Guest post: If you say “I am not Charlie,” you are not a liberal
Guest post by Josh Spokes.
It is not “liberal” to tut-tut at Charlie Hebdo. It is not “liberal” to insist on turning your head away from misogyny and murder because the perpetrators are part of a group that experiences racist oppression.
If you say “I am not Charlie,” you are not a liberal. You are rejecting enlightenment values. Universal human values.
It does not matter who you vote for, how progressive your circle of friends is, or how mindfully you shop, or how faithfully you donate to NPR. You are not a liberal if you qualify your “objection” to murder by asking if maybe the Charlie Hebdo writers should have dressed their prose more modestly if they didn’t want to get murdered.
And you’re insulting your own intelligence and your own good moral core when you pass along what are now known lies – objectively false statements – about Charlie Hebdo. If you want to object to this, please do some wider reading first. Do not be confident that the prevailing wisdom among your liberal friends will guide you correctly.
I made that mistake. I won’t make it again.
Hear, hear.
In this litmus test for true liberals, I’ve a question.
After some Coptic guy in the U.S. screened a short film lampooing Mohammed and people in the mid-East rioted, Obama came out with the following statement: ” The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet Mohammed”. In this sense ‘slander’ is a synonym for lampoon.
Ophelia yesterday posted an article by Nick Cohen that quite rightly chided the pope for his post massacre statements.
Is Obama really any better? Is he really a liberal?
The images of Mohammed found in C.H. are no better or no worse than the images depicted in that short film.
The Copt was also briefly arrested, by the way.
John, are you asking your question derisively? It seems that way to me, but I’m not sure.
Obama is not a liberal, he is a neo-liberal. His environmental policies have not been liberal, they have been pro-business. He has mostly given rhetoric to women and people of color (and some small things, like the contraception mandate in the ACA, which seems like a least-I-can-do thing, and then immediately undid that good by exempting religious institutions). So I would be perfectly comfortable with saying Obama is not a liberal. He doesn’t look like one from where I sit.
I’m not willing to answer that question myself, iknklast, until I hear from John. It appears to me that he assumed:
1. That I, the post author, must necessarily believe Obama is a liberal
2. That I believe that (which we can just assume, apparently) gives John an opportunity to call out my hypocrisy
There aren’t any grounds to assume that, and I dislike being treated in this manner for someone who appears to want to score rhetorical points.
No Josh. ..I do not mean to be derisive at all. And I’m not trying to call you out as a hypocrite…you aren’t.
It’s serious question because when I first heard Obama uttering that line I nearly spit out my coffee. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. In effect he’s declaring the founder of Islam as being off limits to satirists.
I don’t wish to derail your thread, but I questioned the man’s sincerity when he denounced the Hebdo massacre.
Either all religious leaders/founders are fair game for satire or none are.
Why defer to Islam?
John, thank you for clarifying. I’m sorry I’m so defensive; the past several years have taught me to expect the most uncharitable ambush from anywhere, at any time, from people you least expect to be ambushed by.
You’re right—Obama is most certainly not a liberal, and that statement he made (and *many* others flattering religion as a source of goodness) is offensive and barely believable.
Ill note that I am Charlie before saying that posts like these aren’t particularly liberal either – Where some ultimate test is demanded (which matters to the author) and then other things are glossed over like who you vote for , or what other policies you support (which dont matter as much to the author). Purity is a conservative value.
It very much matters what the objection is even if the objection may be wrong or mistaken. There is no requirement that a liberal not be mistaken or wrong about matters.
Purely based on the link , do you believe Joe Sacco is not liberal ?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks
He objects to the murders but there is a *But*
Is Obama really any better? Is he really a liberal?
Well, no. Obama is not and never has been a liberal. He’s a centrist who had some tax breaks for the middle classes. Electing a liberal black man as the first black POTUS could never have happened – just as in the UK Margaret Thatcher, first female PM, could never have been elected if she had not been right wing. It’s hard to break both traditions at once which is why, most often, ground breaking social appointments come from a more politically conservative tradition.
Having said that, it is possible to disapprove of intentionally offensive cartoons without wanting them banned or for the cartoonists to be murdered. It’s easy for the Charlie Hebdo murders to be used by anti-Muslim racists and for support for Hebdo to be used by people who wish to gratuitously insult Muslim people (not Islam as a monolith). Those are two different stances and there’s a fine line between them.
8: I think it’s not so much about not approving of Charlie Hebdo’s brand of satire or their choice of targets, so much as people choosing the immediate aftermath of mass murder to declare their disapproval. Timing matters.
“It’s a bad idea to drink too much at parties” can be a totally unobjectionable statement in many circumstances. Saying immediately after hearing that a woman went to a party and was sexually assaulted, on the other hand…
@AcademicLurker
I didn’t get the timing aspect of it from the above post (given the length of time that has passed) – but even if that was the intent , I’d say it’s possible to think on multiple different lines at the same time.
What most people object to is It’s a bad idea for women to drink too much at parties v/s Boys will be Boys.
Everyone commenting here knows my online self well enough to know I wouldn’t propose anything so stupid or facile as a “litmus test for liberalism” based on whether one swears allegiance to a magazine.
I hoped for actual conversation about this issue. Instead we’re playing games over a rhetorical device. I come her to get away from bullshit. Could you maybe bullshit somewhere else?
If anyone else asks me to affirm or deny, under my “litmus test”, whether so-and-so “is a liberal,” my answer is fuck you.
@7
Yeah Josh, I can understand your ambush reflex. I apologize for coming across the way I did. I sometimes sound angry or sarcastic when I’m nothing of the sort.
I sound the same, John, often. I share your Kryptonite.
I should be more specific: My latest remarks are aimed at you, Deepak. I don’t know if it’s purposeful, but all your comments in my recent memory appear to be driven by “gotcha”. You also appear to conveniently “forget” things you know about the writer—whether it’s Ophelia or another commenter here—in order to further the least charitable interpretation for your own ends.
Years ago you were one of my favorite fellow commenters. Now I feel like you don’t actually like or respect people here, and that this is a unpleasant game you’re playing.
#8
“He objects to the murders but there is a *But*”
The Sacco cartoon reads a lot like CH cartoons: using wrong stereotypes and making points about stereotypic wrongness.
To me the ultimate bottom corner is much telling, since he seems to equate branding muslims as the enemy (which is a completely weird argument to make about CH). If we follow his argument, then with this cartoon he demonstrated that he’s strongly racist and antisemitic himself.
Do you think people interpret this specific cartoon as such? I can think of people lacking any knowledge of English that certainly would.
To me, this invalidates the argument. Or it does mean something else that you did miss: that the point is not anti-CH but relative to folks ability to understand second degree. In this case you proved you did not understand, even when stating that you were charlie too (which you don’t really seem actually).
So, which is it? Or is it that satire is so difficult without obvious keys for the brainless that freedom of speech needs special protection?
I agree. How come Western liberals love their liberties so much, conquered through centuries of bloody wars and revolutions (and we aren’t halfway through, I think), but for the oppressed people of the rest of the world they show the middle finger?
Stay with your mullahs, accept your theocratic dictators, hide under your burkas and leave us alone! As long as you let us play our world chess and get cheap oil to finish poisoning the planet, it’s all right for us.
This position is imperialist, the same as that other one that demonizes Islam as an unhistorical evil power that threatens the West and against which all neocon aggression is justified. It’s like the good cop-bad cop routine of the enhanced interrogation (torture).
I’ve seen the Maghrebi women working in a Paris saturday morning, happy to show off their miniskirts and fashion. Paris gives them a taste of freedom, so precious we can’t imagine, because it’s scarce. Returning home they have to cover again, but they were able to taste a bit of freedom and it’s addictive. So those defending the rights of the religious Islamic patriarchic men want to police them even in France, under the pretext of respecting their culture. Why respect the culture if we don’t respect people?
If we denounce the terrorist attacks of Islamists, we are accused of playing into the neocon discourse. If we denounce the imperialist “war on terror”, we are accused of supporting the terrorists. The only solution is to take a clear stance against terrorism but also give support to those of our sisters and brothers who fight for freedom and human rights in the developing countries and among the migrant communities. After all, they are the only hope that their countries one day would become really democratic, progressive and peaceful.
Despite all the obfuscation happening now, this position will win in the long run, I hope.
The building of healthy working nations, with increasing openness and civil freedom is the only way of development that works for their societies. That’s what they have been doing all along, as soon as they managed to come out of the colonial stranglehold. Look at all those Latin American countries. Who liberated them? Themselves. Who torpedoed their independence and wealth all the way? The US.
Who scuttled the Sukarno Indonesian government in a terrible bloodbath to impose Suharto? Who chased Mosadegh to enthrone the Shah? More recently, who destroyed Libya? (No, they did not destroy the Qaddafi regime, they destroyed the country with Al Qaeda troops under the command of NATO military cadres and covered by the attacks of their Air Forces.)
Now the US/NATO is trying to do the same to Syria, after destroying Iraq (once more, they did much more than destroying the regime, they ruined the country).
Why do I say all this? Because racism, as much as it is prevalent in Europe and the USA against the Muslim immigrants, is not what stings the millions that are still in their countries. It’s imperialism.
And I return to Obama. He gloats that the US is the mightiest country in the world. Sure. And shows his hands red with the blood of the people he has been killing in illegal covert wars and drone attacks. His hands are not cleaner than Bush/Chenney’s, they are perhaps dirtier. Nobody knows, it’s all secret now.
So fuck him.
@Josh Spokes
and
I only know you from this site , and thats all Im going on.
If you meant to say something else , you can say that.
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Deepak: Fuck you and fuck off.