The Left's Confusion About Racism... And Other Things

America’s Literary Elite Takes a Bold Stand Against Dead Journalists

"It was an odd sight; gauche caviar left-wing writers aligning themselves against slain soixante-huitard left-wing cartoonists, all while expressing sympathy with “devout” religious conservatives “humiliated” and “suffering” because of silly drawings from a low-circulation satirical newspaper.

Some PEN members pulled out of the event. At least one publicly threatened to quit. Others said that while they would attend the gala, the still-mourning Thoret would be treated like Elia Kazan at the Academy Awards, with the objectors remaining seated, grim-faced, hands folded in their laps.

Charlie Hebdo—scourge of the post-fascist political party Front National, enemy of Papists, cheerful anti-racist activists, fellow travelers of the French Communist Party, staunch agitators for Palestine—has been accused of racism and employing crude and offensive satire to “punch down” at an aggrieved minority.

So while we can all agree that the right to free speech is indivisible, is Charlie a racist? Click around a bit—no French skills required—and you’ll find out that Charlie is Stormfront with colorful cartoons, a modern Der Stürmer-like tabloid, but one supposedly marinated in the politics of the old-guard left. A day after the attack, Slate’s Jordan Weissmann did a bit of Googling and discovered that those comparing the dead to “white power” activists had something of a point. Two days after the murders, under the crass headline “Unmournable Bodies,” The New Yorker’s Teju Cole provided a confused exegesis on French satire, a subject he has previously avoided discussing. Charlie Hebdo, he wrote, was possessed of a “bullyingly racist agenda” and traded in “violently racist” images.

Elsewhere, the #JeSuisCharlie brigades were admonished for affiliating with an anti-Arab magazine whose “staff was white,” a point not contested by editor Moustapha Ourrad because he had annoyingly just been murdered by religious psychopaths. Nor did Zineb El Rhazoui protest, likely because she was too busy mourning her dead friends and cobbling together the newspaper’s first post-bloodbath issue. Francine Prose, one of the first refuseniks, said PEN’s choice “very conveniently feeds into a larger political narrative of white Europeans being killed by Muslim extremists, which is not the case,” a point with which the families of slain Hebdo staffers might take issue.

Even those vigorously defending the PEN decision assimilated the racism narrative. Rob Spillman, head of PEN’s membership committee, defended the Charlie Hebdo decision while, just to be safe, dismissing the paper as “gleefully racist.”

There is no need to relitigate the main points in Charlie Hebdo’s defense. The context of those cartoons stupidly flagged as bigoted has been explained by a number of baffled French observers. And ask yourself: Should you trust the judgments of newly minted French satire experts, most of whom don’t speak French and have never held a copy of the newspaper? Or should you trust Dominique Sopo, the Togolese-French president of SOS-Racisme, France’s most celebrated anti-racism organization, who made the obvious point that Charlie Hebdo was the “most anti-racist newspaper” in the country? Those accusing his murdered friends of supporting the very things they so passionately opposed, Sopo said, were either motivated by “stupidity or intellectual dishonesty...Every week in Charlie Hebdo—every week—half of it was against racism, against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim hatred.”

Indeed, the assumption, repeated ad nauseam since January, that the newspaper was “obsessed” with Islam was effectively rubbished by two French academics writing in Le Monde, who pointed out that in the last decade only seven of 523 covers Hebdo covers dealt with Islam. Twenty-one attacked Christianity. Having extensively reviewed the paper’s political content, they delivered a straightforward verdict: Charlie Hebdo was “undeniably an anti-racist” publication. And barely mentioned by either critics or supporters of the PEN decision was the small detail that when the shooting began, the Charlie Hebdo staff members were discussing their participation in an upcoming anti-racism conference."

The Left seem to equate Islam with a specific race, which is a racist concept that is easily dispelled. Palestinians, Iranians, Turks, Malaysians are not all Arabs, I'm sure it would surprise the Leftist "intellectuals" to know. What is actually being defended by the Left is a totalitarian political-religious polyglot of sects with one thing in common: the hideous example of the "perfect life of Muhammad", a man for whom no action was forbidden.

That is what the Left has in common with Islam. For the Left, they alone dictate morality. And that is subject to change depending on the situation and what result the Left needs at the moment. Under those fickle non-rules, nothing is forbidden to the Left, and every action is available. The only constant Leftist moral principle is the necessary hatred for the Other, the dissenters, who are defined as Evil for their crime of dissent, condemned and to be shunned at a minimum, eliminated as possible. Hebdo was a dissenter from all dogma of every variety. The elimination of Hebdo was moral, and that it was done by the perpetual Victimhood Class made the murders moral, as natural Victimhood reactions to their persecution. Hebdo was the Other. So the killers were the victims, not Hebdo... by Leftist definition and moral diktat.

So for moral consistency, the Leftist moral elitists must object to any praise for their common enemy: those who disagree with them and their allies. Note that this disagreement is about Freedom vs. dictated "morality". The Left is NOT for freedom.

UPDATE:

Charlie Hebdo Receives Free Speech Award, Standing Ovation at PEN Gala