Under the title “The Abuse of Satire,” The
Atlantic posted the text of
remarks Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau delivered recently at Long
Island University upon receiving an award. In his address, the satirist spoke
about the “red line” that satire must not cross; as an example of such a
transgression he cited Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon assault on the sacred
cows of Islam – an assault that resulted in the murder of the French magazine’s
staff. In faulting them, Trudeau was essentially blaming the victims and absolving
their Islamic butchers.
“I, and most of my colleagues,” he said, “have spent a lot of time
discussing red lines since the tragedy in Paris.” Apparently that discussion
didn’t result in the use of clear, honest language to describe the attack at
the Hebdo offices, which was not an
act-of-God tragedy like a tsunami; it was a massacre for which Islamic
terrorists were solely responsible.
In any case, as background Trudeau mentioned the example of the Muhammad
cartoon controversy that began eight years ago in Denmark, when Muslim
provocateurs took an obscure collection of satirical cartoons that were
unflattering to Islam and used them to inflame outrage throughout the Muslim
world, resulting in worldwide riots and the deaths of dozens. Trudeau saw those
cartoons as intentionally and needlessly provocative. He criticized the “free
speech absolutists,” who defended the cartoonists, for rejecting judgment and
common sense, and the cartoons themselves for serving no positive social end.
Similarly, Trudeau claimed, Hebdo “succeeded in provoking many Muslims throughout
France to make common cause with its most violent outliers. This is a bitter
harvest.” This is a common argument from the left – that criticism or ridicule of
Islam drives the “moderates” into the arms of the fundamentalists. The left
never bothers to ask itself why the “moderates” themselves don’t rise up en masse to defy the “tiny minority” of
fundamentalists who have supposedly hijacked their religion, or why “moderates”
would, under any circumstances, ally themselves with medieval butchers whose
goal is the elimination of western civilization.
As a Christian, it would never occur to me to respond to attacks on
Christianity (which are legion) by enlisting in the Lord’s Resistance Army or joining
the Westboro Baptist Church (both of which, in any case, are satanic
perversions of Christianity that no church authority sanctions – unlike the
case with Islamic radicals).
Trudeau noted that satire is supposed to afflict the comfortable, to
“punch upward” against authority. It’s “the little guy against the powerful.”
But “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it's just mean”:
By attacking a powerless, disenfranchised
minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charlie
wandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if
it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were
published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests
across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died.
This is shamefully misleading. The staff of Charlie Hebdo did not die violent deaths because they ridiculed the
helpless “non-privileged”; they died because, unlike all but a few cartoonists
and satirists, they refused to be cowed by fanatical savages that wield an ever-increasing
degree of power in the civilized world.
Muslims are a minority in the West but they are not non-privileged, powerless,
or disenfranchised. They are accorded the same rights and opportunities as
everyone else; they are actively supported and protected by the guardians of PC
multiculturalism in government, academia, and the media; and their increasing demands
for special consideration are almost always granted. To whatever extent they
are not integrated into western culture, it is because the fundamentalists
among them actively reject assimilation and seek instead to establish a
parallel culture.
“It’s not easy figuring out where the red line is for satire anymore,”
declared Trudeau. “But it’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone,
anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.” But in Hebdo’s case the purpose was not so much
to make people laugh as to stand up for free speech in defiance of a rising
tide of violent Islamic hatred and intolerance. The fact that the satirical
jabs drew gunfire in response was a good, if terrible, indication that the
satirists were directly over the target.
But “what free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge,” Trudeau
continued, “is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean
that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged… At some
point free expression absolutism becomes… its own kind of fanaticism.”
How predictable that a leftist considers the defense of free speech
fanatical, but he will not apply that label to the butchers of Paris. And he
has set up a straw man here: the defenders of free speech never said that
offense must be given, or that the
target of offense has no right to be offended. They assert only that no one has
the right to shut down free speech by claiming
offense, much less to go on a killing rampage in revenge for it.
“As Jon Stewart said in the aftermath of the killings, comedy in a free
society shouldn’t take courage,” Trudeau says. But today it does, because we
are under assault from barbaric ideologues who don’t find anything funny but
the screams of dying Christians, and whose response to ridicule and criticism
is murder. The proper response of the citizens of a free society is to stand
with the satirist, not stand over his grave wagging a finger and blaming him
for his own murder. That is the way of cowards and appeasers.
The real “bitter harvest,” as Trudeau puts it, is a Western culture
weakened from within by irresponsible Islamic immigration and by cultural
jihad, and victimized by jihadist violence. Yes, the Charlie Hebdo murders were a bitter harvest, but they stemmed not
from the magazine’s satire but from the seeds of multiculturalist tolerance
planted by progressives like Trudeau.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Mag, 4/23/15)
