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Thursday 8 January 2015

Charlie Hebdo, Barbara Streisand, and provocative retaliation.

Yesterday, shortly after finishing my baked potato and cheese, I felt a queasiness in my stomach. My twitter feed broke the news of the shooting at Charlie Hebdo's offices. For the next hour or two, or three, and more, I was transfixed by the rolling Live News coverage that has became normality. The whole idea of actually taking someone's life (let alone thirteen) because they used their artistic talents to ridicule a belief system is so alien and incomprehensible to me that it started to hurt.

Until lunchtime yesterday, I doubt if more that 5% of my friends would have heard about Charlie Hebdo. Here is the French equivalent of Private Eye, only with more cartoons and, crucially, bravery. While Private Eye might be seen as the satirical outpost of the UK media, compared to Hebdo, it is all rather tame and constricted by the British stiff upper lip. Carry On Politics compared to Chaplin's The Dictator.

After lunchtime, however, the Barbara Streisand effect was in full swing. The perpetrators committed their brutal acts as a method of silencing. "If you don't stop printing that which we don't agree with, we will stop you doing so". As expected, the opposite occurred. Retweeting, blogging, Facebooking, and newspaper printing of the cartoons, were all used as a show of defiance in the face of censorship.

Make no mistake, this attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices was an act of Censorship

And that's where I, for all my support for Freedom of Speech, started to become a bit queasy again. At the start, the reprinting of Hebdo cartoons showed for everyone to see, the wide ranging aim and scope of their satire, from politicians, to bankers, to authors, and of course to mutiple religions (including the major ones of the 'west'). However, a sense of retaliation started to build. A sense of 'us' versus 'them' with every 'I'm going to draw cartoons of Mohammed every day' or the mocking and public flogging of any media outlet that dared to censor or outright block publication of Hebdo's cartoons.
Front cover of Charlie Hebdo showing Michael Houellebecq, a noted author who has been accused in the past of being Islamophobic. Cover mocks him as a 'mystic' saying he'll lose his teeth in 2015, and practice Ramadan by 2022.

Where as the original Charlie Hebdo cartoons were printed in the context of lack of context: Everyone, absolutely everyone, was a target of the cartoonist's truth, we are now assigning a malicious context to them. We tell ourselves that the radicalised perpetrators aren't a true indicator of Muslims or Islam, but then use a staple of Islam (Aniconism) to attack them, to provoke them, to retaliate.

Freedom of Speech allows you to do this, and I am not for a moment saying that it doesn't. I am merely saying that respect as Human Beings should make you wonder if you are, in the quest to taunt the perpetrators, censuring people's Freedom to Religion?

If we get caught up in using cartoon depictions of Mohammed as the weapon of choice against these murderers, we are in essence declaring war on Islam. If we want to declare war on the perpretrators (and their radicalised ideas), then we should satirise yesterday's murderers and their horrific acts.

I am not brave enough to do that, and for that reason, I am not Charlie and chances are, neither are you.

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