Exit wounds: On condemning Charlie Hebdo after the attacks

Almost the entirety of Charlie Hebdo’s output is dedicated to punching upwards, and they devote far more space to appropriately monstrous caricatures of the Le Pen family and each member of the French establishment than they do for Islamists. Whether their satire is tasteful or not bears no relevance on whether we should qualify our support for Charlie Hebdo in the aftermath of the murders. The attackers have stated that they did not attack the paper because of racist cartoons about a black slave on a leash or Boko Haram’s sex slaves demanding benefits, but specifically because of the paper’s willingness to mock Islamists.

Islamists are not a powerless or victimised minority. That they are repressed and jokes are told about them in both the West and the Muslim world is not prejudice but rejection. The paper was chosen because of both this rejection and as it was considered a soft target of liberalism, as the Jewish schools in Toulouse, the Belgian Holocaust Museum, and the youth wing of the Norwegian Labour Party all were…

For a political position which claims to place such a strong emphasis on empathy, it has been sorely lacking on the far-Left in recent days. That all of the journalists were murdered over a difference of opinion is apparently irrelevant; instead, I have seen a far greater effort on the demonstration on far-Left credentials through the condemnation of Charlie Hebdo and freedom of speech than on solidarity with democrats and anti-Islamists. More importantly, in criticising the cartoons in response to an outpouring of sympathy for Charlie Hebdo, it is implied that their deaths are less important than if those cartoons had never been drawn.