satire or hate speech?

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01/12/2015 21:04

Subject: Re:satire or hate speech?

quote

Anonymous

Another explanation by a French person in Facebook :
What is Charlie? A note for my non-french friends
There seems to be a lot of confusion about what Charlie Hebdo is, or is not. I have even read that some of their drawings were “racists”. That is upsetting since Charlie is rooted in a deep anti-racist tradition.
The lack of understanding of foreign newspapers is not surprising. I remember my first contact with Weekly World News’ Bat Boy as I went shopping in a supermarket near Boston when I was a student. That was a little hard to understand for a Frenchman.
So let me explain Charlie Hebdo.
First, the point of Charlie is to publish outrageous cartoons. It comes from a long tradition of political satire, mocking political leaders and religious zealots. By and large, the main targets of Charlie have been the government and the Catholic Church. In fact, Charlie was created after a previous newspaper, Hara-Kiri, was shut down by the interior ministry in 1970.
That tradition goes back a long way. In the 18th century, satirical papers made fun of the King and the Queen. Louis XVI was often portrayed as a pig, and Marie-Antoinette as a snake or a hyena. The Golden Age of satirical papers was the 19th century. There were many in the U.S. and the U.K. as well. Some of the cartoons are still well-known today. In France, however, unlike in some other countries, there was a strong anti-clerical tradition and many cartoons made fun of the Catholic Church. A famous weekly paper, and probably the inspiration of Charlie Hebdo and countless others, was L'Assiette au beurre, published in the early 20th century. L’Assiette made fun of the police, the army, but also promoted anti-colonial ideas, all with provocative cartoons.
The important point to understand here is that the anti-clerical slant of Charlie Hebdo really comes from a tradition of making fun of the Catholic Church. It is only in the past 10 years that it has shifted its focus against Islamic fundamentalism.
Being anti-clerical is really not being racist. These guys made their most provocative cartoons against Le Pen precisely because they viewed the “Front National” as a racist party. Mustapha Ourad, from Kabylie, in the north of Alegeria, was among those killed at Charlie Hebdo. He was in charge of proof reading and correcting grammatical mistakes. Charb, the Editor of Charlie who was the main target of the killers on Wednesday, was on the same death list as Salman Rushdie. His partner, Jeannette Bougrab is of Algerian descent. She is also a center-right political figure and strongly secular, a little bit like Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
This is what Charlie Hebdo was, and this is why we were shocked and deeply saddened by the cowardly murders that took place in Paris.
This is not to say, of course, that I was an unconditional fan of Charlie Hebdo. As David Brooks wrote “Most of us don’t actually engage in the sort of deliberately offensive humor that that newspaper specializes in.” He is right. Charlie Hebdo, like many papers of that kind, was childish and, to me, a bit repetitive. So many people who grew up with the cartoons of Cabu, also outgrew them at some point. Or so we thought. I was not a big fan on the Muhammad cartoons either. I thought they were mostly not helpful and not funny, although I liked the cover “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons”.
But the point here is precisely that it is pointless to expect papers like Charlie to be always helpful. They are not meant to be. They are not Le Monde. They are grotesque, random, puerile, and, sometimes, outrageously funny