Mick Hartley

It's ten years on from the Charlie Hebdo killings, and it doesn't make for an inspiring tale of lessons learned. Two Islamists, outraged by the magazine's printing of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, stormed into the Hebdo offices on 7th January 2014 and slaughtered twelve people, including eight members of the editorial staff. It was as clear an attack as you could possibly imagine on the principles of a free society where nothing and no one is exempt from ridicule, yet though the massacre was met initially with horror and condemnation, the back-tracking soon began. And it hasn't stopped since.

Andrew Hussey at UnHerd:

Just a week after the killings, for instance, Le Monde published an editorial, signed by prominent Left-wing intellectuals, condemning Charlie’s “obsession” with Muslims and attacking French immigration policy and police brutality. More recently, journalists in Left-wing papers, with Libération leading the way, have openly expressed scepticism for Charlie Hebdo — even suggesting the magazine was guilty of racism.

No wonder Charlie Hebdo feels betrayed by the very people that should have had its back. It continues to publish, naturally, and is marking the anniversary of the attack with a new book. Entitled Charlie Liberté, le journal de leur vie (“Charlie Freedom: The diary of their life”), it’s dedicated to those who died. Yet though it’s clearly meant as a homage to the victims, Charlie Liberté also contains a decidedly bitter tone. More precisely, Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, the managing director of Charlie Hebdo and himself wounded in the attack, writes that Charlie has been betrayed on all sides over the last decade — but most of all by what he calls the “spineless” Left. This includes media and academia as well as politicians, all of whom spent the last 10 years dodging direct conflict with Islamism.

That, of course, begs the question: why? Why, despite France’s long history of secular struggle, have so many on the Left and centre abandoned their comrades so absolutely? For Riss, the answer is partly to do with physical cowardice, with lawmakers and journalists simply too frightened to face the Islamist menace. To be fair, these fears are sometimes justified: an unnamed senior editor of a leading “progressive” magazine once told me he couldn’t openly support Charlie for fear of his life.

More than that, though, Riss attacks the political cynicism of supposed progressives eager to court the Muslim vote, or anyway avoid specious accusations of racism.

Now that rings a bell.

Freddie Attenborough in The Critic:

In the wake of the attack, millions took to the streets under the banner “Je Suis Charlie”, a declaration of solidarity and a proclamation that freedom of speech is non-negotiable. Yet, as we mark the 10th anniversary of this attack, it is impossible to ignore how fleeting that solidarity has proven to be. Even at the time, there were murmurings that Charlie Hebdo had “gone too far”, as if the act of drawing a cartoon could ever justify cold-blooded murder.

When PEN America decided to award Charlie Hebdo its Free Expression Courage Award, more than 200 well-known writers protested. The dean of a journalism school, writing in USA Today, implied that the magazine’s satires of Muhammad should fall outside the protections of the First Amendment. Even Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, suggested that Charlie Hebdo had incited the murderous violence against it….

This unthinkable atrocity was not merely an attack on a magazine. It was an attack on the principle that no idea, no belief, no religious figure is beyond satire. It was an attempt to impose, through violence, a prohibition on critique. To yield to such demands is to surrender the freedoms that underpin our societies.

As we do so, however, we should not blind ourselves to how much has already been lost. The freedom to criticise, to lampoon, to question sacred tenets has been increasingly curtailed, not just by fear of violent reprisal — the “jihadi’s veto” — but also via a broader societal tendency to avoid controversial subjects altogether. In the void created by fear, de facto blasphemy laws have crept into Western societies. They do not bear that name, but they have the same chilling effect. Writers, artists and thinkers censor themselves, avoiding subjects deemed too risky, too provocative, or too likely to incite a mob. This stifles not just speech but the contestation of ideas essential to progress, representing a capitulation to those who seek to control discourse through intimidation.