Why I Never Have Been — And Never Will Be — “Charlie”

[rug]

April 13, 2016
Chris Hall

Like virtually every person on the planet with some sort of a conscience, I was appalled by the massacre at the offices of the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo last year. How could you not be? It was an act of appalling violence. But the evidence that Charlie Hebdo had a mean-spirited and racist streak piled up so quickly in my social media that I never wanted to declare “Je suis Charlie.” The same conscience that made me sickened at the murders of 12 human beings made it impossible for me to join in solidarity with the magazine they worked for.

I admit, I felt a lot of ambivalence at first. People I respected and usually agreed with were telling me that I was wrong, and I double- and triple-checked myself as I’m wont to do, but the arguments in favor of Charlie Hebdo, even when coming from people I generally respected such as Salman Rushdie, had a strong whiff of bullshit.

In the last year, Charlie Hebdo has been pouring the racist shit on so heavily that you could strangle on it. Nose plugs aren’t enough to stifle the stench; you need a military-grade gas mask to kill the smell. In January of this year, they published a cartoon saying pretty bluntly that Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee whose body washed up on the shores of Turkey, would have grown up to sexually assault European women. (You can find a tweet of the cartoon here.)

There is already an enormous amount of evidence demonstrating Charlie Hebdo‘s racism and xenophobia. But for those who are still hanging on by their bare fingernails, who are still making excuses about how the rest of us don’t understand the context of French politics and culture, Charlie Hebdo‘s recent editorial titled, “How Did We End Up Here?” should be the final blow.

http://the-orbit.net/literateperversions/why-i-never-have-been-and-never-will-be-charlie/

[jonno99]

1. I think Charlie is in competition with the folks over at Westboro Baptist -

to see who can foment the most hatred...

[rug]

2. This is a pretty scathing article.

It didn't even need to reproduce the cartoons.

[MisterP]

3. hey, Dieudonne still has like €150,000 in fines for his speech

if anyone wants to "defend controversy" there's plenty of unPC, unpious, not-conveniently-dead sorts they can toss a dollar at

after all, sauce for the goose is good for the gander

[rug]

4. He has an ironic name.