It is mocking us for what we miss every single day
Maajid Nawaz defends Charlie Hebdo at the Daily Beast.
The outrage began when Arab and Turkish newspapers decided that Hebdomust be mocking little Aylan.
But soon, non-Arab media also joined the fray and eventually certain race-equality activists, such as barrister Peter Herbert—chair of the U.K.’s Society of Black Lawyers and former vice chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority—were threatening legal action, stating that ‘Charlie Hebdo is a purely racist, xenophobic and ideologically bankrupt publication that represents the moral decay of France. The Society of Black Lawyers will consider reporting this as incitement to hate crime and persecution before the International Criminal Court.’
Wow. I did not know that. That’s disgusting.
But never in living memory has a magazine been as misunderstood as Charlie Hebdo. For the truth is, Charlie Hebdo is not a racist magazine. Rather, it is a campaigning anti-racist left-wing magazine. And its cartoons, which are so often misunderstood to be promoting racism, are in fact lampooning racism.
That isn’t always obvious just by looking, in fact it often isn’t. But given all the circumstances – including the murders – people really ought to make the effort to do more than just look.
And this brings us to satire. Satire is, by definition, offensive. It is meant to make us feel uncomfortable. It is meant to make us scratch or heads, think, do a double-take and then think again. It is supposed to take our prejudices, turn them upside down, reapply them, and make us think we’re seeing something we’re not, until we stop to question ourselves.
Yes taste is always in the eye of the beholder. But that’s the whole point of goodsatire. It is not meant to be to our tastes. It is meant to challenge our tastes. Having our fundamental assumptions about life challenged is never a comfortable thing.
That reminds me of something Tony Pinn said during that panel we were both on at CFI in June – “if social justice doesn’t make you uncomfortable, you’re not doing it right.”
Not to our taste? OK. Make us cringe? Fair enough. Don’t like them? Fine. But whatever we do, let us not misrepresent these images. Juxtaposing images of a dead child next to offers of cheap food “meal deals” is not mocking little Aylan, it is mocking us. It is mocking us for what we miss every single day, hidden in plain sight, and we do not see it because this is how desensitized we have become to human suffering. No, those besieged, brave satirists at Hebdo are not mocking Aylan. They are mocking newspaper covers like this from the UK right-wing tabloid The Daily Mail in which an image of Aylan was—in a national newspaper— placed below an actual food deal. And how many of us noticed that on the day this Daily Mail cover went to print?
We have met the callous bystanders, and they are us.
How can that not be obvious to people?! I mean, I see that immediately and I don’t read French. I don’t know how devoid of understanding you have to be to not see the point of that cartoon.
It’s easy to miss the point of the cartoon if you look at it expecting to find any cartoon from Hebdo offensive.
What Sackbut said, of course, but also–a lot of people just don’t get irony and satire.
I wonder if it’s a generational thing? I cut my teeth on Mad Magazine, the National Lampoon (awful as it often was under P.J. O’Rourke,) Blazing Saddles, and the early SNL. Stewart and Colbert are great, but Stewart spelled out his positions on things, and Colbert’s Colbert Report persona was fairly nonthreatening (usually. When he took aim at the Bush White House at that White House Correspondents Dinner, he ruffled the feathers of some people who definitely recognized satire when they heard it.)
Kids these days.
If these guys had been around when Swift published his “Modest Proposal”, they would have been accusing him of hate crimes against the Irish. How can supposedly literate people get the wrong end of the stick so consistently?
I think the root issue is missing context. The “offending” cartoon was not on the cover. The cover was an absolutely obvious indictment of racism, and the treatment of immigrants in France in particular. If you buy / read the magazine, it’s clear how the other cartoons are meant.
If you just see the Aylan cartoon on the internet, don’t know French culture (biting sarcasm and black humour are very mainstream in France, especially for political comment), and don’t see the magazine as such, it’s apparently possible to be offended. If you’re not OK with this type of humour, you don’t buy Charlie Hebdo.
It reminds me of the hate paroles shouted against Rushdie, for a few pages that were mildly doubtful of certain ideas in Islam, in a very long and complicated book they hadn’t read…
If you don’t understand French and, just as importantly, don’t understand current affairs and who’s who you won’t understand CharlieHebdo and have no business criticizing it. Before we take him seriously let’s give Peter Herbert the advanced French test.
It’s very tiresome all these agenda-ridden bigots projecting their own biases onto a simple magazine.
CH is not ‘misunderstood.’ The apologists and collabos deliberately misrepresent the magazine, and the Twue Believers line up to chime in.