The Long Take: Charlie's Courage

Ten Years On, Charlie Hebdo and their free speech deserves to be defended

In 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten depicted the Islamic prophet Mohammad in a series of cartoons in response to comments the author Kare Bluitgen made about being unable to find an illustrator to work on his children’s book about The Quran. Most of the illustrators he approached were afraid of the backlash they’ll receive, as Islam notoriously prohibits any blasphemous portrayal of the prophet. As the broadsheet faced the wrath of the Muslim world - from mass protests, death threats of public hangings - Jyllands-Posten's decision to stand by the cartoons became a symbol of defiance against blasphemy laws.

Charlie Hebdo has portrayed Muhammad numerous times, and for every depiction, extreme violence has been sprung towards the French satirical magazine. On 7 January 2015, the head office was met with a barrage of bullets by the Kouachi brothers, both of whom identified as members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda. Twelve people were killed - including eight of its staffers - and ten were injured. The deaths include the editor-in-chief Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, and the cartoonists Jean “Cabu” Cabut and Bernard Jean-Charles “Tignous” Verlhac.

There were many differences between the responses to the events surrounding Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo. One of them is that Jyllands-Posten, is a conservative broadsheet, whereas Charlie Hebdo often leans to the left-wing of politics (Charb was a member of France’s Communist Party and wrote cartoons for the anti-racist NGO MRAP), albeit its comedic approach feels very countercultural, in contrast with its Western peers in America and the UK.

But the most important difference is that many newspapers around the world, regardless of whether they agree with their stances, reprinted the Jylland Posten cartoons in their original forms. Only one newspaper, Hamberger Mortgenpost, a far-left German newspaper, reprinted Charlie Hebdo’s Muhammad cartoons. No newspaper in the Western world has since reprinted theirs in solidarity, with some feeling conflicted in whether they should be republished.

The reactions to the Charlie Hebdo attacks were polarizing. The hashtag #JeSuisCharlie was evoked across social media, with millions of people sending condolences to the victims. But many were shocked by its content and refrained themselves from supporting their freedom to publish these cartoons, over the fear that the Islamic followers would be harmed. Journalists like Mehdi Hasan and Glenn Greenwald claim that while the cartoonists have every right to publish these cartoons, they have no right to offend innocent Muslims or publish it in the crude manner that they are notable for.

Responses from the Muslim community across the world were more severe. There were deadly protests held in Niger, following the publication of the Survivor’s Issue, where several churches were burned down and five people were killed. The Islamic Human Rights Commission in the UK has also crowned the publication Islamophobe of the Year.

More notably, over 245 authors - which included Teju Cole, Junot Diaz and Joyce Carol Oates - have written an open letter to PEN America, not to encourage support for Charlie Hebdo over its “objectionable” drawings. The publication has been accused of “punching down” with Slate’s Jordan Weissman saying that the $300,000 donation from Google says that it’s not the kind of expression a government should be paying for. Arthur Chu, a famous Jeopardy champion, wrote in The Daily Beast saying that "Charlie Hebdo is a crap publication and people need to stop celebrating it and making martyrs out of its staff."

This shows that some commentators, particularly those of the Anglo-Saxon sphere, failed to understand Charlie Hebdo’s satire and how often the controversies they face serve as an obstacle to whether the cartoonists deserve to have their freedom of expression defended. Look past all the detractors and you’ll find that they not only won’t stand with Charlie Hebdo, but refuse to understand the context of which it was published. Understanding it would not only justify the defence for the magazine’s commitment to freedom of speech, but to show that the smears are far from warranted.

Charlie Hebdo is the successor of Hara Kiri, a satirical monthly magazine that was infamous for mocking French President Charles de Gaulle following his death at his home in Colombey. The caption for one of its issues in 1970 says Bal tragique à Colombey : 1 mort, which means in English as "Tragic ball in Colombey: 1 death". Gaulle after his passing, had a higher reputation among the country’s population as the leader of the Free French Forces against Nazi Germany.

From 1981, Charlie Hebdo has been relaunched numerous times due to the lack of funding, yet throughout its existence, their editorial stances and cartoons frequently took swipes at the political and cultural establishment. After all, its motto is "bete et mechant" which means “mean and nasty”, aiming to provoke wherever is possible.

The magazine’s dark humor combines the morbid and absurd to lampoon social taboos. But that has long been a tradition in French humor. It is derived from Sigmund Freud’s idea that humor is liberating and rebellious, with the surrealist author Andre Breton describing it as “the opposite of joviality.” Both men see this as a way to expose the rotten roots of established norms that benefit its oppressors. So, for example, Hara-Kiri’s tasteless depiction of Charles De Gaulle shocked the public, but he was drawn that way, because he was seen as an enemy to the New Left for his authoritarianism and political conservatism. Scholars have been quite sceptical of this approach, with some calling it “reactionary" and “self-aggrandizing” as it saw how it could marginalize the people these humorists are attempting to protect.

The magazine had a wide range of targets. Charlie Hebdo had mocked various politicians from Emmanuel Macron to Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It even went as far as spearheaded a petition from Charb to ban the National Front, France’s hard-right political party led by Marine Le Pen, whose condolences were rejected by the magazine (its founder Jean Marie Le Pen, who recently passed away, refused to send condolences to the victims of the 2015 massacre). They remain one of their biggest targets, when one of its members was revealed to be gay. Other people they mocked over the years include Boko Haram slaves, celebrities like Michael Jackson (when he passed away in 2009), as well as various politicians.

It also sets its sights against various religions like Judaism and Christianity. Every year, Charlie Hebdo holds an international competition for writers to mock religion and its oppressive tendencies. In 2022, the topic of Islam is revisited with the hashtag #MullahsGetOut, condemning the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini and encouraging freedom activists in that country to resist against the regime. Laurent Léger, an investigative journalist and a survivor of the shootings, told CNN that “we want to laugh at the extremists—every extremist. They can be Muslim, Jewish, or Catholic. Everyone can be religious, but extremist thoughts and acts we cannot accept.”

These cartoons, no matter how vulgar they are, have to fit Hebdo’s left-leaning libertarian ideology, very specific to French thinking. Some of them, like its jabs against Le Pen and the Pope, are easier to explain. They are obvious targets that progressives would support, but they are also elite figures who influence society top down. On the surface, these equal opportunity jabs do not sit neatly into the punching up/down dichotomy that the critics perceive Charlie Hebdo to be, and become more complicated once the lives of the satirists are at stake.

Islam seems to be a topic that should be out of bounds from any discussion. Immediately after the Jylland-Postens controversy, Charlie Hebdo released an issue of a cover of Muhammad covering his face, with the caption of “Mahomet débordé par les intégristes”, which means “Muhammad, overwhelmed by fundamentalists,” criticizing Islam for being saturated by radical followers and terrorists. The then Prime Minister Jacque Chirac condemned the issue.

It would continue to lampoon the Islamic prophet, in spite of many controversies. In its most famous issue from 31 October 2011, the magazine depicts Muhammad telling the reader “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” Two days later, Charlie Hebdo’s offices were firebombed and their website was hacked. In September 2012, Muhammad was depicted on all fours, while another shows an Orthodox Jew pushing him in a wheelchair, spoofing the film The Intouchables, in response to when the anti-Islamic short film Innocence of Muslims was released. The French government increased the security of its head offices to protect them from any possible violence.

The smears of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons, this time, from all sides of the political spectrum, still continue. According to The New Yorker, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt condemned Charb and Le Figaro, France’s conservative daily newspaper, says that they were “silly provocations” and the Roman Catholic newspaper La Croix condemned them for “fuelling the flames to show one’s noble resistance to extremism leads to offending simple believers.” The then Foreign Minister for France Laurent Fabius accused the cartoonists of “pouring oil on the fire” and the then White House Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed that the material was “deeply offensive.” The last two responses established Charlie Hebdo as a divisive avatar for free speech (America’s approach to free speech is more libertarian compared to France’s, which has put in many hate speech laws, including the criminalization of the denial of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust), where both politicians will say that they will defend their right to be heard, but that the content is ultimately objectionable, because it would marginalize innocent Muslims, and put themselves in danger. The former editor-in-chief Charb objected to both police calls to pull its content, as well as the critiques. He told Le Monde “when activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.”

Charlie Hebdo’s intuition to mock religion, especially Islam, comes under the influence of Laïcité, which stands for full secularism in France. When the country banned the burqa, it supported the decision by depicting a topless woman with the caption “yes, to wearing the burqa… on the inside.” Immediately after the attacks, Charlie Hebdo released a survivor’s issue, in which it shows a frowning Muhammad holding a Je Suis Charlie sign with the caption Tout est Pardonne, which translates to All is Forgiven. Its new editor, Gerard Biard called for the continued commitment to laicite and said that “the first victims of Islamic fascism are the Muslims.” This position demonstrates how unapologetic and shameless the magazine can be, in the face of its detractors that object to their humor, in France and elsewhere.

Months after the attacks, Charlie Hebdo faced outrage with a series of cartoons depicting Aylan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee whose drowning in the Mediterranean Sea was photographed as a symbol of the European migrant crisis. Kurdi’s drowning was juxtaposed by the artist Riss, with a billboard of Ronald McDonald (the caption translated to “Welcome Migrants. So Close to Making It)” and Jesus (the caption is translated as Christians Walk on Water, Muslims Drown), but its most incendiary was depicting Kurdi as a sexual harasser of women, in response to the sexual assault attacks in Cologne, Germany in 2016.

The imagery is as cruel and tasteless as you could get in depicting a dead child and to its detractors, it was a vindication that Charlie Hebdo not only deserve the criticism of Islamophobia, but that all the defense of “free speech” following the January attacks had rang false.

Yet this was an indictment of the failings of the government, not an endorsement of outright anti-immigration rhetoric or that the toddler deserved to die. The first two cartoons are rather critical of the materialism and privilege of liberals using Alan Kurdi’s death as a way of virtue signaling against racial intolerance, which makes anti-immigrant sentiments possible. The Alan Kurdi photo is seen as a symbol of the migration crisis, and a dead body is emotionally sufficient to shut down the debate on that topic, having been appropriated by many artists and spread all across the Western world. As Brendan O’Neill wrote, “it’s a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.”

It had also depicted the British Royal Family kneeling on Meghan Markle, in a parody of the George Floyd killing, with the caption “Why I Left Buckingham Palace”, implying that Markle is the one being silent. It has also depicted Emmanuel Macron sexually assaulting Gisèle Pélicot, the woman who was gang raped by 72 men, with her husband filming the act. These cartoons, of course, sparked headlines, with the belief that they are mocking the victims, even if it’s clear that they are mocking the perpetrators.

As the debate about whether Charlie Hebdo should depict Muhammad intensified, the magazine had internal issues of its own. Months after the attack, the cartoonist Renald ‘Luz’ Luzier, who drew the 100 lashes of Muhammad cartoon in 2011, resigned for personal reasons, and felt exhausted. This is in contrast with one of its star writers Zineb El Rhazoui, a human rights activist and an outspoken critic of Islam. El Rhazoui has made several cartoons lampooning the prophet, including a cartoon retelling its life in 2013, resulting in continuous death threats against her from ISIS to Al-Qaeda. She was one of the most prominent faces of the attacks, when she spoke at the University of Chicago Law School, becoming the first journalist to speak on American soil. Rhazoui then accused Charlie Hebdo and editor Gerald Biard of capitulating to extremists by refraining from drawing Muhammad and eventually resigned in 2017.

But on 1 September 2020, the Muhammad cartoons were finally reprinted again, on the day that the fourteen accomplices were put on trial over the attacks. It has the caption “Tout Ca Pour Ca”, which translates to “All of that, just for this,” In its editorial, Riss states that “We will never lie down. We will never give up,”

Days later, two people were stabbed outside Charlie Hebdo’s headquarters and the responses were unsurprising. The Muslim community in France called to boycott its nationally-made products, while journalists at Al-Jazeera, sympathetic with their concerns, condemned Charlie Hebdo for perpetrating Muslim Hate. Emmanuel Macron, one of the magazine’s biggest targets, condemned the attacks as “terrorist-related”. Simultaneously, he praised the cartoons and claimed that the right to blaspheme ties hand in hand with freedom of speech. “Satire is not a discourse of hate,” Macron said.

To commemorate the tenth anniversary, a book will be released called Charlie Liberty: A Diary of Their Lives later this year, which pays tribute to the eight staff writers who were killed, with a collection of their cherished drawings.

The courage from Charlie Hebdo to continue lampooning its targets never went away. To this day, it continues its duty to offend, with no sense of boundaries or lines to be crossed. It’s perhaps a feature in Charlie Hebdo, whether you like it or not. But when people move forward to the next target, things haven't changed.

The January 2015 shootings and its aftermath has demonstrated a large dichotomy between courage and cowardice. The latter shows how Charlie Hebdo’s critics recklessly shift the arguments when they are asked to defend the free speech of content they find objectionable. But the former is represented by fearless persistence and resilience, and it is much more sorely needed in the most outrageous satire we currently see.

Once it is no longer about free speech, it is about the safety of people they feel are oppressed by the magazine’s existence, even if their religion is the motivation behind the attacks. Mocking a religion and calling out its radicalism, leads to people believing that the murders of the cartoonists is somewhat lawful. Thus, they deliberately misunderstand its substance, resulting in open letters and op-eds blaming them for the attacks. Charlie Hebdo’s opponents did not take them seriously, but literally.

It’s tempting to say that this is part of the safetyism that has afflicted modern Western culture during the better part of the 2010s, where the needs of the oppressed outweigh the need for a free flow of ideas, in contrast with the openness of the French, which is more secular and less burdened by offense-taking. This also affects the state of American comedy, which is destined to break taboos, like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin did, but cannot go further than that. Being offensive for the sake of free speech can be a double edged sword. This emphasis means the withering of strident rules and norms of a civilised society, while creating a partisan feedback loop to mindlessly break whatever seems like a taboo. But to offend still works, because being a happy warrior has been part and parcel in the fight for free speech. And the ability to offend without any threats of violence remains a necessary key to a functioning democracy.

A terrorist attack should mean that the discussion surrounding the victims needs to be simple and not complicated by other potential conflicts. Unfortunately, the gloating of victims being murder, based in part on a toxic ideology, is now a sad aspect of the predominance of social media, allowing punditry to be relentless and outrageous.

In order to restore sanity, you have to increase courage. Charlie Hebdo commemorated the series of November terror attacks in various areas of France, with a cover saying “F**k them. We have champagne.” They retained the joy of life, rather than become burdened by fear. While the slogan Je Suis Charlie (which is translated as “I Stand with Charlie”) is meant to evoke a universal feeling, it doesn’t capture what it means to read Charlie Hebdo and the death defying stakes they face when an edition is released. Fighting for the free speech of your political opponents doesn’t mean you have to wholeheartedly accept the nature of said speech. It means that you are grateful for the arguments that challenge yours.