The writer Monica Byrne presents us with an example of well-meaning but confused reasons for objecting to an award’s being given to Charlie Hebdo. The example is interesting because I keep finding the objections and protests under-explained and under-motivated, so I remain curious about what exactly the protesters think they’re protesting.

She titles her post “The PENAmerican award I wish I could give tonight.” Ok, but wishing you could give a different award is nowhere near a reason for protesting one actually being given, especially under these particular circumstances.

If you missed the news, here’s a summary: PENAmerican, an organization dedicated to free speech in arts and literature, is awarding French magazine Charlie Hebdo for “freedom of expression courage award,” for continuing to print after their entire editorial board was assassinated by extremists. Given the nature of Charlie Hebdo‘s content—and the conspicuous attention the assassinations received all over the world, even as journalists are killed daily by their own governments in the countries whose presidents showed up for “solidarity marches” in Paris—several writers (including Teju Cole and Rachel Kushner) resigned from being table hosts at the awards gala. Salman Rushdie excoriated them in The Guardian. Other writers have stepped up to take their places.

“Given the nature of Charlie Hebdo‘s content” with no elaboration on what that nature is conveys the impression that Charlie Hebdo’s content is self-evidently pernicious in some way. The part about conspicuous attention just dangles there, unexplained. How is that any kind of explanation for what follows?

However, she says she gets both sides.

But here’s the thing I wish PENAmerican would get: claims to “freedom of expression” are a mark of privilege in places where oppressed populations are struggling merely to be allowed to live as themselves. For them, freedom of expression is a myth. The very existence of Charlie Hebdo is a manifestation of gross privilege bestowed on one segment of the French population and denied to another.

Well of course it is (except for the word “bestowed”). That’s always the case. It’s a privilege to have readers, it’s a privilege to write or draw for a satirical publication, it’s a privilege to sell copies. But what follows from that? That we should just stop having any writers and cartoonists, magazines and newspapers and books? Should we all be restricted to Twitter?

But you know what, even if we were all restricted to Twitter, privilege would still emerge, because some people would be more interesting or amusing than others.

Obviously an award to writers or cartoonists is not an award to factory workers or domestics. Maybe awards are a bad idea in general. There are plenty of arguments for that idea; I’m pretty sure I’ve made some of them at various times, especially around the Oscars and the “Super Bowl.” But that’s not a reason to withdraw from one award out of many, especially when the people being awarded are survivors of a bloody massacre during an editorial meeting about an anti-racism campaign.

It’s far easier, and far more lazy, to recognize The Organization That Had a Very High-Profile Awful Thing happen to them, than to, say, recognize that the entire Muslim population of France continues to live in the place they call home despite constant state-sanctioned hostility to their rights to life, livelihood, religion, and yes, freedom of expression.

Is it? How much effort was it for Byrne to type that sentence? Not much.

This is, frankly, just more Dear Muslima, albeit for very different reasons and aimed at a very different kind of people. It’s another fallacy of relative privation. There are all sorts of awful things happening all over the planet – Nepal, Nigeria, Syria, North Korea, take your pick – that PEN wasn’t talking about last night because it was talking about other things. But we are allowed to do different things, as our talents and interests suggest. We need writers and cartoonists too, along with aid workers and activists. And in any case Charlie Hebdo is on the side of the marginal and despised, so there’s even less reason to single them out for having privilege “bestowed” on them by fuck knows who.

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

Highlights from #PENgala and the award to Charlie.

Neil Gaiman ‏@neilhimself 16 hours ago
Gerard Biard, Charlie Hebdo editor in chief, gets a standing ovation at the #PENgala. This was how his speech ended.

BGrueskin ‏@BGrueskin 16 hours ago
“Fear is the most powerful weapon they have. We must disarm them” #CharlieHebdo #PENgala

Joel Simon @Joelcpj
Moving to see #CharlieHebdo honored at #PENgala

 

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

The Guardian’s report on the PEN gala and the award to Charlie Hebdo is – predictably – much nastier than the Times’s. The Guardian throws them under the bus in the first sentence.

Charlie Hebdo magazine received a controversial freedom of expression award from American PEN on Tuesday night despite the vocal opposition of many of its own high-profile members.

That’s not only nasty, it’s bad writing – it sounds as if “members” of Charlie Hebdo vocally opposed the award. Hacks. But let’s focus on the nasty – they have to inform us instantly that the award is “controversial” and that many important people were vocally opposed. They have to load the dice, poison the well, frame the story.

Accepting the award, Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard said that the magazine’s shocking and sometimes offensive content helped combat extremists who would limit free speech. “Fear is the most powerful weapon they have,” he said. “Being here tonight we contribute to disarming them.”

Nicely done, Guardian.

The decision to honour Charlie Hebdo has bitterly divided the literary community, with over 200 members of PEN signing a letter that said: “there is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.”

The magazine’s critics, including Peter Carey, Teju Cole and Rachel Kushner, who led a boycott of Tuesday’s event, said it that used racist stereotypes against the most marginalised members of French society, an accusation the editors reject.

But the Guardian, it wants you to know, doesn’t.

Biard and Congolese author Alain Mabanckou told the audience that Charlie Hebdo was and always had been “anti-racist”, a reply to the criticism that the magazine portrayed French racial and religious minorities in a stereotypical way. “Charlie Hebdo has fought all forms of racism since its inception,” Biard said.

Mabanckou also argued that the magazine was simply received in France differently than in the US, and that misunderstandings had resulted from “cross-cultural exchanges: we all belong to one family and we’re all committed to freedom of expression”.

I wonder what the scare-quotes on “anti-racist” are for. To nudge us into thinking they’re lying, perhaps?

Mostly, gala guests defended the award on principle – a point that the dissenting writers also believe in, if not to the same degree. All agreed that writers, artists and people everywhere should be able to speak freely, even when that their words may shock or offend. PEN executive director Suzanne Nossel reiterated this point, and called for all members and writers to “move on together in defence of freedom of expression”.

And the Guardian sincerely hopes that we will be left with the impression that the protesters were and are right, that Charlie Hebdo really is racist, and that the only reasonable defense of the award is based on the principle of free speech regardless of content.

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

The Guardian tells us about the people replacing the boycotters at the PEN gala this evening.

Now award-winning fantasy novelist Gaiman, acclaimed cartoonist Bechdel, Maus creator Spiegelman, Reading Lolita in Tehran author Azar Nafisi and American author and journalist George Packer have been named as new hosts at the event, which PEN confirmed would have heightened security. French-Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou, meanwhile, will present the award to Jean-Baptiste Thoret, the Charlie Hebdo member of staff who arrived late to work on 7 January, missing the attack that killed 12 people.

Mabanckou told the Guardian he had decided to present the award because “I’m a big reader of Charlie Hebdo, because I know that it’s not a racist magazine. I decided to do it in memory of all journalists and cartoonists who die because they have the courage to pursue their work. Finally, I decided to do it because among the members of Charlie Hebdo who were massacred in January 2015 was a friend of mine, the economist and journalist Bernard Maris, who was an extraordinary man.”

From what I’ve been able to gather over the last four months, they were all pretty extraordinary.

Gaiman tweeted: “I’ll be hosting a table at the PEN event because it’s important.” He told the Associated Press in an email: “I was honoured to be invited to host a table. 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.”

“They died for their beliefs. The award is for courage that transcends our like or dislike of them,” Nafisi tweeted this weekend. She also wrote: “PEN award to CH is recognition of the writers’ & artists’ rights to ‘disturb the peace,’ regardless of the price”.

If writers and artists don’t disturb the peace, who will? I’m serious. Other people have other jobs to do, they don’t have time to disturb the peace, their bosses don’t want them to disturb the peace.

Other writers including Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Simon Schama, Richard Ford and Sara Paretsky have also offered their support to PEN. The novelist Salman Rushdie, meanwhile, has been a particularly outspoken supporter of PEN’s decision to honour Charlie Hebdo, writing in a letter to the free speech organisation that by withdrawing, the six authors had “made themselves the fellow travellers” of “fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence”.

And who can dispute him?

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

Originally a comment by veil_of_ignorance on A new way to weasel.

Two things:

(1) It was indeed absurd and cynical how Western governments (and their MENA allies including the KSA) have exploited the CH massacre for empty lip service to free speech. However, this is a common phenomenon which is not limited to CH. We see it anytime when the political agenda allows it: from Raif over Pussy Riot to Liu Xiaobo. This does not mean that those people do not deserve to be honored or are some kind of neoliberal US-imperialist fifth column. Or to inverse the argument: the fact that Edward Snowden is now best friends with Putin – not due to the latter’s universal commitment to free speech but for obvious political reasons – doesn’t mean that Snowden should be accused of enabling Russian, neo-Stalinist nationalism and conservatism.

(2) “By choosing to honor Charlie Hebdo, the victim of Islamic radicals, rather than any of the many worthy dissidents they could have chosen, people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, truly courageous people whose actions and words have placed them at odds with the powerful western nations of the world”. Since Furst likes to speak about narratives, I will provide a counter-narrative: What happened to CH doesn’t really involve American white liberals; however, it involves many progressive people in Muslim majority countries and the Muslim diaspora who are increasingly silenced, marginalized and endangered by the growth of Islamic fundamentalism. This is the reason why – while the white liberal American press tried to play white guilt Olympics – there generally was a lot of solidarity from the left-wing and liberal press in the MENA region, which realized that what happened to CH is also currently happening to them (Zineb El Rhazoui wrote interesting things about this topic and the fact that CH allowed francophone MENA authors to publish things which they could not publish in their home countries). By bringing in Assange and Snowden in contrast, the American liberal tries to make everything about them and their struggles again.

I might go out on a limb, but I think that what we see in the whole CH debate is almost hegemonic white guilt: the American white liberal press holds a lot of power when it comes to influencing the international sociopolitical discourse. And by pushing an almost totalitarian narrative of white guilt – a narrative which vastly overstates the West’s power in today’s geopolitical constellation, which denies the agency of non-Western actors, which essentializes universal social problems (e.g. the role of women in society) to the West and romanticizes non-Western cultures (= a variety of orientalism which tends to be ignored) – it basically suffocates social dissent from the Global South.

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

From one of the worst piece on Charlie Hebdo and PEN to one of the best: Michael Moynihan at the Daily Beast.

On January 7, Jean-Baptiste Thoret was ambling toward the office, late for an editorial meeting—he’s a French film critic, after all—when 12 of his colleagues at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were being cut to ribbons by AK-47 fire. A fraternal team of semi-illiterate religious fanatics, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, both Paris-born, casually returned to their getaway car, congratulating themselves for having avenged their aggrieved prophet. As a digestif, an accomplice was across town, preparing to murder Jewish shoppers at a kosher supermarket.

It helps to know how to write, doesn’t it, particularly on this subject. It’s striking how much of the writing of the antis has been leaden and wit-free and clunky, even from people who ordinarily do know how to write. It’s as if the style is forced to match the thought: both must be equally talentless, the way two horses pulling a carriage have to pace together.

Charlie Hebdo would seem a rather obvious choice for a prize celebrating journalistic courage, considering the newspaper was firebombed  in 2011 for producing cartoons satirizing militant Islam, lived with a heavy—but not heavy enough—security presence, and continued to raise a middle finger to those who threatened its journalists with death. But the award was an obvious choice that annoyed more than 200 PEN members—including Eric Bogosian, Wallace Shawn, Junot Diaz, and Peter Carey—who responded to the honor with a campaign of defamation against the dead.

You’d think it would catch in their throats, wouldn’t you. You’d think they would shiver and stop and re-think their positions. You’d think they would quail at giving political support to people who murder cartoonists and Jewish supermarket-shoppers.

Charlie Hebdo—scourge of the post-fascist political party Front National, enemy of Papists, cheerful anti-racist activists, fellow travelers of the French Communist Party, staunch agitators for Palestine—has been accused of racism and employing crude and offensive satire to “punch down” at an aggrieved minority.

Six impossible things before breakfast.

Two days after the murders, under the crass headline “Unmournable Bodies,” The New Yorker’s Teju Cole provided a confused exegesis on French satire, a subject he has previously avoided discussing.Charlie Hebdo, he wrote, was possessed of a “bullyingly racist agenda” and traded in “violently racist” images.

I couldn’t even read that thing in January. I took a look, I cringed, and I couldn’t stand to read it.

Elsewhere, the #JeSuisCharlie brigades were admonished for affiliating with an anti-Arab magazine whose “staff was white,” a point not contested by editor Moustapha Ourrad because he had annoyingly just been murdered by religious psychopaths. Nor did Zineb El Rhazoui protest, likely because she was too busy mourning her dead friends and cobbling together the newspaper’s first post-bloodbath issue. Francine Prose, one of the first refuseniks, said PEN’s choice “very conveniently feeds into a larger political narrative of white Europeans being killed by Muslim extremists, which is not the case,” a point with which the families of slain Hebdo staffers might take issue.

“Conveniently” – how I hate that “conveniently.” How I hate the fake knowingness behind that whole sentence.

Should you trust the judgments of newly minted French satire experts, most of whom don’t speak French and have never held a copy of the newspaper? Or should you trust Dominique Sopo, the Togolese-French president of SOS-Racisme, France’s most celebrated anti-racism organization, who made the obvious point that Charlie Hebdo was the “most anti-racist newspaper” in the country? Those accusing his murdered friends of supporting the very things they so passionately opposed, Sopo said, were either motivated by “stupidity or intellectual dishonesty…Every week in Charlie Hebdo—every week—half of it was against racism, against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim hatred.”

Well, ok, but why wasn’t the award given to Julian Assange? The brave martyr hiding in an embassy to avoid rape charges?

Few of PEN’s critics responded to this counter evidence. When asked on Twitter if he had ever thumbed through a copy of Charlie Hebdo, n+1 editor and what-a-bunch-of-racists petition signatory Keith Gessen admitted that he hadn’t. “Nor would my French be up to it if I did. This is more about PEN than it is about Charlie, and I know lots about PEN. :)” In other words, Gessen has a beef with PEN America—likely about how the recipient was chosen—which necessitated signing a petition branding Charlie Hebdo a racist publication.

Smiley face.

Tee hee.

Novelist Deborah Eisenberg, one of PEN’s most vocal and least informed critics, said Hebdo’s brand of satire was “reckless,” like “dropping your lit match into a dry forest.” Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau indulged in his own bit of victim-blaming, saying that “the decision they made” to be satirists, applying religious satire evenly across faiths and denominations, “brought really a world of pain to France.”

Strange, coming from Garry Trudeau, isn’t it – since he made the decision to be a satirist himself, and hasn’t noticeably deferred to ridiculous taboos. Why would he blame other people for not deferring to ridiculous taboos? I will never understand it.

There’s more, not-to-be-missed stuff. Don’t miss it.

PEN’s dissident Fanonists might stay away from Tuesday night’s ceremony, or make a bold stand against the nonexistent racism of 12 dead journalists by refusing to clap for the one who got away, or simply hope that next year’s Courage Award honoree will have been murdered for inoffensive journalism that comports with the bien pensant opinions of America’s literary class.

As for Thoret, after the atrocity visited upon Charlie Hebdo in January, he can manage a room half full of the self-righteously misinformed. His comrades are gone; the newspaper is more popular than ever; and his American critics, he sighs, “don’t really know what they are talking about.”

But their ignorance isn’t stopping them talking about it. They’re an embarrassment.

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

Well this is a novel way to crap on Charlie Hebdo – fully seeing what’s wrong with all the cries of “racist!” from people who have no French and no knowledge of French culture and no willingness to listen to people who do – and coldly deciding to crap on Charlie anyway, because bafflegab.

It’s Joshua Furst in The Forward.

When I heard that the writers Deborah Eisenberg, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Rachael Kushner and Taiye Salasi had publically withdrawn from their roles as table hosts for PEN America’s annual gala in protest over the organization’s decision to award Charlie Hebdo the Freedom of Expression Courage Award, my first reaction was to cringe at the spectacle of a group of writers — many of whom I greatly respect — coming out against a clearly beleaguered, clearly courageous publication simply because they disagreed with its politics.

At the same time, I felt, on some fundamental level, that they were right to be criticizing PEN. That I couldn’t place exactly why troubled me.

But he got to work and managed to come up with something, so now he’s content.

He was annoyed by the presence of a whole slew of illiberal heads of state at the Charlie protest march in Paris. Yes, so was I, but that’s not a reason to crap on Charlie.

There was a “je ne suis pas Charlie” counter-protest, but that troubled him too. But that was then.

The pertinent question now isn’t whether Charlie Hebdo’s politics conform to my own, or even whether I’m offended by the content of their cartoons, but rather, what PEN’s purpose in honoring the journal in this specific way in this specific context is and what this says about PEN.

To answer this question, one must look at the context of the award—not just the attacks but all that’s happened since. One must take into account the competing narratives and symbolic meanings that have accumulated around the magazine, and ask: does PEN want to affirm the over-simplified narrative being peddled by the politicians who gathered in Paris, and if not, how does it recognize the way this narrative has been challenged by the vigorous arguments about class and race that rose out of the wake of the attacks?

So that’s a reason to crap on Charlie, according to Furst. Nope. It isn’t. It could be a reason to write a piece about the award (just as he’s doing, in fact), but it’s not a reason to call Charlie Hebdo racist or compare it to neo-Nazis or to boycott the award.

Was Charlie Hebdo simply the safest, easiest choice to present to this audience? Is PEN a cultural institution here to celebrate the idea of free speech while providing intellectual cover for the preexisting assumptions of our capitalist democracy, or is it an organization meant to rattle and challenge, and yes, fight to protect those whose voices are stifled by political, economic and social repression, both here and abroad?

It’s easy for an American organization to celebrate those who have take stands against America’s enemies. By choosing to honor Charlie Hebdo, the victim of Islamic radicals, rather than any of the many worthy dissidents they could have chosen, people like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, truly courageous people whose actions and words have placed them at odds with the powerful western nations of the world, PEN has communicated to their donors that it is on the side of powerful and reinforced the neo-liberal assumptions that allow for unchecked oppression to be perpetuated in our name around the world.

This, to me, is a fundamental betrayal of everything PEN is meant to stand for. And so, despite not agreeing with every word it contained, I felt strongly enough about the central idea of the letter protesting PEN’s choice that I was compelled to sign it.

Furst seems to have overlooked something. The people at Charlie Hebdo were killed. Assange and Snowden are alive. He also seems to be overlooking, or forgetting, the fact that Charlie Hebdo is no fan of capitalism or neo-liberalism.

This is how it’s done, I guess. This is how it was done to Salman in 1989 and after, and it’s how it’s done now. It’s an ugly business.

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