How ‘Je Suis Charlie’ exposed the hypocrisy of the elites

Two crimes were committed against the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, 10 years ago today.

Islamist gunmen committed mass murder at the paper’s Paris offices. They shot dead eight cartoonists and journalists, two police officers and two others, in a graphic demonstration of their hatred for freedom of speech and of the press.

Then the great and the good of Western society committed a mass free-speech fraud. They sold us the line that they all supported free speech, making rhetorical and ritualistic gestures of support for the Charlie Hebdo victims. Yet at the same time, many were acting out their contempt for the real freedom of expression that allows such provocative publications to exist in the first place.

The massive ‘Je Suis Charlie’ demonstrations in Paris and many other cities, which followed the massacre and the connected murders at a Jewish supermarket, were uplifting displays of human solidarity that made an impression on us all. They also, however, gave a misleading impression of the state of play with free speech in Europe and America.

Here, it might have appeared, was a clear cultural divide: on one side, a free world united in support of Charlie Hebdo and freedom of expression; on the other, a handful of extremists opposed to liberty and ‘all that we hold dear’. Behind those solidarity banners, however, Western opinion was far less solidly for free speech. Many public figures could hardly wait to stop paying lip service to liberty and start adding the inevitable qualifications, obfuscations and, above all, ‘buts…’.

Those who took a dim view of genuinely free speech in the aftermath of Charlie Hebdo were not confined to Islamist terror cells. It quickly emerged that the threat to freedom came not just from a few barbarians at the gate, but also from within the supposed citadel of civilisation itself.

The moving displays of solidarity were primarily showing sympathy with the murder victims. Support for freedom of speech as embodied by the consistently offensive Charlie Hebdo was a lot less solid. It might have been more appropriate if many of those placards had named individual victims – ‘Je suis Charb / Wolinski / Elsa’ – rather than Charlie the magazine. From the Guardian to Sky News, media outlets in the UK which expressed outrage at the murders still felt obliged to apologise for any offence caused by allowing a glimpse of the post-massacre cover of Charlie Hebdo, with its cartoon image of Muhammad.

Even before the dead had been buried, it turned out that the ‘worldwide’ support for Charlie Hebdo’s right to free speech was far from universal – and that those of a different persuasion were not confined to the hostile parts of the Islamic world.

An international consensus of a different hue quickly emerged, to agree that the Charlie Hebdo massacre showed the need to apply limits to free speech and restrict the right to be offensive. This consensus included some unusual bedfellows, notably His Holiness Pope Francis and the Communist Party of China.

Soon after condemning the murders, the pope almost appeared to suggest that those cartoonists he called ‘provocateurs’ had been asking for it. His Holiness declared that ‘There is a limit’ to free speech, that ‘You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others’, and that it was ‘normal’ for those who do so to ‘expect a punch’.

The state-run Xinhua News Agency, official voice of the Chinese Communist regime, was a couple of days ahead of the pope in stating that ‘the world is diverse and there should be limits on press freedom’. Its editorial made clear that, for China’s authoritarian rulers, ‘unfettered and unprincipled satire, humiliation and free speech are not acceptable’.

To which the natural response might be, ‘Is the pope a Catholic?’ and ‘Do red bears dump on the press?’. Nobody should have been too shocked to hear such views on punishing heretics from the head of the church whose Inquisition condemned Galileo, or from the Chinese state hierarchy that has kept its press on the shortest leash and freedom in a noose.

More surprising was that the joint Vatican-Beijing statement setting ‘limits’ to what the likes of Charlie ought to say seemed to become the accepted party line for many in the supposedly liberal-minded West, who also want to rein in ‘unfettered satire and free speech’. No sooner had they got the niceties of paying respects to the dead out of the way than they embarked on wholesale free-speech fraud.

There were loud accusations of hypocrisy after the appearance of autocratic governments from the Middle East and Africa at the Paris ‘Je Suis Charlie’ demo. As one US professor at George Washington University tweeted, ‘Glad so many world leaders could take time off jailing and torturing journalists and dissidents to march for free expression in France’.

Yet double standards flourished much closer to home. The French authorities led the way, responding to the murderous assault on free speech in their capital by ordering a crackdown – on those whose speech they found offensive. The Justice Ministry sent a letter to all French prosecutors and judges ‘urging more aggressive tactics’ against suspected hate speech and those accused of defending terrorism. A week after the Charlie Hebdo attack, more than 50 people had been arrested for speech crimes. The French authorities thus spelled out their version of standing up for free speech: they would fight to the last for the people’s right to say things that government and judges approved of.

Across the Channel, the free-speech fraudsters turned out in force in the UK. Some overcooked their disdain for Charlie Hebdo: the European editor of the Financial Times sparked a backlash by writing a column which accused the ‘stupid’ satirical rag of ‘editorial foolishness’. In an apparently irony-free move, the Financial Times then felt obliged to ‘update’ (meaning censor) his column for paying too little heed to Charlie Hebdo’s right to freedom of expression.

At least he was trying to be honest about it. If anything, it was more objectionable to witness the display of double standards from UK politicians and liberals who had led campaigns to criminalise ‘offensive’ speech and sanitise the scurrilous, dirt-digging British tabloid press, yet expected us to believe that they had become freedom fighters for the satirical and scandal-mongering French press’s right to offend.

Straight after Charlie Hebdo, then Conservative prime minister David Cameron told parliament that ‘we stand squarely for free speech and democracy’. In later interviews Cameron even said that ‘in a free society there is a right to cause offence’. This was the same UK prime minister whose government presided over a state where people were being arrested and jailed for posting unpleasant jokes and messages online or singing naughty songs at football grounds, and whose justice secretary had just pledged to quadruple prison sentences for offensive internet ‘trolls’ found guilty of speech crimes.

Cameron also insisted after Charlie Hebdo that as a politician ‘my job is not to tell newspapers and magazines what to publish or what not to publish’. That would be the same prime minister who in July 2011 set up, with the support of all party leaders, the Leveson Inquiry not merely to probe the phone-hacking scandal but also to cleanse the entire ‘culture, ethics and practices’ of the offensive UK tabloid press and propose a new system to tame it. On that occasion, Cameron had a very different message for parliament about what he could tell the press to do, asserting that: ‘It is vital that a free press can tell truth to power… it is equally important that those in power can tell truth to the press.’ One can imagine what the increasingly offence-sensitive British authorities would have said to any Charlie-type magazine whose front covers had dared to mock Muhammad in the UK.

A month after parliament had united in support of Charlie, an all-party committee of UK MPs called for persistent online ‘hate speech’ offenders to be issued with ‘internet ASBOs [anti-social behaviour orders]’ that would ban them from Facebook and Twitter, a punishment usually reserved for convicted sex offenders. It is not too hard to imagine the name of Charlie Hebdo being among those nominated for any such state hit-list of ‘haters’.

And then there was Labour’s then deputy leader, Harriet Harman, the party’s self-styled champion of press freedom. In a statement after the Paris murders Harman declared that ‘free speech is a basic human right for every individual and no democracy can function without freedom of the press’, that the ‘right to satirise, to lampoon and to criticise is a freedom which we must celebrate and defend’. She pledged ‘to take all the steps necessary to assure our journalists and media that we will do everything we can to defend that right of free speech’. Strong and admirable words. A few weeks later, however, Harman appeared at a Hacked Off rally in Westminster to warn those same journalists and the media that Labour was ‘absolutely committed’ to implementing Lord Justice Leveson’s proposals for state-backed regulation of the UK press and that, if elected, a Labour government would ‘follow through on Leveson’ with laws to bring a free press to heel.

Much of the cultural elite in the UK wrestled with its liberal conscience in response to Charlie Hebdo, and lost. Novelist Will Self wrote that the murderers were ‘evil’. Yet he could not stop himself also complaining about how ‘our society makes a fetish of “the right to free speech” without ever questioning what sort of responsibilities are implied by this right’, as if there was something perverse about extending ‘free speech’ to cartoonists.

Higher still in the literary stratosphere, the London Review of Books, a self-proclaimed champion of artistic expression, could barely disguise its lack of empathy with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. A ‘deeply disappointed’ reader wrote to ask why the journal had issued ‘No message of solidarity, no support for freedom of expression’ in the aftermath of ‘the execution of the editorial staff of a magazine a few hours’ journey from your own office’. LRB editor Mary-Kay Wilmers published a curt response stating that, ‘I believe in the right not to be killed for something I say, but I don’t believe I have a right to insult whomever I please’.

Perhaps the LRB thinks those whose insults go too far should be punished, but that the sentence was excessive. Wilmers dismissed those ‘who insist that the only acceptable response to the events in Paris is to stand up for “freedom of expression”’. As with Self, those tell-tale inverted commas appeared to offer the same comforting support to ‘freedom of expression’ as a noose might to a hanging man.

Even in the US, land of the free and home of the First Amendment that gives constitutional protection to freedom of speech and of the press, the free-speech fraudsters were quick to distance themselves from Charlie Hebdo. President Barack Obama and secretary of state John Kerry both made bold statements in defence of free speech, Kerry winning plaudits for insisting that ‘no matter what your feelings were about [Charlie Hebdo], the freedom of expression that it represented is not able to be killed by this kind of act of terror’. The Obama administration was then criticised for failing to send any senior representative to the Paris march. However, Laurent Léger, an investigative reporter at Charlie Hebdo and survivor of the attack, thought that was a more honest expression of the White House’s true attitude to free speech. ‘You have to be very happy [Obama] didn’t come to the march in Paris’, said Léger. He called the snub ‘an absolute scandal’.

One illustration of how far the tide had been turning against free speech in the US came when the departing ombudsman of National Public Radio declared ‘I am not Charlie’. In his ‘farewell blog posting’, Edward Schumacher-Matos wrote: ‘I do not know if American courts would find much of what Charlie Hebdo does to be hate speech unprotected by the Constitution but I know – hope? – that most Americans would.’ What Schumacher-Matos seemingly ‘does not know’ is that there is no such thing as ‘hate speech unprotected by the Constitution’; offensive ‘hate speech’ is protected in the US by the First Amendment, as Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons certainly would be. Yet a leading media figure, who has not only worked as a journalist on top American newspapers for decades but has also lectured on the First Amendment as a visiting professor at the prestigious Columbia University School of Journalism, apparently thought otherwise.

Of course, everybody with a shred of humanity condemned the cold-blooded mass murder by Islamist gunmen. Well done. They had far less to say about the right of Charlie Hebdo or any other section of the Western press to publish whatever it believes to be true or just funny, regardless of whether it upsets Muslims or Catholics, Tories, socialists or transgender activists.

The free-speech fraud around the Paris killings did not come out of the blue. It would be pleasant to imagine that the vocal ‘Je Suis Charlie’ reaction reflected the strength of support for freedom of speech and of the press in Europe and America. It would also be wrong. If there really was such solid support for free speech, it would not have taken the cold-blooded murder of cartoonists and journalists to prompt our politicians and public figures to mention it. The loud expressions of support for free speech were so striking because they contrast with the everyday silence on the subject.

In normal circumstances, we in the West now spend far more time discussing how to restrict and outlaw types of speech than how to defend and extend that precious liberty. Almost everybody in public life pays lip service to the principle of free speech. Scratch the surface, however, and in practice most will add the inevitable ‘but…’ to button that lip and put a limit on liberty. The ‘buts’ were out in force on both sides of the Atlantic and across the internet after Charlie Hebdo; to quote American writer Andrew Klavan, it looked like ‘The Attack of the But-Heads’.

This was the culmination of a steady loss of faith in freedom of speech and the ability of people to handle uncomfortable words or images. In recent years, it has become fashionable not only to declare yourself offended by what somebody else says, but also to use the ‘offence card’ to trump free speech and demand that they be prevented from saying it.

Charlie Hebdo itself was in the firing line of the war on offensive speech long before the gunmen burst into its editorial meeting. In 2007, the magazine was dragged into court under France’s proscriptive laws against ‘hate speech’ for publishing cartoons of Muhammad, in a case brought by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of French Islamic Organisations, with the undeclared support of some in high places. ‘This is not a trial against freedom of expression or against secularism’ was the free-speech fraudster’s protest from the mosque’s lawyer, Francis Szpiner – who also happened to be a close ally of France’s then president, Jacques Chirac.

Charlie Hebdo won that particular case, but others embraced the underlying principle of Europe’s hate-speech laws – that words and images which offend can be a suitable case for punishment – and expressed it in more forceful terms. In 2011, the satirical magazine’s offices were firebombed. There were no mass ‘Je Suis Charlie’ protests on that occasion. Indeed, back then some observers were keen to spell out their contempt for Charlie’s right to offend. Time magazine asked whether the firebombed weekly was ‘a victim of Islamists or its own obnoxious Islamophobia?’. For Time’s France correspondent, Charlie Hebdo’s ‘Islamophobic antics… openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists’ that they had received. Presumably, they got what they’d been ‘begging’ for in January 2015.

Perhaps we need to face the hard fact that the Islamic gunmen who attacked the offices of Charlie Hebdo acted not just as the soldiers of an oldish Eastern religion, but also as the armed extremist wing of a thoroughly modern Western creed of You Can’t Say That. The Islamist gunmen took that attitude to a murderous extreme.

As another Islamist gunman did a month after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in February 2015. There was a meeting in a café in Copenhagen, Denmark to discuss the issues of free speech and blasphemy. Inna Shevchenko of the Ukrainian feminist protest group, FEMEN, opened the panel discussion, talking about her relationship with the cartoonist Charb – Charlie Hebdo’s editor – and their shared insistence on their right to freedom of expression (FEMEN are famous for protesting topless).

Shevchenko got to the nub of the argument: ‘I realise that, every time we talk about the activity of those people, there will always be, “Yes, it is freedom of speech, but…” And the turning point is “but”. Why do we still say “but” when we…’ At that precise moment her speech was ended by the sound of sustained gunfire from outside the meeting.

The timing of the Islamist gunman’s attack on the Copenhagen free-speech meeting was so precise it might almost have been scripted. Just as the speaker raised the problem of people within the West saying, ‘Yes it is free speech, but’, to signal the limits of their support, the murderer added his own full stop to the debate from outside by opening up with an M95 assault rifle, leaving Finn Noergaard, a Danish filmmaker, dead. (The gunman later killed another man in an attack on a synagogue in the city.)

The weakening of support for free speech in the West, signalled by the rising chorus of ‘buts’ attached to it, has encouraged those few willing to take more forceful action to put a stop to what they deem offensive.

That Copenhagen meeting on free speech and blasphemy was called on the anniversary of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issuing a fatwa condemning the author Salman Rushdie to death for his novel, The Satanic Verses, first published in 1988. Rushdie’s was one of a few prominent voices raised against the attack of the but-heads after Charlie Hebdo. The author told an audience at the University of Vermont in Burlington that: ‘The moment somebody says, “Yes, I believe in free speech, but” – I stop listening.’ Rushdie ridiculed the free-speech frauds’ familiar cop-outs that: ‘I believe in free speech, but people should behave themselves… I believe in free speech, but we shouldn’t upset anybody… I believe in free speech, but let’s not go too far.’ The ‘buts’ that began to be heard in the UK and US when Rushdie was accused of going too far and upsetting people nearly four decades ago have since become a deafening chorus.

That bitter controversy surrounding Muslim protests against The Satanic Verses over 35 years ago marked a turning point in attitudes towards offensive speech, when many in the West condemned the fatwa yet chided Rushdie for being too offensive to Islam. It was during that row in 1989 that I first wrote about the importance of the right to be offensive. Then in 1994, as the editor of Living Marxism magazine, I published a declaration in defence of that right. It upheld two principles – ‘No censorship – bans are for bigots and Big Brother’, and ‘No taboos – taboos are for the superstitious and the stupid’. And an imperative that has informed my attitude ever since: ‘Question everything – ban nothing.’

In the three decades since, as the You Can’t Say That culture has advanced, the fear of offending Islam has grown in the West. There has been a sustained effort to bury the issue post-Rushdie, to avoid discussing sensitive or difficult questions about what our society stands for and what unites or divides us. The result has been to suppress free speech and censor what is deemed potentially offensive. As the author Kenan Malik puts it in From Fatwa to Jihad, in recent years the liberal elite ‘internalised the fatwa’. There is now a quite lengthy list of plays, books and exhibitions that have been cancelled or cut in Europe and the US in order to avoid controversy or offence (and not just to Muslims) – often in acts of pre-emptive self-censorship without the need for protests beforehand.

Having done their best to bury these issues and stymie debate for decades, our elites seem shocked when the tensions suddenly break through the surface of society and explode into view. They then try to force the genie back into the bottle, cracking down on anything deemed to be ‘extremist’ speech.

But such simple authoritarian solutions won’t work. Trying to defend freedom by banning its enemies, to uphold our belief in free speech by censoring those who disagree, would be both wrong in principle and useless in practice. What we need to do is to fight them on the intellectual and political beaches, not try to bury the issues in the sand. The big problem Western society faces is not how to stop radical Islamists expounding their beliefs; it is how best to make a compelling case for what ‘we’ are supposed to believe in. As ever in times of trouble, the only thing that is likely to work is encouraging more speech rather than ordering there be less of it. Free speech is the potential solution, not the problem.

Despite the initial upsurge of ‘Je Suis Charlie’ sentiments, the Paris massacre did not lead to any major new campaign for free speech. Quite the opposite – it reinforced the fear, reticence and confusion surrounding freedom of expression in the West today. Now more than ever, we need to put the case for unfettered free speech and the right to be offensive. That must involve defending the right of a magazine like Charlie Hebdo to offend who it chooses, without any buts.

In the free-speech fraud that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre, many suddenly started talking about the ‘right to offend’ and the fact that there is ‘no right not to be offended’. Quite so. What many of them appeared to mean, however, is that we must defend the right to offend Islamist extremists.

But the right to be offensive has to be about much more than Islam. It means the right to question, criticise or ridicule any belief or religion – and the freedom of the religious or anybody else to offend secular sensibilities, too. We should be free to question everything that we are not supposed to question in the suffocating cloud of conformism that hangs over our societies today.

France of course is the land of Voltaire, the 18th-century revolutionary writer whose views on tolerance and free speech were famously summarised as: ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it.’ By contrast, we are now living in the age of the reverse-Voltaires, whose slogan is, ‘I know I will detest what you say, and I will defend to the end of free speech my right to stop you saying it’.

It would be a fitting tribute to those killed 10 years ago in Paris if we were to rekindle the spirit of the free-speech fighters of yesteryear for the 21st century. ‘Je Suis Charlie’ is not enough – we need to send out the message loud and clear that ‘Nous Sommes Voltaire’.

This is an edited, updated extract from Trigger Warning: Is the Fear of Being Offensive Killing Free Speech?, published by William Collins.

Mick Hume is editor-in-chief of europeanconservative.com and a spiked columnist.