“Ted Cruz & The New McCarthyism”: Inside A Dangerous Response To The Atrocity In Paris
Here are a few sentences I should not have to write but apparently must, all the same: Taking the life of another human being is an absolutely terrible thing for a person to do. By definition, murder is a crime — perhaps the most heinous one there is. No one should be physically threatened, much less killed, for sharing an opinion. Everyone should have the right to say, write, draw or otherwise express whatever sentiment they’d like without fear of violent reprisal. And anyone who thinks it’s not only appropriate, but righteous, to use violence or the threat of violence in order to silence those they disagree with is as profoundly wrong as they could be.
Some more things that should go without saying: The massacre of 10 journalists (and two law enforcement officers) at the offices of the Paris-based satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo that was carried out this week by Islamic extremists was an obscenity, a crime whose evil could never be adequately expressed with words. No matter how blasphemous, callous, insulting and bigoted the political cartoons produced by Charlie Hebdo over the years may have been, there is nothing — absolutely, positively and undoubtedly nothing — that could ever justify or excuse such fanatical sadism. The men who organized and perpetrated this slaughter were villains of the highest order, opponents of many of humanity’s greatest intellectual breakthroughs and moral achievements.
You can probably tell already, but I resent feeling that the above two paragraphs are necessary. But because I also happen to believe that many of the cartoons produced by Charlie Hebdo were mean-spirited, lazy, unfunny and sometimes baldly racist; because I do not believe that it is necessary for me to promote these cartoons in order to oppose their creators’ murder; and because some of the more influential members of the media and the government are trying to make lockstep support for Charlie Hebdo’s work a new litmus test of one’s belief in human freedom and dignity, they are. Indeed, for far too many people, it is seemingly impossible to hate the cartoon but love its creator. It’s a mindset that reminds me of nothing so much as McCarthyism — and as Matt Yglesias explained the other day in a thoughtful and sensitive post, it really sucks.
When I think of the people insinuating, or outright claiming, that one cannot claim to be a true opponent of radical, eliminationist Islam unless one showers Charlie Hebdo with unqualified praise, there are a few folks — mostly former supporters of the Iraq War — that most immediately come to mind. My colleague Heather Digby Parton has quite skillfully dismantled Jonathan Chait’s latest piece of preening bravado already, but he’s hardly the only person of influence who’s responded to the attack by whipping himself into a frenzy of empty bombast and portending (or is it promoting?) a coming apocalyptic struggle. The New York Times’ Roger Cohen tweeted in response to the news that the “entire free world” must avenge the killers’ victims “ruthlessly.” Ayaan Hirsi Ali predictably agreed and wrote that “the West” must respond to the massacre by ceasing to “appease leaders of Muslim organizations in our societies.”
Even some journalists who present and think of themselves as on the liberal side of the debate over radical Islam could not help but frame the killings as just one small part of a larger, epochal struggle. “The … massacre seems to be the most direct attack on Western ideals by jihadists yet,” wrote the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg. The attacks of September 11, 2001 were grand and nightmarish, he grants. But he argues that “satire and the right to blaspheme are directly responsible for modernity.” The New Yorker’s George Packer, meanwhile, described the attack as “only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades,” an ideology that is engaged in “a war against … everything decent in a democratic society.” (Ironically, Packer and Goldberg also both urge us not to alienate non-extremist Muslims by using the kind of clash-of-civilizations language they otherwise engage in.)
Considering this is the rhetoric coming from the folks paid to ruminate and write, you can probably imagine the stuff coming from Congress. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — who, others have noticed, bears a striking resemblance to “Tail-Gunner Joe” — proclaimed in a press statement that the murders were “a reminder of the global threat we face.” On Facebook, he said that they should be considered “an attack on us all.” For his part, Secretary of State John Kerry tried to thread the needle, claiming that the Charlie Hebdo atrocity was an element of “a larger confrontation” that was “not between civilizations, but between civilization itself and those who are opposed to a civilized world.” And to no one’s surprise, multiple Republican senators argued that what happened in Paris was proof that the NSA not only should not be reformed, but should be granted more sweeping powers instead.
As Yglesias notes in the column I praised earlier, it’s depressingly easy for someone who criticizes this kind of black-and-white, saber-rattling bluster to find themselves in the awkward position of having to assure that they’re not arguing that violent jihadism is not so bad. If one person claims that a threat is all-consuming while another person claims it to be “merely” dire, it’s almost certain that some if not many in the audience will conclude — through either willful obtuseness or simple faulty logic — that their difference of opinion is due to different values. This is the very same intellectual blindspot that McCarthy exploited decades ago in order to portray anyone to the left of Robert Taft — or anyone who was ambivalent about the country’s embrace of a permanent national security state — as either sympathetic to the Soviet Union or dedicated communists themselves. And it’s the same kind of Manichean worldview that, much more recently, helped return U.S. troops to the streets of Baghdad.
Like I said at the beginning of this piece, what a small group of masked men with AK-47s did in Paris this week was a horror, an atrocity, a tragedy and a crime. The pain the victims’ loved ones must be feeling right now is beyond my comprehension. When I try to imagine how the helpless journalists who were murdered on Wednesday must have felt — or when I come across the already iconic photo taken before one of the gunmen killed Ahmed Merabet, a police officer who was himself Muslim — it’s a struggle not to retch. And when I think about how, in my country, the debate over terrorism still demands some of us, if we want a fair hearing, to prove we’re as opposed to slaughter as anyone else, I struggle further still.
By: Elias Isquith, Salon, January 10, 2015
“#JeSuisCharlie”: I’d Rather Die Standing Than Live On My Knees
This terrible thing happened.
Three hooded men armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles seized a magazine newsroom in Paris and murdered many of the journalists meeting there. At least 12 people are dead; at least 11 others are injured. A detail I can’t shake: One of the gunmen reportedly began the massacre by calling out the journalists by name.
As I write, we already know that four cartoonists for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are among the dead: Editor Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb; Jean Cabut, known as Cabu; Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous; and Georges Wolinski.
Charlie Hebdo has made fun of many religious leaders, but it is best-known for having offended fundamentalist Muslims. And even many non-Muslims object to them as racist in their depictions. In 2011, the newsroom was firebombed for its satire on Islam and cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad.
As various news organizations have reported, Charbonnier had been under police protection since the firebombing, but he made clear that he would not be intimidated by threats of violence.
“It may sound pompous,” Charbonnier told the French daily newspaper Le Monde in 2012, “but I’d rather die standing than live on my knees.”
Eyewitness videos show that after Charbonnier and at least 11 others, including two police officers, were murdered, the killers shouted in the street before fleeing.
“God is great,” they yelled. “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad. We have killed Charlie Hebdo.”
We journalists are frequently criticized for inflating coverage when one of our own is killed. This week has been no exception. Within hours of the Paris massacre, my Twitter and Facebook feeds were peppered with posts from those demanding to know why we weren’t pursuing with equal vigor the story of a homemade explosive that blew up Tuesday outside an NAACP chapter in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Their outrage is understandable, but I would argue that so is our focus in the immediate aftermath of the Paris massacre. The Colorado Springs explosion reportedly did minor damage to the NAACP office and a barbershop in the building, but no one was injured or killed. The FBI is investigating.
I am writing this before we know the identities of all the victims in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. So much sad news to come. There will be official investigations, but we already know the killers’ dark hearts because of what they screamed — behind the anonymity of hoods, we should always emphasize.
We mourn our colleagues who die in war zones, but this one feels different because of where they were killed. They had simply shown up for work. If you’re a journalist, it’s too easy to imagine this happening again, to journalists somewhere else. To journalists anywhere else.
I understand that not everyone in the general public cares about the safety of journalists. I do ask that you try to understand why many people do. We are, after all, fellow humans.
Of course, we are seeing the inevitable criticism that Charlie Hebdo should have just stopped its habit of inciting. A desire to label satire as needless provocation illustrates its need. Extremists have always relied on fear to cripple their opposition.
Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa for his assassination because of his novel The Satanic Verses. On Wednesday, his support for the slain journalists and the magazine was unequivocal.
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity. ‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion.’ Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the Union of French Mosques, was also steadfast: “We condemn … this hateful, criminal act. … While the terrorists are intensifying their acts to exacerbate the confrontation inside our country, both Muslim and Christians have to intensify their actions to give more strength to this dialogue, to make a united front against extremism.”
By Wednesday afternoon, cartoonists from around the world had produced tributes to Charlie Hebdo and the journalists who were murdered.
Some news organizations blurred images of the magazine’s controversial illustrations in their coverage, but many others posted galleries of them. The entire newsroom of Agence France-Presse posed for a picture holding white-on-black signs, which read, “Je suis Charlie,” or “I am Charlie.” The hashtag “JeSuisCharlie” generated a Twitter thread as inspiring as it was informing.
On Wednesday evening, crowds gathered throughout France, including at Place de la Republique in Paris. Many raised pens in tribute to the slain cartoonists.
By the tens of thousands, they showed up, their faces visible to the world. Many of them chanted, “We are not afraid” and “We are all Charlie.”
This terrible thing happened.
Hope survived.
By: Connie Schultz-An Award Winning Columnist and Essayist for Parade Magazine: The National Memo, January 8, 2014
“You Can Always Count On Fox”: Fox Captures The Culprit For The Paris Attacks; Bill de Blasio, With An Assist From Obama
My first thought on hearing about the killing of at least a dozen Parisians at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo—including editors, cartoonists, and one cop shot on the sidewalk, execution-style, in front of cell-phone cameras—was that Bill Maher will feel even more justified in denouncing Islam as a “violent religion,” all the eloquent arguments by Reza Aslan and others notwithstanding. The murders were an attack not just on journalism, but on comedy itself, not unlike the hacking of Sony over the cartoony Seth Rogen movie The Interview.
My second thought was, “Will journos and comedians now need bodyguards?” Unfortunately, they already do—one of the cops killed Wednesday had been assigned to protect editor Stéphane Charbonnier because of Charlie‘s previous cartoons lampooning the prophet Muhammed and jihadist terror groups. The offices were firebombed in 2011 because of Charbonnier’s fearlessness.
Third thought: “How will Fox cover this?” Will they be torn between hating the terrorists and defending the “surrender monkey” French? Will they somehow connect this to the two cops killed in New York and blame Mayor de Blasio and protesters around the country marching against police violence? Nah, they can’t manage that, can they?
But you can always count on Fox. Within hours of the breaking news this morning, host Martha MacCallum and New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin were throwing the Paris attack and the NYC story into the same blender. After the Ferguson and New York protests, Goodwin said, “Police started to second guess themselves” for fear of being unjustly blamed or worse, killed, for acting too aggressively. The cops, he said, were like journalists who “censor themselves” for fear of being attacked.
Martha nodded. Whether it’s journalists holding their tongues for the sake of political correctness or cops holding back on choke-holds and shooting unarmed black men, “that makes things a lot softer,” she said.
Fox’s Eric Bolling raised the stakes on Outnumbered, saying, “This should be a test case for New York City and cities everywhere. Here’s the point: there’s a very serious push from the left that the police should not be militarized. We should over-militarize.”
An hour earlier, Fox & Friends had been jumping back and forth between the Paris attack and Obama’s threat to veto the first two bills coming out of the new Republican Congress, with Elisabeth Hasselbeck teasing before two commercial breaks: “Coming up: Hypocrisy brewing over president’s veto threats?” The idea is to link two unrelated things—terrorism and Obama’s promised veto of the Keystone pipeline—by weaving them into the same time and space. Weave and repeat: It’s simple and effective propagandistic association.
Ultimately, Fox connects everything under a still-larger narrative: YOU are under attack. Different Fox hosts Wednesday morning went on to tie the Paris attack to the release of Guantanamo prisoners, the Benghazi terrorists who haven’t been apprehended, and the likelihood that enhanced interrogation techniques—i.e., torture—won’t be used on any perpetrators because Obama is just too soft on Islamic terrorists.
On cable news this morning, you did hear the caveat to not blame all Muslims—Bobby Ghozi warned against that impulse on CNN; on MSNBC, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Islam was “a “peaceful religion.” And even on Fox, a counterterrorism expert said, “Islam is not the definition of terrorism. Far from it.” But he added that unless we start calling it “what it is—radical Islamic terrorism,” we can’t beat them.
In other words, while much of the liberal media are still trying to sort out just what happened and who did it, Fox is already out of the gate incorporating the attack into its ongoing agenda. And no matter whether or not this terrorist assault helps the authoritarian right over here like 9/11 did, in France it will almost certainly boost the Islamophobic Marine le Pen and the right in France 2017 elections.
As political commentator and Huff Post French editor Philippe Moreau Chevrolet said on Al Jazeera, “The far right doesn’t need to campaign anymore. [The attack] is doing the campaigning for them.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, January 7, 2015
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