Let me start here: What happened in France at the offices of Charlie Hebdo was a vicious and disgusting atrocity. The murder of these people in cold blood for their expressions of pen and ink is despicable, tragic, awful and unforgivable. I weep for the friends and families of the victims, and praise the widespread “Je suis Charlie” campaign and subsequent rally in which scores of people expressed their outrage that free expressionism should be met with death. But . . .
There is an inherent hypocrisy to the outcry of some, particularly in the use of the phrase “I am Charlie.” Are you? How so? Are your attitudes toward Islam, the Muslim population and the Middle East and North Africa artistic and non-violent? Have you taken the time to educate yourself on the cycle of violence between the West and the Islamic world and realized that we are full participants (with a much higher body count on our scoreboard) in the circle, not clean-handed victims? If you honestly think that the horrific attack on the victims at Charlie Hebdo had only to do with an offensive cartoon, it is time to change your profile picture back to your own face and do a little reading.
Bill Maher jumped on the tragedy to increase the ratings of his newly found right-wing, racist audience, proclaiming on the Jimmy Kimmel Show that “Hundreds of Millions of Muslims support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this…”, backing up that insanely unfounded claim with “There are studies!” claiming that the majority of Muslims believe that if you insult the prophet, “All bets are off.” The inaccuracy of Mr. Maher’s claims pales in comparison to the overwhelming irresponsibility of what he says. In most of America, Muslim, Islamic and Middle Eastern are synonyms. For a shockingly large number, terrorist is on that list as well. How can a supremely intelligent man who claims to be a liberal put forth an unabashed call to xenophobia, racism and violence with his words on national television without accepting who in the viewing audience will run with those words against his possibly Muslim neighbor? It is outrageous.
Furthermore, the Muslim world, even prior to Mr. Maher’s outrageous claims, scrambled to denounce the attacks. The president of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas attended the rally in France, arm in arm with a line of world leaders (the US was noticeably absent). The Arab League denounced the attack (as only extremist groups rushed to praise it), with additional statements against the violence from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and several other Islamic countries. Mosques across France, even while being attacked with grenades and threatened with violence, expressed their support of free speech and Charlie Hebdo while denouncing the violence. Even Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, a Hezbollah leader, put out a video, while not directly mentioning the attacks in France, claiming that extremists hurt Islam more than cartoonists.
But more important, and infinitely more insidious, than the hysterical claims that all of Islam is to blame for the attack, is the implied innocence behind the wave of social media “Je suis Charlie” images. One popular cartoonist's response, depicting a terrorist with a smoking gun next to a dead artist with the tag “He drew first” is particularly disturbing in the implication that we (the cartoonist, representing the “West”) are innocent and non-violent and our actions against the Arab world amount to nothing more than a few silly satires. In reality, the body count of Arabs and Middle Eastern people at the hands of the “West” and in particular the United States, is overwhelmingly massive. The artists at Charlie Hebdo are innocent victims. The western world is not.
We leveled Iraq, smashing the infrastructure of that country with an incredible display of violence, including dropping an agent-orange reminiscent chemical weapon that is wreaking cancerous havoc across the country today. We have killed more children and destroyed more schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan than all of the Al-Qaeda factions combined. Israel’s recent war on Gaza stacked up the bodies of civilians and children like firewood, prompting the United Nations and Amnesty International to call for war crime investigations and yet the checks to the IDF from the US continue to clear. We are not innocent artists who play in satire but leave the violence to the barbarians. We are a collection of nations that has perpetrated a level of violence against the Arab world on such a mass scale it can only be viewed as all out war. And though those countries in which we have slaughtered the masses are not a single race, we view them as such and therefore must accept our responsibility and execution of mass murder.
It is time to take a step back and look at our attitudes because our foreign policy is supported by and banks on the racism of the average American voter. The concept of unmourn-able bodies – oversimplified, the idea that we de-personify the Arab world to such an extent that we no longer consider their deaths a loss of actual life – is finally extending beyond academia and into the national media, but it is happening way too slowly. We still accept, as a collection of western “modernized” (read: Christian) nations that our lives are worth more than their lives, no contest. At its core, that is disgusting racism. At its horrible current truth, it is a justification that we are innocent victims no matter how incomparable the body count. And so we claim to be Charlie, the non-violent artist expressing a viewpoint, as is our right, and dying for that freedom of expression. We do so without taking a second to acknowledge the enormous pile of corpses on the other side.
How are you Charlie? Do you support the American military operations abroad? Do you use the word combination ‘Muslim terrorist’? Do you laugh and repost the calls to wipe out Islam, and say horrific things like “I know not all Muslims are bad, but {insert ignorant, Islamophobic, racist statement}.” Because if you do – if you have done anything other than what those artists did who educated themselves to the Nth degree on the circular hypocrisy of the world and died for expressing that disparity against all sides – than you are not Charlie.
Fine. You do not need to change your profile picture. The support of those victims is, truly, beautiful and you should keep it in place. You can express your indignation however you like, as is your free and clear Western right. But those artists were heroes, mocking all of us from the prophet to the holy trinity and everything in between, in an effort to change the world. If you claim to be part of a society that falls innocent victim to the unprovoked terror of Islam, you are dishonest. You are blinded. You are irresponsible. You are not Charlie.
There is an inherent hypocrisy to the outcry of some, particularly in the use of the phrase “I am Charlie.” Are you? How so? Are your attitudes toward Islam, the Muslim population and the Middle East and North Africa artistic and non-violent? Have you taken the time to educate yourself on the cycle of violence between the West and the Islamic world and realized that we are full participants (with a much higher body count on our scoreboard) in the circle, not clean-handed victims? If you honestly think that the horrific attack on the victims at Charlie Hebdo had only to do with an offensive cartoon, it is time to change your profile picture back to your own face and do a little reading.
Bill Maher jumped on the tragedy to increase the ratings of his newly found right-wing, racist audience, proclaiming on the Jimmy Kimmel Show that “Hundreds of Millions of Muslims support an attack like this. They applaud an attack like this…”, backing up that insanely unfounded claim with “There are studies!” claiming that the majority of Muslims believe that if you insult the prophet, “All bets are off.” The inaccuracy of Mr. Maher’s claims pales in comparison to the overwhelming irresponsibility of what he says. In most of America, Muslim, Islamic and Middle Eastern are synonyms. For a shockingly large number, terrorist is on that list as well. How can a supremely intelligent man who claims to be a liberal put forth an unabashed call to xenophobia, racism and violence with his words on national television without accepting who in the viewing audience will run with those words against his possibly Muslim neighbor? It is outrageous.
Furthermore, the Muslim world, even prior to Mr. Maher’s outrageous claims, scrambled to denounce the attacks. The president of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas attended the rally in France, arm in arm with a line of world leaders (the US was noticeably absent). The Arab League denounced the attack (as only extremist groups rushed to praise it), with additional statements against the violence from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Qatar and several other Islamic countries. Mosques across France, even while being attacked with grenades and threatened with violence, expressed their support of free speech and Charlie Hebdo while denouncing the violence. Even Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, a Hezbollah leader, put out a video, while not directly mentioning the attacks in France, claiming that extremists hurt Islam more than cartoonists.
But more important, and infinitely more insidious, than the hysterical claims that all of Islam is to blame for the attack, is the implied innocence behind the wave of social media “Je suis Charlie” images. One popular cartoonist's response, depicting a terrorist with a smoking gun next to a dead artist with the tag “He drew first” is particularly disturbing in the implication that we (the cartoonist, representing the “West”) are innocent and non-violent and our actions against the Arab world amount to nothing more than a few silly satires. In reality, the body count of Arabs and Middle Eastern people at the hands of the “West” and in particular the United States, is overwhelmingly massive. The artists at Charlie Hebdo are innocent victims. The western world is not.
We leveled Iraq, smashing the infrastructure of that country with an incredible display of violence, including dropping an agent-orange reminiscent chemical weapon that is wreaking cancerous havoc across the country today. We have killed more children and destroyed more schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan than all of the Al-Qaeda factions combined. Israel’s recent war on Gaza stacked up the bodies of civilians and children like firewood, prompting the United Nations and Amnesty International to call for war crime investigations and yet the checks to the IDF from the US continue to clear. We are not innocent artists who play in satire but leave the violence to the barbarians. We are a collection of nations that has perpetrated a level of violence against the Arab world on such a mass scale it can only be viewed as all out war. And though those countries in which we have slaughtered the masses are not a single race, we view them as such and therefore must accept our responsibility and execution of mass murder.
It is time to take a step back and look at our attitudes because our foreign policy is supported by and banks on the racism of the average American voter. The concept of unmourn-able bodies – oversimplified, the idea that we de-personify the Arab world to such an extent that we no longer consider their deaths a loss of actual life – is finally extending beyond academia and into the national media, but it is happening way too slowly. We still accept, as a collection of western “modernized” (read: Christian) nations that our lives are worth more than their lives, no contest. At its core, that is disgusting racism. At its horrible current truth, it is a justification that we are innocent victims no matter how incomparable the body count. And so we claim to be Charlie, the non-violent artist expressing a viewpoint, as is our right, and dying for that freedom of expression. We do so without taking a second to acknowledge the enormous pile of corpses on the other side.
How are you Charlie? Do you support the American military operations abroad? Do you use the word combination ‘Muslim terrorist’? Do you laugh and repost the calls to wipe out Islam, and say horrific things like “I know not all Muslims are bad, but {insert ignorant, Islamophobic, racist statement}.” Because if you do – if you have done anything other than what those artists did who educated themselves to the Nth degree on the circular hypocrisy of the world and died for expressing that disparity against all sides – than you are not Charlie.
Fine. You do not need to change your profile picture. The support of those victims is, truly, beautiful and you should keep it in place. You can express your indignation however you like, as is your free and clear Western right. But those artists were heroes, mocking all of us from the prophet to the holy trinity and everything in between, in an effort to change the world. If you claim to be part of a society that falls innocent victim to the unprovoked terror of Islam, you are dishonest. You are blinded. You are irresponsible. You are not Charlie.