Top-Down Political Cowardice Helped Make Charlie Hebdo a Lonely Target

From Jimmy Carter to Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to John Kerry, politicians have led the abandonment of free speech.

There is a plausible theory of the case for the dramatic rise in illiberal, speech-stultifying wokeness in America beginning a dozen or so years ago: that it's largely a bottom-up, millennial affair.

"In late 2013," Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), explained in Reason's January 2022 issue, "there was an explosion in censorship that was student-led….The generation hitting campuses in 2013 had been educated by the graduates of…activist education schools. In some cases they were literally the children of the students who had pushed for (or at least were OK with) speech codes in the '80s and '90s."

Tuesday's 10-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre—when a dozen staffers of the satirical antiauthoritarian weekly, including some of France's most beloved cartoonists, were gunned down by Islamists claiming offense at the depiction and mockery of their religion's prophet—is a timely reminder that the West's free speech knees got wobbly long before the millennials hit middle school. And it was political leaders, not stinky college kids, who led the retreat.

The late Jimmy Carter was a noteworthy case in point. On March 4, 1989, less than three weeks after the Ayatollah Khomeini placed a million-dollar bounty on the head of author Salman Rushdie for the supposed blasphemy of critically depicting Muhammad in the novel The Satanic Verses, Carter, less than a decade out of the White House, authored a remarkably awful New York Times op-ed under the headline "Rushdie's Book Is an Insult."

"While Rushdie's First Amendment freedoms are important," Carter to-be-sure'd, "we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah's irresponsibility. This is the kind of intercultural wound that is difficult to heal."

Thus was introduced an almost impressive number of moral and rhetorical sleights of hand that have since the fatwa bedeviled liberalism's discourse in the face of direct murderous threats: the unconvincing throat-clear, the literary/social criticism prompted not by intellectual curiosity but by physical violence, the touristic and condescending assumption of blanket offense, the unidirectional sacralization of "beliefs," the euphemistic downplaying of the heckler's veto ("irresponsibility"?), followed quickly by the metaphorical conflation of dominant-culture expression with marginalized-culture bodily injury.

You can read every single one of these tricks in the hideous 2015 petition signed by 145 members of PEN America protesting the literary/free speech organization's bestowment of its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the surviving staffers of Charlie Hebdo.

"We do not believe in censoring expression," the undersigned throat-cleared, before the big But:

However, there is a critical difference between staunchly supporting expression that violates the acceptable, and enthusiastically rewarding such expression.

In the aftermath of the attacks, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons were characterized as satire and "equal opportunity offense," and the magazine seems to be entirely sincere in its anarchic expressions of disdain toward organized religion. But in an unequal society, equal opportunity offense does not have an equal effect.

Power and prestige are elements that must be recognized in considering almost any form of discourse, including satire. The inequities between the person holding the pen and the subject fixed on paper by that pen cannot, and must not, be ignored.

To the section of the French population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized, a population that is shaped by the legacy of France's various colonial enterprises, and that contains a large percentage of devout Muslims, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.

Carteresque reaction to the fatwa was a needle-scratch across the vinyl of liberalism, announcing a new, bad era for the culture of free speech.

"In the end the Rushdie affair showed us graphically two things, one that we already knew and one that we did not know at all," wrote Jonathan Rauch in a 1993 Reason cover story, which was an excerpt from his classic book Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought. "What we already knew was that fundamentalism—and not just religious fundamentalism but any fundamentalist system for settling differences of opinion—is the enemy of free thought. More frightening was what we had not known: Western intellectuals did not have a clear answer to the challenge that Khomeini set before them."

What a post-presidency Carter had in common with the anti-intellectuals of PEN was a self-righteous combination of intersectionality-ranked empathy (privileging and ennobling complaints based on the downtroddenness of the complainants), and official powerlessness. Teju Cole may have some cache on the Upper West Side, but he's not exactly out there making foreign policy.

Those who do hold the awesome responsibility of harnessing U.S. power have over the past 35 years viewed Islamicist-provoking expression as something between annoyance and threat. President George H.W. Bush, as Rauch pointed out, greeted the fatwa with "a long week of silence" until finally saying, "unimpressively, that the death threat was 'deeply offensive.'" The administration of Bush's son reacted to the murderous 2006 rampages over Danish newspapers' publication of Muhammad cartoons by stating that, "Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images." Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) spoke for D.C. interventionists everywhere in 2011 when saying, about the Quran-burning Florida pastor Terry Jones, "I wish we could find a way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war."

That's the Republican way of barely stomaching allegedly blasphemous American free speech. The Democratic variant, which until now has been far more potent, combines that imperial irritation with an additional nod toward Carter/PEN intersectionality. The result has been some gruesomely illiberal speech-scapegoating—including of Charlie Hebdo.

In 2012—before the massacre, but after the 2011 firebombing in response to a Muhammad cover—then–White House press secretary Jay Carney reacted to news of more Charlie Hebdo caricaturing by saying, "Obviously, we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this. We know that these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory."

In October 2015, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified to Congress that Charlie Hebdo's cartoons "sparked" the murderous violence against it, an inapt metaphor (the word you are looking for is kindling) whose moral rot can perhaps be best detected by substituting assassination for rape, cartoon content for skirt length.

One month later, after the Islamicist massacre of 129 concertgoers at the Bataclan in Paris, then–Secretary of State John Kerry asserted: "There's something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, 'OK, they're really angry because of this and that.' This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate."

The most insistent Democratic blame on content creators for far-flung violence came with the September 11, 2012, killing of four U.S. servicemen in Benghazi, Libya, which the administration serially claimed was "sparked" by a straight-to-YouTube video called Innocence of Muslims shot by some rando in Cerritos, California.

"The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others," Clinton said while U.S. diplomatic buildings were still on fire. On September 13, she added, "Let me state very clearly—and I hope it is obvious—that the United States government had absolutely nothing to do with this video. We absolutely reject its content and message….To us, to me personally, this video is disgusting and reprehensible. It appears to have a deeply cynical purpose: to denigrate a great religion and to provoke rage."

Then, on September 25, 2012, President Barack Obama made a stunning speech at the United Nations General Assembly telling the violent mobs that their sense of insult was not just understandable, but correct:

In the last two weeks…a crude and disgusting video sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. I have made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video, and I believe its message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity. It is an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well—for as the city outside these walls makes clear, we are a country that has welcomed people of every race and religion. We are home to Muslims who worship across our country. We not only respect the freedom of religion—we have laws that protect individuals from being harmed because of how they look or what they believe. We understand why people take offense to this video because millions of our citizens are among them….

The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. Yet to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied. Let us condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims.

It is moderately heartening to see France giving Charlie Hebdo the somber commemoration it deserves. The post-election culture of speech in America feels somewhat looser, even if the preliminary indications from the incoming administration are worrying.

But if the project of free inquiry is to stem its long backslide, it cannot depend on the employees, millennial or otherwise, of cultural and intellectual institutions, likely as they are even on this day to thumb-suck over the "thorny debates around the limits of satire and religious tolerance." And the culture of free speech sure as hell is not going to be strengthened by any goddamned politician.