A useful thing via Twitter:

Hazem Eseifan @Eseifan 14 hours ago
#Charlie_Hebdo’s response to its idiotic critics on the American left.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The always-wonderful Joan Smith beez wonderful again with her take on Charlie Hebdo.

Almost 150 well-known writers, including the novelists Joyce Carol Oates and Peter Carey, have written a letter protesting the award. They say they are sickened by the murders but claim the decision to honour the magazine is “neither clear nor inarguable”. They accuse Charlie Hebdo of mocking “a section of the French population that is already marginalised, embattled, and victimised” and causing “further humiliation and suffering” among France’s Muslims.

Seeing this, my mind flashed to The Satanic Verses. Back in 1989, I was dismayed by the number of people who said that the death sentence passed on Salman Rushdie was wrong, but he shouldn’t have offended Muslims. The historian Lord Dacre even declared that he wouldn’t shed a tear if some British Muslims “were to waylay [Rushdie] in a dark street” and teach him some manners. Defending free speech is easier in principle than in practice, it seems.

Indeed. My mind has been flashing back to 1989 all week (as has Salman Rushdie’s). It’s a bad thing. It’s bad when people on the left tell other people on the left that they mustn’t rebel against religion because [insert bad reasons here]. Religion is one of our masters, and it’s arguably the most illegitimate of all. The left has no business telling people not to rebel against their masters.

Curiously, these self-appointed defenders of Europe’s Muslim population are making exactly the same mistake as the people they think they’re opposing; like white racists, they regard “Muslims” as a homogenous group. They see them as uniformly powerless, ignoring the emergence of a Muslim middle class and the enormous power wielded by advocates of extreme forms of Islam. I don’t imagine the secular blogger Raif Badawi, who is still under sentence of 1,000 lashes, would have much time for the argument that the Wahhabi sect which runs Saudi Arabia is mild-mannered and ineffective.

Or a powerless marginalized group, either.

The journalists gunned down at Charlie Hebdo – including a French-Algerian copy-editor, Mustapha Ourrad – understood this very well. Some Muslim men (they almost always are men) are very powerful indeed, whether they are the leaders of Boko Haram or the Muslim clerics who encourage impressionable young men to kill people. There are good reasons for being afraid of Islamic extremists, just as I would have gone in fear of the Inquisition if I’d been born in 15th-century Italy.

Or of the nuns if she’d been born in 20th-century Ireland.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Also in pleasanter news: from the New York Times:

Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel are among the writers who have agreed to be table hosts at next week’s PEN American Center gala after six authors withdrew in protest of an award being given to the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

So, that will do. That’s not too shabby. Alison Bechdel has a hit musical on Broadway at this moment.

The literary and human rights organization told The Associated Press this weekend that the other new hosts are George Packer, Azar Mafisi and Alain Mabanckou, a Congolese-born French author who will present the award to Hebdo’s editor in chief Gerard Biard and critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thore. PEN is giving the magazine a Freedom of Expression Courage award, a decision that has been fiercely defended and criticized.

That’s Nafisi, if they mean the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, as I imagine they do. But anyway – cool beans. I would be ecstatic to sit at any one of those tables.

“I was honored to be invited to host a table,” Gaiman wrote in an email Sunday to The Associated Press. “The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage: They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed, and the survivors have continued following the murders.”

Stout fella.

The literary world has been in a civil war of words since PEN announced last week that Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and four other table hosts pulled out from the gala, citing what they say are the offensive cartoons of Muslims in Charlie Hebdo. A stream of tweets, letters, Facebook postings and opinion pieces has divided old friends such as former PEN presidents Prose and Salman Rushdie, a leading backer of the honor, and even set siblings on opposite sides.

I’ve been reading Joseph Anton again because of all this, and I keep finding tragic-ironic appearances by Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje and the like. It’s sad.

Gaiman, in his email to the AP, said he was puzzled that “several otherwise well-meaning writers have failed to grasp that you do not have to like what is said to support people’s right to say it.”

No, you don’t, but you probably do have to like or at least respect what is said to be happy about an award for it. Being happy about an award is a step or two (or several) beyond supporting people’s right. I agree with the protesting writers about that much. I just think they’re dead wrong about not liking or at least respecting what is said. They are objecting from the left, not from the right, and that’s just a complete mistake. And with so many people explaining the mistake to them, they ought to be able to grasp it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

English PEN has a book we can buy.

English PEN is delighted to announce the publication of Draw The Line Here, a collection of cartoons drawn in response to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015.

The book is a collaboration between the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation (PCO), Crowdshed, and English PEN. It features cartoons drawn by British artists in the days immediately after the attacks. The work of 66 cartoonists is featured, including Steve Bell, Dave Brown, Martin Rowson, Peter Brooke and Ralph Steadman.

Books cost UK £15.00 each. Compare that to $250 to attend the “VIP reception” on Dawkins’s June tour…

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Glenn Greenwald thinks people have been misrepresenting the arguments of Francine Prose and Deborah Eisenberg.

To defend the award to Charlie Hebdo, PEN officials argued that the award did not constitute an endorsement of the content of the cartoonists’ speech, but rather, only a recognition that they were courageous in expressing themselves. The principle articulated by PEN was clear: a person is deserving of this award if they continue to express their views even in the face of credible threats of violence, and especially if they pay for their right to free expression with their lives.

The objecting PEN writers believe this principle to be invalid and contrived. To prove that point, they offered a hypothetical example that was classic reductio ad absurdum: suppose a KKK leader continued to publish white supremacist filth in the face of credible threats of violence, and was killed for doing so: of course PEN would not bestow the KKK with a courage award, and almost nobody would be comfortable if they had.

And that far, I agree with the objecting writers. I think PEN put it too strongly when it said that. (Maybe PEN would say yes, a murdered KKK propagandist would be eligible for a courage award from PEN; in that case I would disagree with PEN.) But I don’t consider it a reductio ad absurdum but just an illustration of how the claim says too much. It’s not absurd enough to be a reductio ad absurdum. I think it’s just a competing example; I don’t know if there’s a technical word for that.

Their point was that the award is not merely about courage, but is clearly linked to a positive assessment of the content of Charlie Hebdo cartoons, as proven by the fact that PEN would never give the award to someone, such as a KKK leader, who expresses heinous views. And since these PEN writers don’t view the content of the cartoons as worthy of admiration, they oppose the award. They believe Charlie Hebdo should have full free speech rights, but not be admired for the content of their speech: the most basic distinction when it comes to free speech advocacy. That’s all there is to it.

Yes, but that’s not all that such examples can do. They can also poison the well. They can manipulate people who hear and see them. They can re-frame the discussion. The Nazis or the KKK can be a competing example but also a comparison, at least implicitly.

In her original letter kicking off the controversy, Deborah Eisenberg raised the examples of racist fraternities and Nazi propagandists who express widely reviled views that provoke recrimination and threats, and asked: “Is there not a difference — a critical difference — between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable and enthusiastically awarding such expression?”

See there? Is that a reductio, or a comparison? It looks to me like more of the latter than the former. I think she’s saying Charlie Hebdo is bad in the same way that racist fraternities and Nazi propagandists are bad. I don’t think it’s at all clear that she considers the racist fraternities and Nazi propagandists obviously far more awful than Charlie; I think she’s saying they’re all much of a muchness.

Another objecting PEN writer, Francine Prose, wrote an incredibly clear op-ed in the Guardian this morning making clear exactly what her objections are (and are not), and similarly wrote:

I believe that Charlie Hebdo has every right to publish whatever they wish.

But that is not the same as feeling that Charlie Hebdo deserves an award. As a friend wrote me: the First Amendment guarantees the right of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, but we don’t give them an award. The bestowing of an award suggests to me a certain respect and admiration for the work that has been done, and for the value of that work and though I admire the courage with which Charlie Hebdo has insisted on its right to provoke and challenge the doctrinaire, I don’t feel that their work has the importance – the necessity – that would deserve such an honor.

Same thing, although less coherent – she seems to have thought that Charlie’s badness wasn’t obvious enough in comparison to neo-Nazis and so it was necessary to add badness + lack of necessity to make a big enough sum. But that’s not clearly because she wasn’t trying to say they were both much the same kind of thing.

Greenwald then gets indignant with Padraig Reidy for taking what Prose wrote at face value. Hmph. I don’t think Padraig is the one making an error here.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Christiane Amanpour in a public Facebook post. It’s a letter she sent to PEN.

I am sure I was among many people who were puzzled and dismayed by the 6 PEN writers who have pulled out of next week’s Gala because of the award going to Charlie Hebdo. I am very glad to know that American PEN is standing up for what’s right by going ahead with the award, and as such I am glad I am still able to make available my video-taped contribution to the Gala, on behalf of one of our jailed colleagues, Khadija Ismayilova of Azarbaijan.

Much has been already written disdaining the action and motives of the PEN 6. I can only imagine these writers were wholly unacquainted with the precise nature of Charlie Hebdo’s satire and cartoons. So I’d like to send you this little primer in the hope you will forward to them all:

First as the PEN 6 will see from this article in Le Monde, Charlie Hebdo was NOT obsessed by Islam, was not deliberately inciting hatred of one religion, and was most certainly not aiming its satire at France’s large and beleaguered Moslem minority. The graph shows that of 523 copies of the magazine between 2005 and 2015, religion took up 38 of the covers. Of those, Islam 7, Christianity 21, and multiple religions took up 10.

In addition, while some of the PEN 6 complain Charlie Hebdo targets or offends French moslems, a precise examination of their satire shows they are actually targeting the absurdity, violence, misogyny, hatred and intolerance of global Islamic extremism. You can like or dislike what Charlie Hebdo does, find it funny or not, but to suggest that somehow they were inciting hatred and violence and ….not so subtle subtext…”oh well, the cartoonists were asking for it then”, is categorically wrongheaded, churlish and morally repugnant.

Music.

Read the whole thing.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Thursday I posted a partial list of the writers who protest the courage award to Charlie Hebdo; via Glenn Greenwald here is the full list:

Chris Abani

Leslie Absher

Elizabeth Adams

Gabeba Baderoon

Deborah Baker

Russell Banks

Susan Bell

Naomi Benaron

Helen Benedict

Cara Benson

Charles Ramírez Berg

Susan Bernofsky

Eric Bogosian

Donald Breckenridge

Ami Sands Brodoff

Karen Brown Brooks

Janet Burroway

Helene Cardona

Peter Carey

Bryn Chancellor

Carmela Ciuraru

Patricia Clark

Tony Cohan

Teju Cole

Michael Cunningham

Emily M. Danforth

Tod Davies

Siddhartha Deb

Junot Díaz

Erin Edmison

Brent Hayes Edwards

Brian T. Edwards

Deborah Eisenberg

Hedi El Kholti

Trey Ellis

Eve Ensler

Elizabeth Enslin

Barbara Epler

Jennifer Cody Epstein

Ali Eteraz

Percival Everett

Marlon L. Fick

Boris Fishman

Stona Fitch

Peter H. Fogtdal

Seánan Forbes

Ashley Ford

Linda Nemec Foster

Lauren Francis-Sharma

Ru Freeman

Nell Freudenberger

Molly Friedrich

Joshua Furst

Gretchen Gerzina

Keith Gessen

Francisco Goldman

Conner Habib

Jessica Hagedorn

Kathryn Harrison

Jonathan T. Hine Jr.

Edward Hoagland

Laura Hoffmann

Nancy Horan

Marya Hornbacher

Sandra Hunter

Megan Hustad

Randa Jarrar

T. Geronimo Johnson

John Keahey

Uzma Aslam Khan

Dave King

Gilbert King

Robert Spencer Knotts

Ruth Ellen Kocher

Nancy Kricorian

Amitava Kumar

Rachel Kushner

Amy Lawless

Zachary Lazar

Jonathan Lee

Katherine Leiner

Ted Lewin

Ed Lin

Michael Lindgren

Julie Livingston

Craig Lucas

Ann Malaspina

Charlotte Mandell

C. M. Mayo

Patrick McGrath

Clarissa McNair

Deena Metzger

Thais Miller

Kyle Minor

Rick Moody

Skye Moody

Lorrie Moore

Dolan Morgan

James McGrath Morris

Idra Novey

Stephen O’Connor

Joyce Carol Oates

Peter Orner

Michael Ondaatje

Raj Patel

Chris Pavone

Francine Prose

Marcus Rediker

Adam Rex

Clay Risen

Roxana Robinson

David Roediger

Paul Rome

Mark Rotella

Gina Ruiz

Steven Schroeder

Sarah Schulman

Taiye Selasi

Danzy Senna

Kamila Shamsie

Jeff Sharlet

Wallace Shawn

Matthew Shenoda

Nancy Shiffrin

Russell Shorto

Charles Simic

Tom Sleigh

Holly Goldberg Sloan

Alexis M. Smith

Jill Smolowe

Linda Spalding

Scott Spencer

Emily Gray Tedrowe

Roy A. Teel Jr.

Michael Thomas

Ted Thompson

Kathleen Tolan

Joanne Turnbull

Chase Twichell

Padma Venkatraman

Jasmine Dreame Wagner

Eliot Weinberger

Jon Wiener

G. K. Wuori

Dave Zirin

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Andrew Solomon and Suzanne Nossel explain why PEN is giving Charlie Hebdo an award.

Although censorship has traditionally been the province primarily of governments, attempts to curb speech are likewise undertaken by vigilantes who employ threats and violence. In the last few months we have seen shootings at Charlie Hebdo and at a free-speech event in Copenhagen; the hacking to death of two Bangladeshi atheist bloggers, one of them an American; a death threat against an Australian political cartoonist by jihadists; and the gunning down of a Pakistani social activist.

I missed the death threat against an Australian political cartoonist, but all the other items I’ve been ranting about relentlessly.

These audacious attacks aim to terrorize a worldwide audience into silence on subjects that, though sacred to some, affect many others and must not be above debate. While this is hardly the only free-speech issue on PEN’s long agenda of American and global concerns, the spate of homicides gives it particular urgency.

…

Six writers of tremendous distinction — Peter Carey, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose and Taiye Selasi — have sent notes to us indicating that they were not comfortable attending our gala on Tuesday, in light of the award. Many other writers of distinction — including Paul Auster, Adam Gopnik, Siri Hustvedt, Porochista Khakpour, Alain Mabanckou, Azar Nafisi, Salman Rushdie, Simon Schama and Art Spiegelman — have made statements (some in public and some in private) in support of the award. Our goal has been to avoid a reductive binary; this is a nuanced question, and all of these writers have made persuasive moral arguments.

Not really. All of them have tried to, no doubt, but not all of them succeeded. They’re not all above average.

In offering this award, PEN does not endorse the content or quality of the cartoons, except to say that we do not believe they constitute hate speech. The question for us is not whether the cartoons deserve an award for literary merit, but whether they disqualify Charlie Hebdo from a hard-earned award for courage. (The gala on Tuesday will also honor Khadija Ismayilova, an Azerbaijani journalist in jail for exposing rampant corruption.)

That’s a good way of putting it; I wish I’d thought of it. As I keep saying, it would be possible for cartoons and satirical papers to be racist and thus bad candidates for an award, it’s just that Charlie isn’t one of them.

That the cartoons were not intentionally racist does not preclude their being experienced as racist. Cartoons can and do offend. Yet Christiane Taubira, the black French justice minister who was parodied as a monkey in a cringe-worthy cartoon, delivered a poignant elegy at the funeral of one of her supposed tormentors, Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, saying that “Tignous and his companions were sentinels, lookouts, those who watched over democracy,” preventing it from being lulled into complacency.

The leading French anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, has called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country.” Its current editor, Gérard Biard, says it deplores all forms of racism. According to Le Monde, of 523 Charlie Hebdo covers published from 2005 to 2015, only seven singled out Islam for ridicule (ten were cited as mocking multiple religions); many more mocked Christianity and the racism of the French right.

Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons resist religious extremists’ attempts to redraw the boundaries of free speech by using violence. They do so in defense of norms to which free societies subscribe. Anti-Muslim prejudice in the West is a serious matter. So is fundamentalism, Islamist or otherwise. Feeding off one another, both ills threaten civil liberties and tear at social fabrics. But a statement or an award that addresses one problem does not thereby deny or acquiesce to the other. The distressing absence of broad respect toward Muslims in France does not undercut Charlie Hebdo’s bravery in defending the right to be disrespectful.

I hope the rafters ring with cheers next Tuesday evening when Alain Mabanckou presents the award and Gérard Biard accepts it.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Philip Gourevitch tweets:

Philip Gourevitch @PGourevitch 13 hours ago
Congolese French novelist/Man Booker finalist @amabanckou to present PEN award to CharlieHebdo http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/livre/alain-mabanckou-remettra-le-prix-liberte-d-expression-de-pen-a-charlie-hebdo_1676505.html …

Peter Carey, Francine Prose, please note.

Updating to add a cartoon via Twitter RTd by Alain Mabanckou:

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)