#CharlieHebdo #JeNeSuiPasCharlie Charlie Hebdo is Racist: ur1.ca/jg7wr What follows is a piece written by Oliver Cyran, who worked at Charlie Hebdo from 1992 to 2001. He wrote it 5 December 2013 in response to an opinion piece on Le Monde written by Charb [Stéphane Charbonnier, one of the cartoonists murdered in January 2015] and Fabrice Nicolino: 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!” 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. 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.
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 22:03:38 +0000
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