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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
February 2015 77
CHARLIE HEBDO INTERNATIONAL
A
FTER the terrorist attacks that
killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo’s
offices, and four innocent peo-
ple in a kosher supermarket in early
January, it suddenly seemed that every-
one was Charlie: all the world’s leaders
were Charlie, Enda Kenny was Charlie,
Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s
Viktor Orbán and Queen Elizabeth II were
Charlie.
All the celebrities in Hollywood and
George Clooney were Charlie. The French
police who had long been savagely cari-
catured by the satirical newspaper were
applauded at the Je Suis Charlie march,
and the bells of Notre Dame tolled in
homage to France’s most notoriously irre-
ligious newspaper. One organ that was
self-consciously not Charlie was Ireland’s
Phoenix magazine, whose editor, Paddy
Prendeville, actually signed an editorial
headed “Je ne suis pas Charlie”. A min-
imum of humanity as well as a mature
politics dictate that, while few want to be
totally Charlie, it is quite wrong not to be
willing to be seen as Charlie at all.
While clearly many Muslims are
offended by Charlie Hebdo’s brand of vit-
riolic satire, it is important to point out
that the weekly is not racist, anti-Muslim
or anti-Palestinian, but an anti-clerical
newspaper in a country where blasphemy
had been off the statute books since
1789, which presents left-wing political
content in the most outrageous possible
manner.
This fact is borne out not only by
Charlie Hebdo’s commitment to defend-
ing the rights of France’s immigrants,
many of whom are Muslim, but also by
the numerous legal cases that have been
filed against it over the last two dec-
ades. Since it resumed publication in the
19 90s, Charlie Hebdo has been sued 48
times: 12 times by its archenemies in the
far-right Front National, eight times by
Catholic associations and only six times
by Muslim ones.
Questioned about the newspaper’s
insistence on poking fun at religion,
Charlie Hebdo’s new editor Gérard Biard
told NBC: “…every time that we draw a
cartoon of a prophet, every time we draw
a cartoon of God, we defend freedom of
religion. We declare that God must not
be a political or public figure […] Religion
should not be a political argument. If
faith, if religious arguments step into the
political arena, they become totalitarian
arguments. Secularism protects us from
this. Secularism guarantees democracy
and ensures peace”.
While most of the political leaders
who attended the 11 January march in
Paris would find common ground with
Charlie Hebdo’s bid to defend secularism,
the same cannot be said for the extreme
content of the newspaper’s drawings.
Humour does not travel well; and taken
out of the context of the newspaper’s poli-
tics, jokes about Islamist political parties
and Islamic terrorism, blasphemous
jokes but jokes nonetheless, can be per-
ceived as racist slurs. Parallels have been
drawn with the depictions of Irish peas-
antry in centuries old Punch cartoons:
though there are no grounds to suggest
that Charlie was colonialist.
Ironically, in many parts of the world
where there is no clear distinction
between media and government, a pub-
lication that appealed to less than one per
cent of the French readers is now being
seen as the official voice of France: quite
a feat for a newspaper that publishes
cartoons of some of the country’s most
prominent politicians engaging in sex-
ual acts. Worse still, this perception has
led to attacks on French cultural cen-
tres, death threats to French nationals
and even more paradoxically, given the
newspaper’s standpoint on religion, to
attacks on Christian churches.
As it stands, no date has been set for the
next issue of Charlie Hebdo. According to
the newspaper’s communications man-
ager, the editorial staff who are worn out
by mourning and fatigue will need some
time before they can produce another
newspaper. However, editor Gérard
Biard has insisted that publication will
continue.
In the wake of the brutal massacres in
Paris, the 14 January issue of the weekly,
which usually has a print run of 50,000,
sold seven million copies. This is major
change for a newspaper that had no ambi-
tions to enter the mainstream. Added to
the difficulty of scrutiny from this new
and questioning readership, there is the
blaze of attention from the world’s media
and the certain knowledge that whatever
Charlie Hebdo publishes may be appro-
priated to generate sectarian conflict,
which it does not seek to promote.
Now that people are dying in lynchings
in Niger, Charlie’s principled stance for
absolute freedom of speech along with
absolute freedom to present political
argument in any manner it sees fit may
have to be reconsidered. There is no
reason why a cartoon should result in
anything worse than a court case, but
sadly what pertains in France does not
necessarily apply in the rest of the world.
And the world is waiting for the next issue
of Charlie Hebdo. •
Mark McGovern is a journalist and
translator living in Paris
Journalism gets used to the idea that principle
can be dangerous. By Mark McGovern
Pluralism includes acceptance
of other people’s irreverence
Charlie Hebdo
has been sued
48 times: 12
times by its
archenemies
in the far-right
Front National,
eight times
by Catholic
associations
and only six
times by
Muslim ones
“
