A few weeks ago, The Scrapbook took note of cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s excoriation of the eight Charlie Hebdo journalists shot and killed in Paris last January by Islamist fanatics. The satirist Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame, had just been handed the George Polk Award for “career achievement” and took the occasion to condemn the deceased Charlie Hebdo satirists for committing the wrong kind of satire—the kind (in his words) that “wandered into the realm of hate speech” and invited reprisal.
Well, as shocked as The Scrapbook might have been on this occasion—both by Trudeau’s stupidity and his callousness—we should not have been surprised. In George Orwell’s famous phrase, there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them, and the Charlie Hebdo massacre has yielded its share. Garry Trudeau’s view, to the extent that it can be discerned, seems to be that no French publication has any standing to criticize or satirize Islam, or Islamic extremism, because Muslims are a minority in France. And that resentment of such criticism or satire—in the form of, say, shooting to death unarmed people—is unfortunate, but understandable.
This theme has now been taken up in wider circles. When the PEN American Center in New York announced that it would present its Freedom of Expression Courage award to Charlie Hebdo and its surviving staff, six writers—Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Taiye Selasi—immediately withdrew as hosts of the dinner. While they deplored, more or less, the murder of their French brethren, they were considerably more disturbed by the pointed quality of Charlie Hebdo’s satire, echoing Trudeau’s implication that the eight cartoonists and writers courted their own destruction.
Moreover, in the words of Francine Prose, “the narrative of the Charlie Hebdo murders—white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists—is one that feeds neatly into the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East.” This introduced a familiar element into the narrative, taken up by Peter Carey, who joined Prose in blaming “the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”
Once the PEN Six took their stand, the ball got rolling, and writers on both sides of the Atlantic—Joyce Carol Oates, Wallace Shawn, Eve Ensler, Russell Banks, Edward Hoagland, Charles Simic, Eliot Weinberger, Jon Wiener, and others—joined hands to condemn the Charlie Hebdo staff and offer their eloquent briefs for the terrorists who had shot them dead.
The Scrapbook believes that, on the whole, it is wiser to let obtuse words stand on their own: Commentary is not only superfluous but sometimes counterproductive. Still, a few basic truths might well be repeated. Charlie Hebdo was a left-wing French satirical magazine with a gift for casting its net far and wide. Its purview was scarcely limited to Islam, or the Middle East, or to the “disempowered segment of [the French] population”—far from it, in fact. But the freedom of writers and artists to offend and condemn is absolute; and when that freedom is abridged, whether from without or within, it is lost. That is a more essential component of civilization than any grotesque rationale for cultural resentment and terrorist violence.
Those who benefit from the blessings of the free societies in which they write and draw—and fail to defend fellow artists under attack—should be ashamed of themselves. And the PEN American Center is to be commended for sticking to principle.
