( Mehdi Hassan in NewStatesman)

The response to the inexcusable murder of Charlie Hebdo’s staff has proved that many liberals are guilty of double standards when it comes to giving offence.

Dear liberal pundit,

You and I didn’t like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists”? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubbya’s slogan: either you are with free speech . . . or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo . . . or you’re a freedom-hating fanatic.

I’m writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you’re defying the terrorists when, in reality, you’re playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it “a war declared on civilisation”. So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a “clash of civilisations” and referred to “Europe’s belief in freedom of expression”.

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a “bid to assassinate” free speech (ITV’s Mark Austin), to “desecrate” our ideas of “free thought” (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime – not an act of war – perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn’t think so (and I am glad it hasn’t). Consider also the “thought experiment” offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the “unity rally” in Paris on 11 January “wearing a badge that said ‘Je suis Chérif’” – the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. “How would the crowd have reacted? . . . Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?” Do you disagree with Klug’s conclusion that the man “would have been lucky to get away with his life”?

Let’s be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.

When you say “Je suis Charlie”, is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo’s depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?

Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyranargued in 2013, an “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on “members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power”.

It’s for these reasons that I can’t “be”, don’t want to “be”, Charlie – if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine’s right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, “It is possible to defend the right to obscene . . . speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech.”

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinetin 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware thatJyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would “provoke an outcry” and proudly declared it would “in no circumstances . . . publish Holocaust cartoons”?

Click link below for full article;

http://www.newstatesman.com/mehdi-hasan/2015/01/muslim-i-m-fed-hypocrisy-free-speech-fundamentalists

Posted by F. Sheikh

[ This guest post in Kafila marks one month of the 16th December massacre of school-children by Islamists in Peshawar, Pakistan ]

Pakistan has become a euphemism for insanity.  Doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different outcome. There are though some incredibly brave, thoughtful, humane and patriotic Pakistani men and women who have decided enough is enough and they are determined to chart a different future for the country.

After speaking with one of these activist leaders I was reminded of the Russian author Ivan Turganev’s heroes Bazarov, the young Nihilist from Fathers and Sons or Insarov, the Bulgarian revolutionary from On the Eve.  Youthful, galvanized, resolute, compelled by the rightness of the cause and their destiny, dreaming of a new country and their place within it, they were the first glimpse of “the new men,” lonely and ultimately tragic.  In 1860 Turganev’s heroes were ahead of their time, pulling along a people unwilling to change tradition and unwilling to cede privilege. In 2015 Pakistan, there is a huge obstacle in the way of these courageous souls. They are outnumbered by the rest of us.

The time has come for each of us to recall what it was we were doing when our children were being executed in Peshawar. Is there even a word which encompasses the horror when 135 children are executed? Make no mistake it was our collective shrug which has tipped Pakistan over the edge and into this very dark abyss.  It was our collective indifference which let these children be stalked by death at the hands of cold blooded murderers who went from child to child executing them that December 16 morning in Peshawar. We let our children die alone and scared, with no one to comfort them except other wounded and dying children. And we know, yes we know, that it is not a question of if, but merely a question of when the next body blow will hit Pakistan’s families. We also now know well that more than three decades of breeding monsters in petri dishes has served up the reign of the militarized mullahs and their religion inebriated militias willing to shoot every one of us in the head should we dare to disagree.

Military courts have never been a good idea for any country, especially one which aspires to preserve a hard won democracy. There will be grave excesses and questionable verdicts. Innocents will become victims and there is a great danger that these courts will be where political opposition will go to die. But as much as I want to focus on the merits or demerits of these courts, I keep coming back to the basic premise of why we have arrived at the threshold of military courts? How has this even come to pass that with an act of Parliament a democracy has willingly forfeited critical space, and the fundamental defining tenets of democracy; due process and the right of habeas corpus, to the very folks who led us to this juncture in the first place? The answer resides within each one of us, within our choices, our ambivalence, our confusion, our prejudices, our indifference, our ignorance and of course our fear. Click link below for full article;

http://kafila.org/2015/01/16/love-in-the-time-of-military-courts-fawzia-naqvi/

Posted By F. Sheikh