James Kirchick writes for Commentary:
Two days after Islamists killed nine staffers of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in January 2015, a writer for the most renowned magazine in the English-speaking world compared the victims to Nazis. On the website of the New Yorker, the Nigerian-American author Teju Cole wrote that while the slaughter was “an appalling offense to human life and dignity,” it was nonetheless necessary to realize that such violence takes “place against the backdrop of France’s ugly colonial history, its sizable Muslim population, and the suppression, in the name of secularism, of some Islamic cultural expressions, such as the hijab.” Invoking a paradigmatic free-speech test case, Cole stated that Charlie Hebdo had a right to publish blasphemous cartoons in the same way that the National Socialist Party of America had had a right to march in Skokie, Illinois, in 1979.
And Cole was just getting started.
Before Westerners start making generalizations about Islam and free expression, he averred, they must first acknowledge their own bloodily censorious history—a history they have yet to transcend. Connecting the “witch burnings, heresy trials, and the untiring work of the Inquisition” of yore to the more recent “censuring of critics of Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Cole ridiculed the West’s pretension of seeing itself as “the paradise of skepticism and rationalism” (even as he left unmentioned which of his opponents George W. Bush had burned at the stake). Preoccupation with Islamist violence and the chilling effect on free speech such violence creates, Cole argued, diverts scrutiny from Western governmental infringements upon liberty that are equally if not more grave. Citing the fate of fugitive National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, Cole asserted that Washington’s “traditional monopoly on extreme violence” and “harsh consequences for those who interrogate this monopoly”—Cole’s euphemistic word salad for Snowden’s stealing top-secret information and sharing it with America’s adversaries—is as much a peril to freedom of speech as weapon-wielding religious fanatics threatening to kill anyone who displeases them.
Cole’s characterization of Charlie Hebdo as a product of the far right—a publication that “in recent years…has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations” and carried out a “bullyingly racist agenda”—betrayed his ignorance. Anyone who actually bothered to acquaint himself with Charlie would have learned from two minutes on Google that its “politics,” such as they are, are best described as anti-politics. Founded and staffed to this day by anarcho-leftist veterans of the 1968 student rebellions, Charlie Hebdo is anti-clerical and anti-establishment to the core. A survey by Le Monde of Charlie Hebdo covers over the preceding decade found that the vast majority mocked French political figures, and of the 38 covers that lampooned religion, 21 targeted Christianity while only seven went after Islam.
