A useful thing via Twitter:
Hazem Eseifan @Eseifan 14 hours ago
#Charlie_Hebdo’s response to its idiotic critics on the American left.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Out of respect for you, who have not yet discovered irony
May 3rd, 2015 4:34 pm | By Ophelia BensonDonations of up to $500,000 a year
May 3rd, 2015 12:53 pm | By Ophelia BensonAn article from the Spectator last August, by Andrew Brown…who has written many things I’ve disagreed with strongly, usually in a blog post. I think many of them were attacks on Richard Dawkins and defenses of religion.
His article contains a startling piece of information.
[T]he Richard Dawkins website offers followers the chance to join the ‘Reason Circle’, which, like Dante’s Hell, is arranged in concentric circles. For $85 a month, you get discounts on his merchandise, and the chance to meet ‘Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science personalities’. Obviously that’s not enough to meet the man himself. For that you pay $210 a month — or $5,000 a year — for the chance to attend an event where he will speak.
When you compare this to the going rate for other charismatic preachers, it does seem on the high side. The Pentecostal evangelist Morris Cerullo, for example, charges only $30 a month to become a member of ‘God’s Victorious Army’, which is bringing ‘healing and deliverance to the world’. And from Cerullo you get free DVDs, not just discounts.
But the $85 a month just touches the hem of rationality. After the neophyte passes through the successively more expensive ‘Darwin Circle’ and then the ‘Evolution Circle’, he attains the innermost circle, where for $100,000 a year or more he gets to have a private breakfast or lunch with Richard Dawkins, and a reserved table at an invitation-only circle event with ‘Richard’ as well as ‘all the benefits listed above’, so he still gets a discount on his Richard Dawkins T-shirt saying ‘Religion — together we can find a cure.’
The website suggests that donations of up to $500,000 a year will be accepted for the privilege of eating with him once a year: at this level of contribution you become a member of something called ‘The Magic of Reality Circle’. I don’t think any irony is intended.
$100,000 a year or more.
Can he forgive sins? Knock a few years off the sentence in Purgatory?
That “offer” is no longer on the RDF website. I wonder if the Spectator article embarrassed them.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Back to 1989
May 3rd, 2015 12:00 pm | By Ophelia BensonThe always-wonderful Joan Smith beez wonderful again with her take on Charlie Hebdo.
Almost 150 well-known writers, including the novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Carey, have written a letter protesting the award. They say they are sickened by the murders but claim the decision to honour the magazine is “neither clear nor inarguable”. They accuse Charlie Hebdo of mocking “a section of the French population that is already marginalised, embattled, and victimised” and causing “further humiliation and suffering” among France’s Muslims.
Seeing this, my mind flashed to The Satanic Verses. Back in 1989, I was dismayed by the number of people who said that the death sentence passed on Salman Rushdie was wrong, but he shouldn’t have offended Muslims. The historian Lord Dacre even declared that he wouldn’t shed a tear if some British Muslims “were to waylay [Rushdie] in a dark street” and teach him some manners. Defending free speech is easier in principle than in practice, it seems.
Indeed. My mind has been flashing back to 1989 all week (as has Salman Rushdie’s). It’s a bad thing. It’s bad when people on the left tell other people on the left that they mustn’t rebel against religion because [insert bad reasons here]. Religion is one of our masters, and it’s arguably the most illegitimate of all. The left has no business telling people not to rebel against their masters.
Curiously, these self-appointed defenders of Europe’s Muslim population are making exactly the same mistake as the people they think they’re opposing; like white racists, they regard “Muslims” as a homogenous group. They see them as uniformly powerless, ignoring the emergence of a Muslim middle class and the enormous power wielded by advocates of extreme forms of Islam. I don’t imagine the secular blogger Raif Badawi, who is still under sentence of 1,000 lashes, would have much time for the argument that the Wahhabi sect which runs Saudi Arabia is mild-mannered and ineffective.
Or a powerless marginalized group, either.
The journalists gunned down at Charlie Hebdo – including a French-Algerian copy-editor, Mustapha Ourrad – understood this very well. Some Muslim men (they almost always are men) are very powerful indeed, whether they are the leaders of Boko Haram or the Muslim clerics who encourage impressionable young men to kill people. There are good reasons for being afraid of Islamic extremists, just as I would have gone in fear of the Inquisition if I’d been born in 15th-century Italy.
Or of the nuns if she’d been born in 20th-century Ireland.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
New table hosts for PEN America
May 3rd, 2015 11:24 am | By Ophelia BensonAlso in pleasanter news: from the New York Times:
Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel are among the writers who have agreed to be table hosts at next week’s PEN American Center gala after six authors withdrew in protest of an award being given to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
So, that will do. That’s not too shabby. Alison Bechdel has a hit musical on Broadway at this moment.
The literary and human rights organization told The Associated Press this weekend that the other new hosts are George Packer, Azar Mafisi and Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born French author who will present the award to Hebdo’s editor in chief Gerard Biard and critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thore. PEN is giving the magazine a Freedom of Expression Courage award, a decision that has been fiercely defended and criticized.
That’s Nafisi, if they mean the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, as I imagine they do. But anyway – cool beans. I would be ecstatic to sit at any one of those tables.
“I was honored to be invited to host a table,” Gaiman wrote in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. “The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage: They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed, and the survivors have continued following the murders.”
Stout fella.
The literary world has been in a civil war of words since PEN announced last week that Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and four other table hosts pulled out from the gala, citing what they say are the offensive cartoons of Muslims in Charlie Hebdo. A stream of tweets, letters, Facebook postings and opinion pieces has divided old friends such as former PEN presidents Prose and Salman Rushdie, a leading backer of the honor, and even set siblings on opposite sides.
I’ve been reading Joseph Anton again because of all this, and I keep finding tragic-ironic appearances by Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje and the like. It’s sad.
Gaiman, in his email to the AP, said he was puzzled that “several otherwise well-meaning writers have failed to grasp that you do not have to like what is said to support people’s right to say it.”
No, you don’t, but you probably do have to like or at least respect what is said to be happy about an award for it. Being happy about an award is a step or two (or several) beyond supporting people’s right. I agree with the protesting writers about that much. I just think they’re dead wrong about not liking or at least respecting what is said. They are objecting from the left, not from the right, and that’s just a complete mistake. And with so many people explaining the mistake to them, they ought to be able to grasp it.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Zainub Priya Dala supports the Charlie Hebdo award
May 3rd, 2015 10:46 am | By Ophelia BensonZainub Priya Dala posted a note on Charlie Hebdo and free expression v intimidation to my Facebook wall, and gave me permission to quote it. I’m sure you remember her experience of violent intimidation.
Regarding the PEN American Center’s decision to present the PEN Free Expression Award to Charlie Hebdo:
In a similarity to my experience, (albeit my assault – on a much smaller scale)… It is not a question of content, but a question of style. Literary satirical style throught the ages has always been met with persecution. It is a style that is poorly understood, where artists attempt to create discourse and debate surrounding an otherwise taboo subject. I support freedom of expression in all its forms, be it admiration of a “banned” writer or a deep dissection of a cartoon in all its complexity. Using violence to silence opinion is tantamount to medieval gagging practices. If we cannot debate sensitive issues without fear of retaliation, we are in no way progressing as a society. The Charlie Hebdo tragedy was disgusting. It was bullying. It was unneccsary loss of lives. An award should be given, a commemoration of sorts…. Otherwise the lost lives will have been in vain. When we venerate people who have been persecuted for their craft, we open the way for courageous people to follow in their wake. I say all this because I knew and still know now the sound of being silenced~zpd
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Draw The Line Here
May 3rd, 2015 7:27 am | By Ophelia BensonEnglish PEN has a book we can buy.
English PEN is delighted to announce the publication of Draw The Line Here, a collection of cartoons drawn in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015.
The book is a collaboration between the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO), Crowdshed, and English PEN. It features cartoons drawn by British artists in the days immediately after the attacks. The work of 66 cartoonists is featured, including Steve Bell, Dave Brown, Martin Rowson, Peter Brooke and Ralph Steadman.
Books cost UK £15.00 each. Compare that to $250 to attend the “VIP reception” on Dawkins’s June tour…
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Not really a reductio
May 2nd, 2015 6:32 pm | By Ophelia BensonGlenn Greenwald thinks people have been misrepresenting the arguments of Francine Prose and Deborah Eisenberg.
To defend the award to Charlie Hebdo, PEN officials argued that the award did not constitute an endorsement of the content of the cartoonists’ speech, but rather, only a recognition that they were courageous in expressing themselves. The principle articulated by PEN was clear: a person is deserving of this award if they continue to express their views even in the face of credible threats of violence, and especially if they pay for their right to free expression with their lives.
The objecting PEN writers believe this principle to be invalid and contrived. To prove that point, they offered a hypothetical example that was classic reductio ad absurdum: suppose a KKK leader continued to publish white supremacist filth in the face of credible threats of violence, and was killed for doing so: of course PEN would not bestow the KKK with a courage award, and almost nobody would be comfortable if they had.
And that far, I agree with the objecting writers. I think PEN put it too strongly when it said that. (Maybe PEN would say yes, a murdered KKK propagandist would be eligible for a courage award from PEN; in that case I would disagree with PEN.) But I don’t consider it a reductio ad absurdum but just an illustration of how the claim says too much. It’s not absurd enough to be a reductio ad absurdum. I think it’s just a competing example; I don’t know if there’s a technical word for that.
Their point was that the award is not merely about courage, but is clearly linked to a positive assessment of the content of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, as proven by the fact that PEN would never give the award to someone, such as a KKK leader, who expresses heinous views. And since these PEN writers don’t view the content of the cartoons as worthy of admiration, they oppose the award. They believe Charlie Hebdo should have full free speech rights, but not be admired for the content of their speech: the most basic distinction when it comes to free speech advocacy. That’s all there is to it.
Yes, but that’s not all that such examples can do. They can also poison the well. They can manipulate people who hear and see them. They can re-frame the discussion. The Nazis or the KKK can be a competing example but also a comparison, at least implicitly.
In her original letter kicking off the controversy, Deborah Eisenberg raised the examples of racist fraternities and Nazi propagandists who express widely reviled views that provoke recrimination and threats, and asked: “Is there not a difference — a critical difference — between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable and enthusiastically awarding such expression?”
See there? Is that a reductio, or a comparison? It looks to me like more of the latter than the former. I think she’s saying Charlie Hebdo is bad in the same way that racist fraternities and Nazi propagandists are bad. I don’t think it’s at all clear that she considers the racist fraternities and Nazi propagandists obviously far more awful than Charlie; I think she’s saying they’re all much of a muchness.
Another objecting PEN writer, Francine Prose, wrote an incredibly clear op-ed in the Guardian this morning making clear exactly what her objections are (and are not), and similarly wrote:
I believe that Charlie Hebdo has every right to publish whatever they wish.
But that is not the same as feeling that Charlie Hebdo deserves an award. As a friend wrote me: the First Amendment guarantees the right of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, but we don’t give them an award. The bestowing of an award suggests to me a certain respect and admiration for the work that has been done, and for the value of that work and though I admire the courage with which Charlie Hebdo has insisted on its right to provoke and challenge the doctrinaire, I don’t feel that their work has the importance – the necessity – that would deserve such an honor.
Same thing, although less coherent – she seems to have thought that Charlie’s badness wasn’t obvious enough in comparison to neo-Nazis and so it was necessary to add badness + lack of necessity to make a big enough sum. But that’s not clearly because she wasn’t trying to say they were both much the same kind of thing.
Greenwald then gets indignant with Padraig Reidy for taking what Prose wrote at face value. Hmph. I don’t think Padraig is the one making an error here.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Imagine the outcry if any other Party held a meeting with gender separation
May 2nd, 2015 4:38 pm | By Ophelia BensonIt appears that Harriet Harman held a meeting with gender segregation in the audience (or constituency or whatever you call people at a political campaign meeting).
Liar MPs @LiarMPs 3 hours ago
Imagine the outcry from the left wing if any other Party held a meeting with gender separation. @HarrietHarman pic.twitter.com/1qIXLzbMio
I suppose they could have sat that way by chance…or this could be a photo from some other event…
But LiarMPs again –
It’s a poster for a Labour Party jalsa or rally in Birmingham today, and at the bottom it says
Cllr Mariam Khan is organising a women’s section for Jalsa & is inviting all women to attend.
Well gross.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Bill Cosby is trending again
May 2nd, 2015 4:22 pm | By Ophelia BensonMeanwhile, in the annals of Bill Cosby, the list keeps lengthening.
In a press conference held by attorney Gloria Allred in New York this Friday, two women, Lili Bernard and Sammie Mays, both accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them.
Mays, a writer, says she met Cosby at a convention in New Orleans in the late ’80s, and that she became unconscious after receiving a drink from Cosby. She woke up half undressed and falling out of her chair.
Bernard, an actress who appeared on the final season of the “Cosby Show” and viewed Cosby as a mentor, claims that the comic drugged and raped her in the early ‘90s. “He praised me,” said Bernard. “He lifted me up. I believed him. After all, he was Bill Cosby. After he had won my complete trust and adoration, he drugged me and raped me.” Bernard added that when she saw Cosby in 1992 he threatened her and said “You’re dead, Bernard. You don’t exist. I never wanna see your face again.”
…
While the statute of limitations has expired for most Cosby accusers, Bernard was allegedly assaulted in New Jersey, which has no statute of limitations for rape. Yesterday, Bernard and Allred reported the crime at a police station in Atlantic city, with hopes that Cosby will finally be prosecuted. “Unlike most other states, New Jersey has no statue of limitations for rape,” said Allred. “Which means that law enforcement is not prevented from prosecuting a case because of an arbitrary time period set by law.”
This brings the total number of accusers to 35.
Cosby’s doing a show tonight in Atlanta. Protests are planned.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Categorically wrongheaded, churlish and morally repugnant
May 2nd, 2015 3:52 pm | By Ophelia BensonChristiane Amanpour in a public Facebook post. It’s a letter she sent to PEN.
I am sure I was among many people who were puzzled and dismayed by the 6 PEN writers who have pulled out of next week’s Gala because of the award going to Charlie Hebdo. I am very glad to know that American PEN is standing up for what’s right by going ahead with the award, and as such I am glad I am still able to make available my video-taped contribution to the Gala, on behalf of one of our jailed colleagues, Khadija Ismayilova of Azarbaijan.
Much has been already written disdaining the action and motives of the PEN 6. I can only imagine these writers were wholly unacquainted with the precise nature of Charlie Hebdo’s satire and cartoons. So I’d like to send you this little primer in the hope you will forward to them all:
First as the PEN 6 will see from this article in Le Monde, Charlie Hebdo was NOT obsessed by Islam, was not deliberately inciting hatred of one religion, and was most certainly not aiming its satire at France’s large and beleaguered Moslem minority. The graph shows that of 523 copies of the magazine between 2005 and 2015, religion took up 38 of the covers. Of those, Islam 7, Christianity 21, and multiple religions took up 10.
In addition, while some of the PEN 6 complain Charlie Hebdo targets or offends French moslems, a precise examination of their satire shows they are actually targeting the absurdity, violence, misogyny, hatred and intolerance of global Islamic extremism. You can like or dislike what Charlie Hebdo does, find it funny or not, but to suggest that somehow they were inciting hatred and violence and ….not so subtle subtext…”oh well, the cartoonists were asking for it then”, is categorically wrongheaded, churlish and morally repugnant.
Music.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
All the nays
May 2nd, 2015 11:49 am | By Ophelia BensonThursday I posted a partial list of the writers who protest the courage award to Charlie Hebdo; via Glenn Greenwald here is the full list:
Chris Abani
Leslie Absher
Elizabeth Adams
Gabeba Baderoon
Deborah Baker
Russell Banks
Susan Bell
Naomi Benaron
Helen Benedict
Cara Benson
Charles Ramírez Berg
Susan Bernofsky
Eric Bogosian
Donald Breckenridge
Ami Sands Brodoff
Karen Brown Brooks
Janet Burroway
Helene Cardona
Peter Carey
Bryn Chancellor
Carmela Ciuraru
Patricia Clark
Tony Cohan
Teju Cole
Michael Cunningham
Emily M. Danforth
Tod Davies
Siddhartha Deb
Junot Díaz
Erin Edmison
Brent Hayes Edwards
Brian T. Edwards
Deborah Eisenberg
Hedi El Kholti
Trey Ellis
Eve Ensler
Elizabeth Enslin
Barbara Epler
Jennifer Cody Epstein
Ali Eteraz
Percival Everett
Marlon L. Fick
Boris Fishman
Stona Fitch
Peter H. Fogtdal
Seánan Forbes
Ashley Ford
Linda Nemec Foster
Lauren Francis-Sharma
Ru Freeman
Nell Freudenberger
Molly Friedrich
Joshua Furst
Gretchen Gerzina
Keith Gessen
Francisco Goldman
Conner Habib
Jessica Hagedorn
Kathryn Harrison
Jonathan T. Hine Jr.
Edward Hoagland
Laura Hoffmann
Nancy Horan
Marya Hornbacher
Sandra Hunter
Megan Hustad
Randa Jarrar
T. Geronimo Johnson
John Keahey
Uzma Aslam Khan
Dave King
Gilbert King
Robert Spencer Knotts
Ruth Ellen Kocher
Nancy Kricorian
Amitava Kumar
Rachel Kushner
Amy Lawless
Zachary Lazar
Jonathan Lee
Katherine Leiner
Ted Lewin
Ed Lin
Michael Lindgren
Julie Livingston
Craig Lucas
Ann Malaspina
Charlotte Mandell
C. M. Mayo
Patrick McGrath
Clarissa McNair
Deena Metzger
Thais Miller
Kyle Minor
Rick Moody
Skye Moody
Lorrie Moore
Dolan Morgan
James McGrath Morris
Idra Novey
Stephen O’Connor
Joyce Carol Oates
Peter Orner
Michael Ondaatje
Raj Patel
Chris Pavone
Francine Prose
Marcus Rediker
Adam Rex
Clay Risen
Roxana Robinson
David Roediger
Paul Rome
Mark Rotella
Gina Ruiz
Steven Schroeder
Sarah Schulman
Taiye Selasi
Danzy Senna
Kamila Shamsie
Jeff Sharlet
Wallace Shawn
Matthew Shenoda
Nancy Shiffrin
Russell Shorto
Charles Simic
Tom Sleigh
Holly Goldberg Sloan
Alexis M. Smith
Jill Smolowe
Linda Spalding
Scott Spencer
Emily Gray Tedrowe
Roy A. Teel Jr.
Michael Thomas
Ted Thompson
Kathleen Tolan
Joanne Turnbull
Chase Twichell
Padma Venkatraman
Jasmine Dreame Wagner
Eliot Weinberger
Jon Wiener
G. K. Wuori
Dave Zirin
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation
May 2nd, 2015 11:00 am | By Ophelia BensonIf you want to see people saying good, intelligent, reasonable things, you can do worse than check out Salman Rushdie’s Twitter. He’s RTd several such things.
Joel Gordon @JoelGord13 hours ago
Do Charle Hebdo opponents at PEN realize that boycotting their award normalizes murder as opposition to speech?@JoelGord It lets murderers start and be part of the conversation. This is why none of their analogies to American racists, etc. works.
There’s Azar Nafisi:
Azar Nafisi @azarnafisi
.@PENamerican @SalmanRushdie PEN award to CH is recognition of the writers’ &artists’ rights to “disturb the peace,”regardless of the price.@SalmanRushdie @PENamerican Satanic Verses didn’t insult true Muslims, it offended their oppressors who treated their own authors same way
Also of interest is a Storify by Dylan Horrocks. He was working in a bookshop in 1989, and he remembers what the fuss over The Satanic Verses was like. He remembers people on the left being full of agonized doubts. Should the paperback come out?
Was it an unnecessary provocation? Shouldn’t we be trying to heal the wounds caused by the book & fatwa? Some argued we should respect the views of Muslims offended by the book, as a marginalised minority who had suffered under colonialism, Western invasion & war, racism & cultural imperialism. Above all, a slow subtle undermining of Rushdie’s credibility: he’s over-rated, it’s a lousy book, he’s not a proper Indian, he’s culturally colonised, arrogant, disrespectful, deliberately offensive, racist. As a young leftist writer & cartoonist, I found it all very confusing & disturbing. People were persuasive. I remember vividly 2 things: 1. The fear of being on the wrong side & confusion about which side that was. 2. The pervasive sense of Satanic Verses as something tainted, toxic, dirty. When the pbk came out at last I bought one & remember keeping it hidden on the way home, like something illicit, pornographic. The Charlie Hebdo murders has brought back these vivid memories because the reaction has been SO similar. I see young well-meaning leftists having the same doubts & fears & confusions, for exactly the same reasons. And the same ongoing murmur of denegration, dismissal, accusation & shaming. So no, @tejucole, don’t tell me the @SalmanRushdie Affair was completely different. Because I was there & it was very much the same.
I was there too, albeit not working in a bookshop. But I was there in the sense that I paid close attention. But I didn’t have those doubts. Why not? I think because even then I was far too passionately unwilling to be told what to do by god-huggers to have doubts of that kind. People blaming Rushdie for the fatwa seemed grotesque and disgusting to me even then. People blaming Charlie Hebdo for their own murders seems grotesque and disgusting to me right now.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The privilege of being born in 2015
May 2nd, 2015 10:07 am | By Ophelia BensonMartin Robbins seizes the occasion of a birth in the Windsor family to point out what luck that baby has to be born with such good odds.
[T]hings are getting better. The small wrinkly proto-Royal that just emerged from the national womb will have thrice the chance of surviving that her father and I did, just through the privilege of being born in 2015. But if that makes you feel all warm and complacent, there are a couple of big problems with this story.
While it’s true that things are getting better, they’re still not good enough. Our babies are considerably more likely to die than those born in countries like Spain, Italy, France or basically any other European nation you can think of. By 2010, we’d just about caught up with Japan… in 1985.
Martin doesn’t talk about the US, but I’ll make this point: things here are quite a lot worse. We have much more poverty and class / race / immigration status / etc segregation here, and a much much much worse system of health care distribution. Oddly enough, that has results.
Martin says that Britain’s version of the US is the north.
There’s a simple statistical adjustment you can do that brings Britain’s infant and child mortality rates back into line with the rest of Europe’s, reducing the rate by a third and putting us level again with countries like France and Germany. Can you guess what it is?
Get rid of the poor people. Especially northerners.
That, at least, is the same here – not the northeners part, but the poor people part. We have a lot of them, and it’s intentional. Why? Because poor people will work for low wages in crap conditions. Profit!
The National Children’s Bureau made the point in a recent report that: “If the UK had the same all-cause mortality rate for children under 14 years as Sweden we could have nearly 2,000 fewer deaths among children in that age group per year – five fewer children’s deaths per day.”
How do we address that? Well there are several things a government can do, and they boil down to this. Protect our strong system of primary health care, and raise standards of mental health treatment. Ensure that poorer families received adequate support. Treat alcohol and drug abuse. Above all, reduce inequality in our society. As the NCB put it, “Poverty kills children. Equity saves lives.”
We don’t even have a strong system of primary health care. The US is a third world country in many ways.
Not to derail Martin’s point. Sorry Martin. The UK could do better, and the US that times a thousand.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Cartoons can and do offend
May 1st, 2015 6:02 pm | By Ophelia BensonAndrew Solomon and Suzanne Nossel explain why PEN is giving Charlie Hebdo an award.
Although censorship has traditionally been the province primarily of governments, attempts to curb speech are likewise undertaken by vigilantes who employ threats and violence. In the last few months we have seen shootings at Charlie Hebdo and at a free-speech event in Copenhagen; the hacking to death of two Bangladeshi atheist bloggers, one of them an American; a death threat against an Australian political cartoonist by jihadists; and the gunning down of a Pakistani social activist.
I missed the death threat against an Australian political cartoonist, but all the other items I’ve been ranting about relentlessly.
These audacious attacks aim to terrorize a worldwide audience into silence on subjects that, though sacred to some, affect many others and must not be above debate. While this is hardly the only free-speech issue on PEN’s long agenda of American and global concerns, the spate of homicides gives it particular urgency.
…
Six writers of tremendous distinction — Peter Carey, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and Taiye Selasi — have sent notes to us indicating that they were not comfortable attending our gala on Tuesday, in light of the award. Many other writers of distinction — including Paul Auster, Adam Gopnik, Siri Hustvedt, Porochista Khakpour, Alain Mabanckou, Azar Nafisi, Salman Rushdie, Simon Schama and Art Spiegelman — have made statements (some in public and some in private) in support of the award. Our goal has been to avoid a reductive binary; this is a nuanced question, and all of these writers have made persuasive moral arguments.
Not really. All of them have tried to, no doubt, but not all of them succeeded. They’re not all above average.
In offering this award, PEN does not endorse the content or quality of the cartoons, except to say that we do not believe they constitute hate speech. The question for us is not whether the cartoons deserve an award for literary merit, but whether they disqualify Charlie Hebdo from a hard-earned award for courage. (The gala on Tuesday will also honor Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani journalist in jail for exposing rampant corruption.)
That’s a good way of putting it; I wish I’d thought of it. As I keep saying, it would be possible for cartoons and satirical papers to be racist and thus bad candidates for an award, it’s just that Charlie isn’t one of them.
That the cartoons were not intentionally racist does not preclude their being experienced as racist. Cartoons can and do offend. Yet Christiane Taubira, the black French justice minister who was parodied as a monkey in a cringe-worthy cartoon, delivered a poignant elegy at the funeral of one of her supposed tormentors, Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, saying that “Tignous and his companions were sentinels, lookouts, those who watched over democracy,” preventing it from being lulled into complacency.
The leading French anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, has called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country.” Its current editor, Gérard Biard, says it deplores all forms of racism. According to Le Monde, of 523 Charlie Hebdo covers published from 2005 to 2015, only seven singled out Islam for ridicule (ten were cited as mocking multiple religions); many more mocked Christianity and the racism of the French right.
Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons resist religious extremists’ attempts to redraw the boundaries of free speech by using violence. They do so in defense of norms to which free societies subscribe. Anti-Muslim prejudice in the West is a serious matter. So is fundamentalism, Islamist or otherwise. Feeding off one another, both ills threaten civil liberties and tear at social fabrics. But a statement or an award that addresses one problem does not thereby deny or acquiesce to the other. The distressing absence of broad respect toward Muslims in France does not undercut Charlie Hebdo’s bravery in defending the right to be disrespectful.
I hope the rafters ring with cheers next Tuesday evening when Alain Mabanckou presents the award and Gérard Biard accepts it.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Take that, parochialists
May 1st, 2015 5:29 pm | By Ophelia BensonPhilip Gourevitch @PGourevitch 13 hours ago
Congolese French novelist/Man Booker finalist @amabanckou to present PEN award to CharlieHebdo http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/alain-mabanckou-remettra-le-prix-liberte-d-expression-de-pen-a-charlie-hebdo_1676505.html …
Peter Carey, Francine Prose, please note.
Updating to add a cartoon via Twitter RTd by Alain Mabanckou:
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
The east side of the hill
May 1st, 2015 4:34 pm | By Ophelia BensonI found this by accident, looking for something else, but here it is for your Friday afternoon entertainment. Not that it is Friday afternoon for most of you any more, but it is for me.
Seattle for some reason I will never understand has a strong bias toward painting houses in horrible drab muddy dark dreary ugly colors. Dull greys, muddy greens, dreary browns…and that’s it. It’s annoying.
The Slog, the blog of the Stranger, ran a piece aptly titled Houses That Don’t Hate Color Like the Rest of Seattle. The first house is one I know well – it’s on the other side of the hill where I live.
Do admit.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Not when it feeds into a narrative of oppression
May 1st, 2015 2:55 pm | By Ophelia BensonA satirical cartoonist on people who don’t understand or appreciate satirical cartoons:
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
Standing up
May 1st, 2015 12:08 pm | By Ophelia BensonUlrike Lunacek, the Vice-President of European Parliament, stood up for Raif Badawi today, according to Ensaf Haidar.
She’s the one facing us, in the blue scarf.
Take heed, King Salman!
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
There is no “but”!
May 1st, 2015 12:01 pm | By Ophelia BensonFrom a translation of what the head of SOS Racisme said about Charlie Hebdo in January.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)
