Murder, motive and belief

Voltaire never actually said, despite the evidence provided by numerous Facebook status updates, that he may not agree with us but will defend to the death our right to say it – but even if he had he wouldn’t mean it.
The truth is: we like to think we support unpopular speech but when someone says something unpopular we try to find ways to suppress it. For example, a mullah tries to defend the indefensible: say, the Peshawar school attack. We will suddenly start believing hate speech does not count as free speech. There are no free speech absolutists and those claiming this mantle are only fooling themselves.
How people feel about Charlie Hebdo has a lot to do with how they feel about religion and the west. For Muslims the magazine was guilty of blasphemy. Whether that blasphemy called for murder is up for debate among such Muslims but the central sin is not. For the European and US right-wing free speech is the convenient garb in which to disguise hatred for Islam; Charlie Hebdo mocked Islam and Muslims ergo Charlie Hebdo is good. Leftists, who may not have a huge issue with blasphemy, do have an issue with a community under attack being further humiliated. They see no defence for Charlie Hebdo.
Everyone has an opinion about Charlie Hebdo but no one other than its 100,000 readers should. It is a satirical magazine, one almost none of us had heard of, published in France, a country few know too much about, and written in French, a language most of us don’t speak. Yet we are now all Charlie Hebdo experts based on a few illustrations. Its defenders call it an equal-opportunity offender and its critics say it reserved its greatest vitriol for Muslims. We just don’t know which interpretation is true but we end up arguing for the one that corresponds with our pre-existing beliefs. We are not Charlie Hebdo because we don’t know what Charlie Hebdo is.
Staying quiet about Charlie Hebdo would be the wisest thing but there are some double standards that need to be pointed out. The march in Paris, meant to demonstrate solidarity with the magazine and its slain staff, ended up being a political summit. In an episode of ‘Yes, Prime Minister’, the prime minister is overjoyed when his predecessor dies because it will give him an opportunity to host a ‘working funeral’ where heads of state can conduct diplomacy without any of the expectations of a summit.
The Paris march was a ‘working march’. Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine were not there because their hearts bleed for French cartoonists. Netanyahu is always happy to be wherever the anti-Islam action is and if he also got an opportunity to plot against Hamas with Abbas then all the better. The Irish prime minister could not have been there to reiterate the right to blasphemy since his country still treats it as a crime.
Representatives from Bahrain, UAE and Saudi Arabia believe in a lot of things – like selling more oil to rich western countries, for instance – but publishing caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is not one of them. It is cheap and easy to be impressed by the sheer number of politicians who were in Paris. Really, it is no more impressive than them showing up for the UN General Assembly session in New York every summer.
The Charlie Hebdo attack and all such incidents in the past are significant for how they act as catalysts in local politics. When the Danish cartoons first appeared there were massive protests organised in Pakistan by the Jamaat-e-Islami and other religious parties. Just how little the organisers of the protests cared about the cartoons was evident when the protests turned into a movement against Pervez Musharraf. The cartoons were a pretext to gather a crowd; changing the tenor of Pakistani politics was the aim.
Similarly, when a movie was famous for about 10 seconds, the religious parties were ready to take to the streets again. This time the PPP, having seen what Musharraf endured, tried to pre-empt the protests by declaring an Ishq-e-Rasool day and leading its own rally. The focal point of the protests ended up being, as is the case with all protests everywhere in the world, the US embassy.
Charlie Hebdo will soon be forgotten and something else will crop up and cause us to have the same arguments about free speech and Islamophobia. One side will say, “I believe in free speech but...” and the other will respond with, “Yes, Muslims are discriminated against but…”
Beware the but in any argument; it undercuts all that came before it. We may try to be reasonable and open-minded but incidents like the Charlie Hebdo murders exist only to show us how right we always were in our beliefs.
The writer is a journalist based in Karachi.
Email: nadir.hassan@gmail.com