Yeah, it seems many many people have totally mischaracterized Charlie Hebdo. Congratulations western outage brigade.
Whoooo /celebrates
Yeah, it seems accusations of crude racism are overblown.
On the other hand, the common "it's French tradition," "they offend everyone," and "they're far-left" defenses miss a few (a lot of) points too. I don't agree with
everything in this article arguing that CH isn't racist, but I thought it made an interesting point, even in its defense of Charlie Hebdo as not-racist.
Charlie, like many organizations, is a jumble of good and bad politics. In the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers, like Christopher Hitchens, the editor at the time, Philippe Val, took a “clash of civilizations” turn that infused the paper. If the mockery of imams was just in keeping with the anti-clerical tradition, and obscene cartoons also targeted the Catholic hierarchy, there now seemed to be an undue emphasis on Islam. [..] As a result of Philippe Val’s post-9/11 Hitchensian tubthumping, as we in English might describe his stance, a number of journalists felt they could not in conscience continue to work for the newspaper and quit,
publicly criticizing the paper. Many people who claim to “criticize everything” actually don’t criticize everything equally, and in fact do single out certain racialized minority groups for unique opprobrium and so genuinely are prejudiced in some way. Many of the current wave of New Atheists such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher are examples of this: they claim to be criticizing all religions, but in fact reserve special criticism for Islam.
Whether or not it was racist, it was certainly marginalizing. And it was that while using racist imagery. I'm sympathetic to the idea that they were, by and large, critiquing crude racism. But I also think it's telling that whenever I've seen French Muslims speak about CH it was in terms of it being a racist, discriminatory journal.
Nah. When one black duder got shot in Ferguson, the mass media across the globe have covered it as well.
What they mostly covered was the resulting outrage in the USA -- a decidedly "western" country.
Also the concept that the international media doesn't by-and-large ignore loss of life in Africa because a black dude's death in the USA was covered seems like an extraordinarily messed-up view of black people.
