, you found it useful to publish an interview with your
lawyer, Richard Malka, the valiant defender of Clearstream [a corporation infamous for tax evasion -
trans.], of Dominique Strauss-Kahn [politician arrested for attempted rape -
trans.] and of the spirit of the Enlightenment. “The veil is the annihilation, the burial of the Republican trinity of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity[8]”, your mouthpiece
declared as if at a Toastmasters’ meeting for vacuum-cleaner salesmen[9].
He would first have to explain to us for whom this famous trinity has any real
meaning, and for whose profit, but let’s move on. What he’s hammering into your
readers’ heads, though they’re already fully instructed on the subject, is that
a few square centimetres of cotton, perhaps mixed with polyester, threaten to
spread the plague across our beautiful country. That the veil is so dangerously
infected that it’s not wise to waste any time worrying about the person who
wears it.
I must make it clear at this stage
that, personally, I have no “problem” with my aunt’s bonnet or my cousin’s
dreadlocks, and I have no more of a problem with my neighbour’s veil. If this
neighbour told me she was wearing it against her will, I would certainly have
the impulse to encourage her to find a way to live how she wants. I would act
the same way if she was forced to wear fishnet stockings or a Scottish kilt.
Outside this scenario, whether a woman decides to wear or not to wear whatever
clobber has nothing to do with me. Whether it’s for personal, religious,
aesthetic or other reasons, that’s her business. What’s stunning is the mania
in this country for projecting our fantasies onto a square of fabric, whether
the alienation of women, the fear of Islamic invasion, the defence of men’s
right to enjoy seductive hairstyles, etc. I don’t care about a veil, high heels
or a Camaïeu [famous French brand - trans.] t-shirt
made in Bangladesh, only that the person underneath, on or inside it deserves
respect. So where have we got to, now that we have to reaffirm such an obvious
principle? Try it, you’ll see: it’s the best preventative against stomach
ulcers and a nasty headache.
Charb
cartoon: “Are we allowed to draw Mohammed’s butt?”
The obsessive pounding on Muslims to
which your weekly has devoted itself for more than a decade has had very real
effects. It has powerfully contributed to popularising, among “left-wing”
opinion, the idea that Islam is a major “problem” in French society. That
belittling Muslims is no longer the sole privilege of the extreme right, but a
“right to offend” which is sanctified by secularism, the Republic, by
“co-existence”. And even - let’s not be stingy with the alibis! - by the rights
of women. It’s widely believed today that the exclusion of a veiled girl is a
sign, not of stupid discrimination, but of solid, respectable feminism, which consists
of pestering those whom one claims to be liberating. Draped in these noble
intentions that flatter their ignorance and exempt them from any scruples, we
see people with whom we were close, and whom we believed mentally healthy,
abruptly start to cut loose with a stream of racist idiocies. Each has their
own source of authority: Skirt Day
[film starring Isabelle Adjani - trans.], Elisabeth Badinter,
Alain Finkielkraut, Caroline Fourest,
Easter Bruckner, [Prime Minister] Manuel Valls,
[fascist National Front leader] Marine Le Pen or countless others, there’s one
for every taste and “sensibility”. But it’s rare that Charlie Hebdo is not cited to support the
golden rule authorising us to spew all over Muslims. And, since your disciples
have learned their lessons well, they never fail to exclaim when they’re caught
red-handed: “But it is our right to mock religions! Don’t confuse legitimate
criticism of Islam with anti-Arab racism!”
It’s obvious that you’re working
this same vein in your opinion piece in Le
Monde. “It’s still the case, you
moan, that Charlie devotes many of
its cover cartoons to the papists. But the Islamic religion, whose flag has
been imposed upon innumerable peoples on the planet, as far as Indonesia,
should somehow be spared. Why the hell should it? What is the relationship,
other than an ideology which is essentialist to the core, between being an Arab
and believing in Islam?”
I would really like to illuminate
you on this point, but allow me first to appreciate the nasty little jab in
which you sneakily serve up the old garbage about
Islam-the-religion-of-conquest that does nothing but consume the planet. The
Islamisation of the Indonesian archipelago began in the 13th century, when
Sumatran princes converted to the religion of the Persian and Indian merchants
who brought abundance into their harbours – not under threat, but by desire to
integrate with a prosperous commercial network. Later, in the 18th century, it
was irreproachably Christian Dutch colonists who set about imposing Islam on
Java, so as to shield its population from the seditious influence of the Hindu
Balinese. We are far from the image of the ferocious Bedouin bringing exotic
peoples to their knees, which appears to sum up your knowledge of the Islamic
world.
But let’s return to the question of
“relationship” between Arabs and Muslims, racism and Islamophobia. Is the
boundary that you trace with such bold assurance between the two categories
really so clear in your minds? To read the beginning of your opinion piece, it’s
possible to be sceptical. The edifying story about the “Arab taxi driver”, who
refused the business of a contributor to your journal “because of its cartoons
mocking Islam”, reveals a certain confusion in this regard. What does the
quality of “Arabic” ascribed to the
driver – who, according to you, could not simply be French – tell us about the
insult suffered by your wretched colleague? Do you believe that only an “Arab”
would turn their nose up at your crass offerings? I, who am neither an Arab nor
a taxi driver, am not sure if I would lend your collaborator the price of a
Metro ticket. Nevertheless, I hope he got over his culture shock and found a
white driver who would allow him in their back seat.
You’re right, Arab and Muslim, it’s
not the same thing. But you know what? Muslim and Muslim, it’s not the same
thing either. Understand this: there are all sorts, rich and poor, big and
small, friendly and rude, generous and greedy, wanting a better world,
reactionary or even, yes, fundamentalist. On the other hand, in Charlie Hebdo,
nothing resembles a Muslim more than another Muslim. Always represented as
weak-minded, fanatical, terrorist, on the benefit. A Muslim woman? Always a
poor dumb thing reducible to her headscarf, with no other social function than
to arouse the libido of your comedians.
Speaking of which, we could say a
lot about the sleazy aspect of your motivations. The euphoria with which Charlie Hebdo
welcomed the topless activists of FEMEN suggests that the grease of
Islamophobia blends perfectly with a splattering of testosterone. The ode of
Bernard Maris to Amina Sboui, a Tunisian FEMEN-ist who posed topless on the Internet, offers a good
example of the hormonal muck dripping off your pages: “Show your breasts,
Amina, show your genitals to all those bearded retards who hang around on porno
sites, to all the desert pigs who preach morality at home and pay for escorts
in foreign palaces, and dream of seeing you stoned to death after raping you... Your nude body is of an absolute purity,
compared to their jellabas and repugnant niqabs[10]”. Paging
Dr Freud...
You have the nerve to accuse your
detractors of “essentialism”, and without doubt the numbskulls who worship you
will applaud your acrobatics. But this isn’t a circus. You wallow in your
essentialism every week - or nearly - by racializing Muslims, constantly
depicting them as grotesque or hideous creatures. What defines the dominant
image of the victim of racialization “is that it is entirely contained in what
racializes it; its culture, its religion, its skin colour. It is seen as incapable of escaping it, incapable of seeing
further than its melanin ratio or the cloth it wears on its head,” observes the
blog of Valérie CG, a feminist who won’t interest you
very much because she hasn’t shown you her tits. Muslim has become a sort of new skin colour, from which it is
impossible to detach oneself.[11] ”
This judicious remark is aimed at
the meanderings of the “child psychiatrist” Caroline Eliacheff,
who, in Elle magazine, had recently justified the sacking of a
veil-wearing childcare worker at the Baby-Loup crèche: “We might worry about
the consequences for a toddler of only seeing the front of a woman’s face, a
head amputated of ears, hair and neck.[12]”
The veil is a weapon of mass destruction, it is burying the Republic as surely
as it amputates women’s vital organs. It’s useless to point out that Caroline Eliacheff, just like you, “fights racism” - at least,
that’s what she declares in her interview. For spouting stupidities, and
justifying the brutal sacking of an employee recognized as competent and who
had not been caught inciting the little angels to jihad, there is no more
comfortable perch than on the highest ground of civilised virtue.
But your throne is overlooking a
swamp. Charb, for whom I once voiced my esteem,
and Fabrice,
whose intellectual rigour I appreciated[13]:
I hold you, you and your colleagues, co-responsible for the increasingly rotten
atmosphere. After September 11, Charlie Hebdo was among the first in the so-called leftist
press to jump on the bandwagon of the Islamic peril. Don’t deprive yourself of
receiving your own share of the shit, at a moment when the number of Islamophobic
acts is breaking records: 11.3% higher in the first 9 months of 2013 compared
to the same period in 2012, according to l’Observatoire
national de l’islamophobie. They worry about a “new
phenomenon” of violence, marked by at least 14 attacks on veiled women since
the start of the year.
Riss cartoon: Sweet Shari`a, “a
kiss is still a kiss”.
Don’t worry, I’m not saying that
reading Charlie Hebdo
automatically unleashes a craving to bucket a mosque with pig’s blood or to rip
the veil off a supermarket shopper, as happens here and there. You’ve pointed
out the targets, but you wouldn’t want some poor guy to attack them for real,
because you’re against violence and against racism. As are, most certainly,
your readers. They have no prejudice against Muslims. It’s just that they break
out in whole-hearted laughter at that Charb cartoon
where an Arab with a big moustache stops in front of a prostitute, while a
bearded preacher sermonizes: “Brother! Why would you pay 40 euros for a single shag when for the same price
you could buy a wife!” In the 1930s, the same gag - with Jews instead of
Muslims - would have gone down a treat, except that, at the time, its teller
would surely not have had the idea to wave around a certificate of anti-racism.
The cartoon in question illustrated an article unmasking the dark designs of a
small group of Salafists in Brussels. The subtitle sums up its thrust well:
“Will all Belgium’s chips soon be halal? Some
beards are pushing for it, and are fighting the democracy which allows them to
exist[14].”
What? Islamification of chips, democracy in danger? In their mind, the reader
is already starting to clean their hunting rifle. In their mind only, because
they’re anti-racist. At least until they go and pour their heart out on some
internet site, applauding your daring deeds, in the manner of “lulupipistrelle”, author of this comment on Agoravox: “So do cartoons of the Prophet give Muslims
ulcers? Well, I feel like punching
all the veiled ladies I meet, and I’m not talking about the bearded ones... but
I control myself...[15]”
Of course, Charlie Hebdo isn’t limited to this one
subject. They write and draw on many other topics. I can well believe that many
readers buy your journal because of your support for animal rights, or because
of [writers] Cavanna or Nicolino,
or for the funny pictures, or to congratulate Bernard Maris after his
nomination to the national board of the Bank of France, another den of thrills
and giggles. But I doubt that many of them don’t get some small, shameful
pleasure from your continual repetition of Islamophobic obsessions - without
which, the magazine would fall from their hands. There are even some - you
can’t deny it - who buy it mainly because of that: to see what “Charlie” is
going to shove in their faces this week. I must admit, that’s good business.
Since the Danish cartoon controversy, and your heroic mounting of the steps at
the Cannes film festival in penguin costumes, arm in arm with Phillipe Val, Daniel Leconte and
Bernard Henri-Levy (but, alas, without Carla Bruni,
though she had been announced), “Muslim bashing” dressed up as “intransigent
defence of freedom of expression” has become your front-window showcase, which you
take care to replenish regularly. You can always insist that undocumented
immigrants are your friends, or criticise Manuel Valls
for his attacks on Roma, but Islamophobia is your staple diet, your first
resort.
You tell me you’re not the only
ones. Your position in this field is, it’s true, largely shared by your
colleagues in the written press, from L’Express
to Valeurs Actuelles,
including Le Point, Marianne, Le Nouvel
Observateur and Le Figaro, to
mention only the most enthusiastic.
And I’m not even mentioning TV and radio. There’s a rich market for media
stories about “inconsiderate”, “scary” and “disturbing” Islam, even if it’s
somewhat saturated. Nevertheless, amidst this healthy and friendly competition,
your mag has successfully carved out a niche with products which have no
equivalent elsewhere, allowing you to occupy a non-negligible segment of
shameless Islamophobic opinion on the left.
However, knowing you, I wonder:
what, exactly, is your problem with the Muslims of this country? In your writing
in Le Monde, you invoke the healthy suspicion of “such great power in the hands of senior clergy”, but without explaining how Islam - which
has no clergy, but you can’t know everything, can you? - exercises “such great
power” in France. Outside of the hard-core version promoted by a few
fanatics, the Islamic religion in our part of the world does not seem to me to
assume such an extraordinarily intrusive or bellicose form. On the political
level, its influence is zero: six million Muslims in our country, none of whom
are members of the National Assembly. For a parliamentarian, it’s safer to
plead the case of commercial lawyers and to pass laws making veiled women
invisible than to worry about eruptions of Islamophobic violence. Nor is there
a single Muslim among media owners, information officers, heavyweights among
employers, big bankers, important editors or union big-wigs. In political
parties of both left and right, only Muslims who have learned by heart the
complete works of Caroline Fourest have any chance of
getting even a low-ranking role.
Charb
cartoon: Filming a scandalous film about Mohammed:
“You’re sure that Mohammed had sex with a pig’s head?” “I can’t
afford to pay a nine-year-old prostitute, dude!”
I do know, Charb,
that you’ve received death threats and that maybe some crazies out there want
to do you violence. That saddens me. Despite all my criticisms of you - and the
others - I don’t like the thought of you permanently tailed by two cops,
costing your beloved Republic an arm and a leg. I also fear that your
guard-dogs might influence you, like Val influenced the whole team. But if
you’re really afraid that French Muslims are turning into serial killers of holy
war, maybe you will get some small comfort in seeing the calm manner in which
these people react to the real or symbolic attacks which are their daily lot.
When a mosque is covered in racist graffiti, do you think that its leaders or
the local faithful break out in cries of vengeance, or vows to put the
Presidential Palace to fire and the sword? No, every time they declare that
they are leaving it all up to “our national justice system”. Among those whom I
know, your skills at whipping up media froth just add a little bit extra to
their burden. I’m not sure I’d have the same patience.
Hunkered down behind your aching
sides, you claim the sacred right “to laugh” equally at imams, priests and
rabbis. Why not, if you still really applied this principle. Have you forgotten
the Siné incident [where a CH cartoonist was sacked
for anti-Semitism in 2008 - trans.], where you had to draw a cartoon? A proven
report of Islamophobia, and you burst out laughing. A misleading accusation of
anti-Semitism, and someone gets fired. This kind of thing goes back to the Val
years, but the cowardly approval which your boss received back then from “the
whole gang” - and particularly from you, Charb -
shows that the system of “one law for some, one for others” in action at that time
wasn’t the fault of just one man. The same rule is still in force. To this day,
I’m told, the special “Shari`a Hebdo”
issue hasn’t been joined by a “Talmud Hebdo”. Please
believe me, I’m not upset about that.
You claim for yourself the tradition
of anticlericalism, but pretend not to know the fundamental difference between
this and Islamophobia. The first comes from a long, hard and fierce struggle
against a Catholic priesthood which actually had formidable power, which had -
and still has - its own newspapers, legislators, lobbies, literary salons and a
huge property portfolio. The second attacks members of a minority faith
deprived of any kind of influence in the corridors of power. It consists of
distracting attention from the well-fed interests which rule this country, in
favour of inciting the mob against citizens who haven’t been invited to the
party, if you want to take the trouble to realise that - for most of them -
colonisation, immigration and discrimination have not given them the most favourable
place in French society. Is it too much to ask a team which, in your words “is
divided between leftists, extreme leftists, anarchists and Greens”, to take a
tiny bit of interest in the history of our country and its social reality?
I do like swipes at the priesthood,
I grew up with them and they helped me develop solid defences against fairy
stories and abuses of power. It’s partly that heritage which raises my hackles
against the lazy intellectual arrogance of a Muslim-basher. An anti-religious
posture gives such a person a convenient way to relax in their ignorance, to
dress up their knee-jerk mental reactions as defiance. It gives respectability
to a gaping lack of imagination, and a conformity which is corrupted by the
come-hither eyes of the extreme right[16].
“Encoding racism to make it imperceptible, and therefore socially acceptable”,
is how Thomas Deltombe defines the function of
Islamophobia, also described as a “machine for refining crude racism”[17].
These two formulas fit you like a glove. So don’t get on your high horse when
your critics use strong language against you. In the last few days, you’ve
cried scandal because a rapper of no great skill called for a “burning at the
stake for those Charlie Hebdo dogs”, as part of an ensemble piece on the soundtrack
of the film La Marche. As if your
magazine were nothing but love and poetry, you let the whole world know that
you were “shocked” by such “violence”. Yet, you weren’t appalled when the
Tunisian rapper Weld El 15 described his own country’s police as “dogs who
should have their throats cut like sheep”. On the contrary, you interviewed
him, with all the respect due to a “fighter for free expression”[18].
The verbal violence of Weld El 15 seemed sweet to your eyes because it was
aimed at a government dominated by Islamists who wanted to send him to prison.
But when the canine metaphor was aimed at you, it was a completely different
kettle of fish. So long, freedom of expression: let’s rally around
neo-conservative talking points on rap like “appeal to hate” or “communalist
religious chant”[19].
The machine for refining crude
racism isn’t just profitable, but also extremely fragile.
Yours truly,
Olivier
Cyran
[1] « Non, Charlie Hebdo
n’est pas raciste ! »,
Le Monde, 20 November 2013.
[2] Fiammetta Venner, « Forum social européen : un autre jihad est possible », Charlie Hebdo, 29 September 2004. Available here.
[3] Published March 1 2006 in Charlie Hebdo with the co-operation of L’Express, RTL, RMC, Europe 1 and France Info.
[4] Zineb El Rhazoui, « Sexe and the Syrie », Charlie Hebdo, 25 September 2013.
[5] Ignace Leverrier,
« Vous allez être
déçus : le “djihad du sexe” en Syrie n’a jamais existé », 29 September
2013.
[6] For an analysis
of this surreal affair, read Abdellali
Hajjat et Marwan Mohammed, Islamophobie,
comment les élites françaises fabriquent le « problème musulman »,
La Découverte, 2013.
[7] « Pas de femmes voilées
aux Restos du cœur »,
www.islamophobie.net, 6 December 2012.
[9] « Affaire Baby-Loup : la laïcité à la barre », interview with Richard Malka by Gérard Biard, Charlie Hebdo, 6 November 2013.
[10]
Bernard Maris, « Cette jeunesse irresponsable », Charlie Hebdo, 20 juin 2013. Can
someone explain to “Charlie’s” editorialist that the jellaba
isn’t an “Islamic” attribute, but an “Arabic” piece of clothing? One month
after this article, and to the great disappointment of its author, Amina Sboui
walked out of FEMEN explaining that she didn’t want her name “associated
with an Islamophobic organisation”.
[11] « L’islam, ce nouveau
déterminisme selon Eliacheff et Elle », www.crepegeorgette.com, 22 November 2013.
[12] « Le conflit sur le
voile touche aussi les enfants », Elle, 13 November 2013.
[13] I was surprised to see you endorsing, with your signature, your employers’ pitiful attempt at image control. I don’t doubt the sincerity of your solidarity, but it seems a bad indicator to me.
[14] Zineb El Rhazoui,
« Les salafistes ont
leur roi des Belges »,
Charlie Hebdo, 13 September 2013.
[15] Comments on the
article « La dernière provocation
de “Charlie Hebdo” contre les musulmans », www.agoravox.fr, 19 September
2012.
[16] Among your friendly supporters: Bruno
Mégret, « Désislamiser la France », speech
at the summer school of the
MNR [far-right party – trans.], 27 August 2005 ;
Ivan Rioufol, « Pourquoi “Charlie Hebdo” sauve
l’honneur », Le Figaro, 19 September
2012 ; Benoît Rayski,
« Tombouctou-sur-Seine : et si on tranchait les mains des
dessinateurs de “Charlie Hebdo” ? », atlantico.fr, 28 November 2013.
[17] Read Alain Gresh,
« L’islamophobie, “Le
Monde” et une (petite) censure, Nouvelles d’Orient, 5 November 2013.
[18] Zineb El Rhazoui,
« Tunisie :
l’islamisme menacé par du rap et des tétons », Charlie Hebdo, 19 July 2013.
[19] Read Sébastien Fontenelle, « Un intéressant
cas de foutage de gueule », Bakchich.info, 26 November
2013.