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Charlie Hebdo: Racist Xenophobes or Martyrs of Free Speech?

Date: January 9, 2015
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Comedy, Freedom of Speech, Uncategorized
Comments: 1 Reply

President

On Wednesday January 7th 2015 two masked men armed with AK-47’s  killed 10 staff members and 2 police officers at the Paris offices of the satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. The paper had depicted images of the prophet Mohammad, which the gunmen found offensive.   After news of the massacre hit the press, People flooded the streets of Paris with signs of Je Suis Charlie, or “I am Charlie,” in support of the slain cartoonists.

Then of course, a backlash began,  at least on the internet. and social media.  Many of my well-meaning friends began to re-post blogs and rants stridently attacking the character and political motivations of the slain cartoonists.  Their evidence was cherry-picked cartoons without English translations, or any greater context.. All of the very vocal Americans critics somehow became experts on French culture overnight.  France is not the US, the country has a very different history and the challenges and difficulties in France are not ours.   The French have never viewed themselves as a melting pot, and they do not welcome changes in their culture or even their language.  Some Muslims in France refuse to assimilate and desperately want preserve their own traditions.  So take a proud culture that doesn’t want to change, and then throw in people who also refuse to adapt and you’ve got a recipe for conflict.  There’s more to it than that of course, but that’s the seed of a lot of the tension.

None of these American bloggers openly condoned the killings but they certainly showed contempt and hostility for the victims.  One vocal critic declared, “Why should we feel sorry for privileged white males who spewed xenophobic, racist, nonsense?”  Other critics claimed the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist  “Depicted of Muslims as hook-nosed stereotypes”   I found this unsettling so  I did a quick google search of the words Charlie Hebdo.  I wanted to see for myself if the paper was as racist and xenophobic as these people were saying it was. I easily found the following images:

DaisyChain

I’m not sure but that looks like a circle of Catholic bishops engaging in some type of group sodomy.

Nudity

The French president surround by a cast of naked characters.

Unflattering

The cartoonists do depict Muslims as racial stereotypes, but the same could be said for these Caucasian men.  No one would call these depictions as flattering.

And of course the image that leads this article is

President

The very white, and very powerful, male president with his dick out.  It appears his penis is speaking for him.

The Pope was also a frequent image on many covers, and of course there were also images of Muslims depicted as racial stereotypes.  I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that the editors poked fun at plenty of other religions, groups and public officials.

Most of the critics denouncing Charlie Hebdo were righteously indignant Americans.  None of them mentioned having lived in France, being French themselves or even understanding the French language, yet these highly opinionated voices were suddenly experts on everything Charlie Hebdo.  One angry rant of click bait entitled In the Wake of Charlie Hebdo Freedom of Speech does not Equal Freedom from Criticism, even included as evidence of the paper’s bigotry, a cartoon mocking the leader of Isis.  The same author cited Gawker as a source, (Gawker isn’t exactly known for being a shining example of journalistic integrity or ethical reporting.)  Isis is of course the same radical group that’s known for human right abuses, mass rapes, and beheadings.  Isis is so vicious even al-Qaeda has urged them to kill fewer civilians.  But I guess to some even the worst radical religious extremists are above mockery.

The same author who seemed completely outraged at the mocking of Isis had no problem getting his point across with words like: fuck, bullshit and labeling nearly everyone who didn’t agree with him as racist.  If you dared to repost an offensive cartoon in solidarity with the slain men, then in his opinion you’re a racist.  His evidence of rampant racism other than the cartoons taken out of context was the following two quotes the murdered editor Stéphane “Charb ” Charbonnier’:

“Muhammad isn’t sacred to me.”

“I don’t blame Muslims for not laughing at our drawings. I live under French law. I don’t live under Koranic law.”

I don’t really see how either quote makes him a racist.   As an agnostic myself, I don’t view any religious symbol as sacred, and I don’t know why anyone must be forced to revere a religion they don’t believe in.  In his second quote, he’s basically saying that yes he understands Muslims may not like everything they publish, but France, is a country with freedom of speech, not one that is dictated by any one religion.  Someone might also point out to the author that Islam is a religion not a race, and there are Asian, Arab, white and black Muslims.  But since the word racist packs more a punch than bigot, he and other politically correct bullies love to throw around the R-word.

I’ll openly admit I’m also no expert on Charlie Hebdo. I’d suspect the author of that article was also going off of scant information.  He cited Gawker as a source after all.   Some of my French friends have claimed Charlie Hebdo’s editors really did lampoon everyone..  I don’t know what to think, but I’m not going to go with a handful of cartoons out of hundreds, an opinion of some friends, or a few cover images as any evidence of anything.   If we’re really going to discuss freedom of speech and expression, offensive, even racist or bigoted content is irrelevant.

In this country we have restrictions on some images and speech.  We’ve agreed as a society that blatantly lying about someone is a punishable offense.  A person can sue another in a court of law for slander and receive millions in compensation.  We’re also have penalties and legal recourse in regards to defamation.  We’ve also decided that possessing images of children being sexually molested is intolerable under any circumstances. Profanity and nudity are both somewhat limited, yet both are easy to find if one goes looking for them.  We have limits on speech that call for acts of violence against others, or acts of treason. It’s illegal to endanger the public safety by screaming “Fire” in a crowded theater, and you aren’t allowed to joke about a bomb in an airport.

Other than those basic limits, people can write and express themselves however they want.  Free speech is messy.  It sometimes offends or upsets people.  In a free society some speech is so horrendous it’s downright hateful.  But what is offensive to one person, might be the harsh biting truth to another.  If one group starts to dictate what is and is not offensive, then we are allowing one group to decide the actions and behaviors of others.  There is plenty in any religious text that could easily be held up as sacred and untouchable, but no religion should force their standards onto the general public.

We also live in a world with plenty of avenues for recourse.  A person can combat offensive speech with more speech.  They can battle what they see as inappropriate expression with more creative expression.  They can refuse to buy papers they don’t want to read, and they can publish their own.

If we want true freedom of expression than absolutely nothing is above mockery or criticism. We cannot cower to any organization or ideology wiling to kill those who generate offensive thoughts and images.  A free society allows speech from every direction and viewpoint. The same freedom allows the misguided bloggers to label these victims as racist xenophobes, is the same one that gives me the opportunity to write this blog.

Does it matter if they wrote some racist and even xenophobic material?  They still died for their words and expression and that, by the very definition of the word martyr, does make them martyrs for free speech.  Because their death was meant to silence us all, we need to speak out even more ferociously in defense of free speech, even when that speech is harsh satire. .

“I don’t agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” – Voltaire.

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Street Harassment: A Challenge to Men

Date: October 30, 2014
Author: julietjeske
Categories: Uncategorized, Women and Feminism
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street-harassment

Once while crossing the street in Washington Heights a man screamed out at me, “Hey Sexy!”  I was wearing baggy jeans, a sweatshirt, a baseball cap and glasses with no makeup.  I looked a step away from a vagrant.  I didn’t respond.  Just then, I heard the same voice shout back at me, “Ya fat ass. Bitch”

I was crossing the street at the light.  Was I supposed to stop, walk over to the sound of the voice even though I had no idea what car he was in.   I knew the man was talking to me as there were no other women around, but I looked so grubby it seemed strange that he would call me “sexy.”  This same scenario plays out daily, sometimes several times a day no matter what I’m wearing or how I look.

In the worst examples I’ve been grabbed by random strangers.  They usually grab me by my arm and try to pull me into them.  It’s so inappropriate it borders on assault.  If a man did that to another man, he’s libel to get punched, pushed, shoved or slapped.  It’s just unacceptable.

One night while walking home from a comedy show a group of young teenagers walked up to me for no reason, and one of them pulled my hair and then ran away laughing.  It was near Union Square, the streets were quite busy.  My response was to immediately start screaming at the boys.  It ended with me chasing them down the block.  I did get some satisfaction when they finally decided to start running from me, the look of fear in their eyes gave me hope they wouldn’t try it again any time soon.

The infamous video that is making the internet rounds lately stirred a fairly heated debate among my friends.  When I watched the video, I saw a woman dealing with street harassment as she wore a t-shirt and jeans and did nothing more than walk silently through the streets of New York City.  What my friend saw was a racially biased video that portrayed black men as the primary source of this type of harassment.  Interesting how people from two oppressed groups can see the exact same footage and get something completely different perspectives from it.  The video did contain some white men who were harassing the woman, and a few voices were of undetermined ethnicity.  However the makers of the video did make a mistake by only using a white woman.  It would have been a better experiment to use women of various ethnic backgrounds.  Not only would the non-white women still get comments, they would probably get racist remarks on top of it.

Since I’ve lived in New York City for 13 years, I have friends from every background imaginable.  Street harassment is something that nearly all of my female friends complain about.  It doesn’t matter if they are white, black, Asian, Latina or some combination.  Every woman under a certain age regardless of size has experienced it.  Some women just block them out, but for many of us the remarks feel like acid, constantly wearing us down as we are just trying to get from one place to another.

I’ve had to deal numerous sexually charged incidents of violence over the years.  I would list them all here but I’d rather not.  I don’t really want to go there again.  A few of them were so bad though, that I was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  PTSD is normally associated with men coming back from war, but anyone who has lived through traumatic experiences can develop the disorder.  When I was 19 years old I got jumped by a guy after coming out of a bar.  I was thrown up against a wall and the man was trying to rip open my clothing.  I was too terrified to do anything.  Luckily someone else noticed what was going on and the man stopped.  But that incident left scars.  Now when someone grabs me on the street I explode.  I tend to start screaming, my blood pressure rises, my heart races, and I go into full flight or fight mode.  I struggle to control myself when this happens, but it’s as if a demon has been unleashed.  Luckily for me this usually causes men to immediately drop their hands, and back away.

To really prove this is a universal problem Hollaback should remake their video and show it happens to all women, and that men of all shades of skin engage in this behavior. I could see my friend’s point that it looked biased.  What troubled me instead were the comments that so many men were making regarding street harassment.

  • It doesn’t exist – women don’t really go through this
  • We should be happy to get such attention
  • If we don’t respond we are stuck up snobs
  • Women have nothing to fear from men
  • Men don’t mean any harm by these comments
  • Men can’t help themselves when they see women walk by
  • Women should just put up with this because it’s not harmful
  • If the guys were attractive we wouldn’t mind the comments
  • This is just how men act and we should accept it

Several women tried in vain to point out that this really is unwanted attention.  Why would women feel less safe when random strangers invade their personal space and try to force them to connect with them verbally or otherwise?  Why are we so guarded when walking down the street?  Why can a man just walk down the street without experiencing this?  Sure some women might make a comment towards a man, but women overall are far less of a threat to anyone’s physical safety.  About 90% of all murders are  committed by men, and 95% of all sexual predators are men.  Now this isn’t to say all men are violent, of course they aren’t.  Most victims of violence are men, and most victims also tend to know their attacker and be the same race as their attacker.  But the chances of a woman committing the same acts of violence is extremely rare.  Violent criminals tend to re-offend, so it literally is a minority of men who are the problem.  Because of this, women are far less likely to assume that every man who she encounters is going to be harmless.  Every day we have to judge if  “Hey Beautiful” just an innocuous statement or if it is the start to a physical assault?  Most of us have found that if we engage with men on the street, some will take that as an invitation for more contact.  In my own experience I’ve found even eye contact is an invitation to a few deranged individuals.  I’ve just been grabbed too many times to assume it won’t happen again.  It’s also sobering to note that according to a recent government survey 1 in 5 American women reported to be a victim of rape, or an attempted rape.  About 80% of those women reported that it happened before the age of 25.  So any cat caller has about a 20% chance that he’s chatting up someone who might very well been a victim of a previous sexual assault.

Instead of logically trying to explain this to the men who don’t understand, I’ll simply say this.  If you don’t believe me, and you don’t want to read my stories then I implore you  to sit down with your close female friends, your sister, your girlfriend, your mother, your daughter, your niece or your aunt.  Ask them if they’ve ever been sexually intimidated by a man.  Ask them if they’ve experienced sexual violence.  Ask them if they had a man follow them down the street, block their path, or grab their arm when they were minding their own business.  I think you’d be surprised what you would find.

And if that still doesn’t get you to change your point of view then think of a young girl in your family.  Think how you would feel if your 8-year-old niece had to put up with the same comments.  I’ve seen girls who are clearly underage get lewd and creepy remarks from men in their 40’s and 50’s.  Think about what that does to their self-esteem to have a man older than her father treat her that way.  If you wouldn’t want your mother to put up with this, or your sister, your niece, your granddaughter, your daughter, your girlfriend or wife, then why is it OK to do it to random woman?

Among my circle of friends it’s usually harder to find the woman who hasn’t had some type of scary incident in her past.   I know one friend who was attacked with a hammer just last year.  She fought off her attacker but had to have staples put in her scalp to repair what he had done to her.  I know of another who admitted to being nearly raped by a man who held a gun to her head, and another still who was driven to a remote location and attacked by a cab driver. Most women have stories like these, the incidents are not rare, and it’s exactly why we are on guard when we are walking down the street by ourselves.

Sadly the woman in the video got rape threats in youtube comments.  Men trying to defend this as simple harmless behavior in the same breath threatened to sexually assault the woman.  It’s as if they are proving our point.  If it really was a compliment, “Hey Beautiful” shouldn’t be followed by “Bitch.”

So start a dialog.  Start it right now.  Talk to your trusted female friends and family members and see what they tell you. Ask your daughter if she’s ever had a man treat her like this.  We aren’t going to get past this with a simple “boys will be boys” attitude.  I’m willing to concede that a lot of men don’t realize that this is upsetting to some women.  Many honestly do think it’s complimentary or a nice thing to do.  Women we just want to live our lives like anyone else, and sometimes that means silently walking down the street without interruption.

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