The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday republished satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The editorial decision is designed to honor the loss of 12 innocents who were killed when two gunmen attacked the magazine’s offices in January 2015.
Charlie Hebdo is republishing the cartoons now in order to mark the beginning of a Paris trial of 14 people charged with involvement in the January 2015 attack on the magazine and a Jewish supermarket. Those attacks, respectively carried out by members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and an ISIS-inspired attacker, shocked the world. Much as the November 2015 Paris attacks by ISIS were designed to destroy French civil society, the January 2015 attacks were designed to deter the intellectual centerpiece of any civil society: the freedom of speech. Salafi-Jihadists like the gunmen responsible for executing Charlie Hebdo’s staff are not individuals inclined to compromise. They instead believe that life must exist in practiced subjugation to their exceptionally warped interpretation of Islam.
Regrettably, rather than reject these terrorists for the evil clowns they are, too many continue to entertain the idea that Charlie Hebdo’s staff and others like them are somehow inviting their own demise. This is idiocy.
Showing a cartoon of staffers who died in the 2015 attack, Charlie Hebdo’s new edition asks the most important question: “All of that, just for this.” Its message is clear: terrorists murdered 12 innocent people because they believed that a drawing posed a mortal affront. Such arrogant nihilism deserves no quarter. It deserves only scorn and a healthy dose of the satire for which Charlie Hebdo is known. President Emmanuel Macron put it well when he was asked on Tuesday for his reaction to the new edition. “It’s never the place of a president of the Republic to pass judgment on the editorial choice of a journalist or newsroom, never.” Macron noted, “Because we have freedom of the press.”
That’s the ultimate cause at stake here: freedom.
We must remember, after all, that the magazine only published the cartoons in 2006 after they were first published in the Danish Jyllands Posten newspaper in September 2005. That original publication sparked rioting across the Islamic world and attacks on Danish diplomatic outposts. Then, too many in the West were quick to suggest that Jyllands Posten had been wrong to inflame Muslim opinion. That somehow even satire must be buried at the altar of those who believe their feelings are more equal than the sacred rights of others. Charlie Hebdo took the opposite approach. Knowing the risks, its editorial team decided to stand with the idea that the right to speak should never be tempered by the threat of the gun.
It’s a truth that some still cannot grasp. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry is leading the charge against Charlie Hebdo this week, taking to Twitter to complain that “Such a deliberate act to offend the sentiments of billions of Muslims cannot be justified as an exercise in press freedom or freedom of expression.”
We should reject that argument absolutely. Absent openness to discussion and insult, a society cannot thrive. Political correctness, whether actively enforced or silently coerced, is the enemy both of natural individual rights and societal health. Its triumph means the silent acceptance of absurdity soon follows. Then comes the stricture of art and the chilling of necessary political debate. Then comes the segregation of political elites from those they are sworn to serve.
Just as the murder of innocent people is anathema to most of us, so also should be the silencing of individual opinion. That is what the terrorists who attacked Charlie Hebdo aimed to achieve. And why it is so important that Charlie Hebdo has reminded us that it will always win.
