Before Charlie disappears from the news cycle, I thought I would post whatever I could put together on Charlie Hebdo's offensiveness to Islam —I will leave out the "race" issue for now. The diary turned to be too long (a fault of mine...). Here it is, in case it may be of interest to some of you.
Full disclosure first: a son of the Old Left, I grew up in the 1970s with the old Charlie Hebdo, which I read from age 12 on. I can still remember covers from the 1970s which influenced my political outlook. But I did not read the new Charlie Hebdo; I may have bought it maybe a dozen times over the past fifteen years. Even though I agreed with a good deal of what was written in it, it struck me as coarse and yes, offensive. Mostly, I didn't find it funny. So I am no expert on the new Charlie Hebdo, and since I have only a few friends who are Muslims, I have no sociological or in-depth experience of the poorer neighborhoods in which Fundamentalist Islam develops, beyond a few years' experience teaching students in such a neighborhood at what would be community-college level.
Here is the diary's central point: the new Charlie Hebdo started to part ways with some on the Left in the 2000s, not over the racist imagery which is at the center of many commentaries at Daily Kos, but because a combination of hard-line antireligion and committed feminism had sparked within the paper a concerted campaign against Islamic Fundamentalism. For why this would be a problem, follow me below the fold.
Islamic Fundamentalism is both theocratic and virulently patriarchal. That Charlie Hebdo would be opposed to it was logical. That it would make this particular strand of Islam one of the main targets of the paper, week after week, was not. Rather than translate the French material from the paper which would explain this, I found what I believe is a valid equivalent in in this article in English by Paul Berman in the New Republic (yes, I realize this is an unpleasant source). To summarize, for Berman, Salafism, the technical term for the kind of Fundamentalist Islam found in poor suburban neighborhoods in France, is the new fascism. It promotes antisemitism, suicidal violence, and the oppression of women, and corrupts young Muslims. The duty of European intellectuals is therefore to fight it.
Berman's position was very much the position developed by Philippe Val, who took over the editorship of Charlie Hebdo from 2001 on, and by his staff, particularly feminist militant Caroline Fourest (Berman quotes Fourest approvingly). For some people on the extreme-left, the anti-Fundamentalist campaign in Charlie Hebdo amounted to racism and Islamophobia, as asserted here in French in this often quoted paper by Olivier Cyran, a journalist who left Charlie Hebdo in 2001. If one reads the article closely, according to Cyran three elements are racist in the Val/Fourest version of Charlie Hebdo: the blanket condemnation of Salafists, the offensive cartoons making fun of Muslims in general, and the implicit endorsement of unsavory "humor" propagated by extreme-right wing characters such as the Dutch cartoonist Gregorius Nekschot.
Me and others have argued that Cyran's reading of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is probably both too narrow and too wide. The primary basis for the campaign was antireligion, more than Islamophobia, to which should be added gender issues. In fact the offending cartoon reproduced by Cyran, which pokes fun at purported "sexual jihadists", was drawn by Catherine, a militant feminist cartoonist on Charlie Hebdo' staff. Cyran also exaggerated the space devoted to the anti-Fundamentalist campaign. it did not fill the whole journal; a lot of what was found in it would be standard Daily Kos fare.
Also, Charlie Hebdo was targeting a particular kind of Islam. Here Fourest has a point: Salafist doctrines have very unpleasant implications, for Muslim women, for the right of Israel to exist if not for all Jews, and for secularist Muslims. The extreme-left is much too glib in dismissing these implications when talking to some Salafists who sound more reasonable, like Tariq Ramadan. And allying with Salafists is definitely a betrayal of feminists. Cyran briefly mentions the possiblity that a veiled woman in France would be coerced by her family, and goes on to explain that he would of course "encourage her to find the means to live freely". This is glibness with a vengeance.
Cyran dismisses Charlie Hebdo's supporters as out-of-touch members of the intellectual elite. But the paper has a solid, if small, following among secular North African and Middle Eastern intellectuals and feminists, who approve of its anti-Salafist campaign for obvious reasons. The paper's staff includes a representative of this group, Zineb El Rhazoui, a Moroccan journalist in exile and feminist militant. She contradicted flatly Cyran's assertions in this article (in French again, sorry).
On the other hand, El Rhazoui, Fourest, and Charlie Hebdo generally, like Berman, missed the elephant in the room: the consequences for their position on Islam of the rise of the Front National, the party of the resurgent French extreme-right, from the 1980s on. Berman's article is dishonest on this score (what else could be expected from the New Republic?). He claims that the leftist efforts at interethnic unity in the 1980s, exemplified by the Marche des Beurs, a demonstration for equality, and the subsequent Touche pas à mon pote organization fighting for antiracism in the suburbs, foundered because of the dastardly schemes of Tariq Ramadan and the Salafists. This is a lie. What killed the Socialist Party among Muslims in the poor suburbs was its reluctance to fight the Front National head on. Truth be told, at least some Socialist politicians indulged the Front, which they saw as a surefire tool to divide and weaken their right-wing opponents. By the end of the 1990s, the Socialist Party had lost all credibility among most immigrants and their children and grandchildren, who considered that it treated the Front National with kid gloves. And of course the Muslims were mostly working-class, and the working-class was alienated as well since the Socialists' economic program had turned conservative.
In contrast to the Socialist Party, Charlie Hebdo could point to a consistent record of violent opposition to both the Front National itself and Front National policies. The paper could also point to its very progressive economic discourse. There is no doubt either that its staff consider themselves antiracist, and not mereley not racist. Charb explained as much in an op-ed in Le Monde, maybe the main "mainstream media" paper in France, in 2013. The op-ed has been translated by a fellow Kossack and is available here.
But what Charb and his friends saw as equal treatment of all religions was still problematic because of the political context, which was not theirs to decide. In 2002, Le Pen, the Front National leader, advanced to the second round of the Presidential election; throughout the 2000s, his party held steady at between 15 and 20% of the votes, and its representation always included a sizeable contingent of Fundamentalist Catholics. More largely, France is an old Catholic country. The Catholic festivals are national holidays, public schools have fish on the menu on Friday. The Salafists never had political representation anywhere, not even one seat in some city council, and Islam generally was at best tolerated, never recognized. Treating the two groups equally was politically absurd.
Charlie Hebdo journalists never acknowledged either the possibility that Salafism itself could be a reaction (which is not to say it was a good reaction...) to the French extreme-right and the political and social isolation Muslim groups increasingly faced. Chronologically, though, the rise of Le Pen and his Front National came first, in the 1980s. Salafism developed (with an assist from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as usual) mostly in the 1990s. Nonetheless, El Rhazoui inserted in her answer to Cyran exactly three lines on the Front National, to explain that "atheists [in Muslim countries] didn't give two hoots whether what they say pleases the French extreme-right". This was rather glib, too, especially since she pointed out elsewhere (rightly) that Cyran's column against Charlie Hebdo had been widely distributed by Islamic Fundamentalists. At any rate, El Rhazoui's position was fine for a struggle going on outside of France. But Charlie Hebdo was a French paper.
Context was forgotten in yet another way, insofar as Charlie Hebdo's uncompromising antireligious stance prevented it from developing a positive discourse on non-Salafist Islam. When Muslims are depicted at all in the paper, they are depicted as Salafist fanatics. Similarly, all the bishops drawn by Cabu have military boots, look like thugs, and stand for all Catholics. But nobody in France outside Charlie Hebdo is claiming that all Catholics are jack-booted thugs. The Front National is daily claiming that all Muslims are fanatics, and Charlie Hebdo did nothing to dispel this idea. In fact, glossing over the very real differences between Salafist ideologues like Ramadan and the more violent Al-Qaeda types, as Fourest and others in the paper routinely do, reinforce the stereotypes among non-Muslims that there is no difference at all.
As demonstrated in another diary, even the worst-looking Charlie Hebdo cartoons are supposed to be read ironically. But some cartoons started popping up on extreme-right websites, which used them by reading them literally. By 2012, Charlie Hebdo provided an extremely ambiguous coverage to the controversy over the violently Islamophobic Innocence of Muslims movie. As with the Dutch cartoonist Nekschot, freedom of expression, antireligion and hatred of Salafists trumped any concern of racism or Islamophobia.
Charlie Hebdo's take on the controversy brought some hesitant support from the leaders of the Front National, and a more enthusiastic endorsement from Riposte Laïque, one of the leading extreme-right websites attacking Islam as a whole (see here for an account in French; all the corresponding pages have been scrubbed from the Riposte Laïque site). That such a support by such people had become possible should have alerted the staff at Charlie Hebdo that something was wrong. It did not, and there is a darker side to what I think is a political blind spot.
Islam in France is not only Islam. One open wound in the body politic is the Algerian war, which lasted from 1954 to 1962. Algeria was under French rule for over a hundred years, starting in 1830. The process of conquest had been extremely bloody, with pervasive war crimes and horrors perpetrated on local populations by the French Army. Next, the French governement succeeded in inciting a relatively large wave of settelement from mainland France, creating a large French immigrant population called the pieds-noirs. In the 1860s and 1870s, French officials stole most of the best land from the locals, and created a system of apartheid at least as brutal as segregation in the U.S. South. This apartheid was not based on race, but on religion. In Algeria throughout the first half of the 20th century, Catholics, and from 1870 on Jews, had civil rights. "Indigenous" Muslims had not.
The Algerian war of Independence compounded the problem. It was maybe the bloodiest decolonization conflict of the whole 20th century: it is widely accepted that casualties numbered one million or maybe more, for a population of less than 9 million. Coincidentally, the Algerian population of French origin also numbered also around 1 mlllion, and this population was "ethnically cleansed" in the space of a few weeks in the summer of 1962, in one of the largest and fastest population displacements of the century.
No wonder that in France "Muslim" is too often a shorthand for "Arab", which itself is quite often a symbolic shorthand for the figure of the despised, downtrodden then triumphant, and always hated "Indigenous Algerian". Ironically, Cabu turned to the extreme-left after being drafted for the Algerian War, which played a key role in the origins of 1960s militancy. But in the 2000s, this past began to be forgotten, or more accurately repressed, on the Left. Anticolonialism gave way to antisalafism. The political results of this shift were not good, IMHO.
There are other elements in the story, which I will evoke briefly here. The israel/Palestine issue played a role in the radicalization of some Muslims in the 1990s, and so did 9/11 and its aftermath, particularly Iraq. I don't think this point needs elaboration on Daily Kos. There is Islam's theological position on women, which for some on the Left makes it a special case among religions. I tend to think all religions can be read in various ways, having visited Sicily and Calabria in the 1970s, and knowing quite a few secular Muslim women. There is the issue of aniconism in Islam —please read this excellent diary, which summarizes it. It is a real issue, since picturing Muhammad is "in-your-face" blasphemy, much more so than holding a Black Mass; Muslims cannot avoid looking at newsstands. On the other hand, religious censorship seems flatly unacceptable to me and many others. And there is the larger issue of the treatment of Muslims and other recently immigrated populations in France. Chris Hedges' column, quoted on Daily Kos, is grossly hyperbolic, and the suburbs are in no way comparable to the Gaza strip. But his basic and unremarkable point that oppression breeds radicalization is correct.
For all this, I still think that the debate over Charlie Hebdo is primarily a debate over the proper reading of antisalafism. Should the dominated position of Salafists trump their oppression of women? Should the implicit links between Islam and the Algerian war trump the exigencies of anticlericalism and antireligion? El Rhazoui argues that reading opposition to Islam as racism is racist, because Islam in general is not a race and should be dealt with everywhere just as we deal with all other religions. Cyran argues that reading opposition to Islam as not racist is racist, because French Islam is often assimilated to a race and we do not deal with it in France as we deal with all other religions.
Unfortunately, I think they are both right.