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Scholar Tariq Ramadan, Harper's Rick MacArthur on Charlie Hebdo Attack & How the West Treats Muslims
France is in a state of mourning after the deadly attack on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo. A massive manhunt is underway for the suspected gunmen, two French-born brothers of Algerian descent. Charlie Hebdo had come under threat and was firebombed in 2011 after publishing controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. We begin our coverage of the Paris attack with a discussion between two guests: Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and one of the most prominent Muslim intellectuals in Europe; and John R. MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, which in 2006 became one of the first U.S. publications to reprint the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked international protests.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: France has declared a day of mourning as a massive manhunt continues for two brothers suspected of killing 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had published controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. On Wednesday night, thousands of people took part in vigils to condemn the attack on Charlie Hebdo. Many held signs reading "Je Suis Charlie," or "I am Charlie." The attack killed several prominent cartoonists, including the magazine’s editor Stéphane Charbonnier, who was better known as Charb. He was placed on al-Qaeda’s most wanted list in 2013. The paper had come under threat before and was firebombed in 2011.
In a televised address to the nation, French President François Hollande said the "message of freedom" of those killed in the Charlie Hebdo shootings would live on.
PRESIDENT FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE: [translated] This shooting of extreme violence killed 12 people and injured several more. Greatly talented cartoonists, courageous journalists are dead. They left their mark on generations and generations of French people through their influence, through their insolence and through their rare independence. I want to tell them that we will continue to defend this message, this message of freedom, in their name. This cowardly attack also killed two police officers, the same who were responsible for protecting Charlie Hebdo and the editorial staff of this newspaper, who were threatened for years and who defended freedom of expression. These men and women died for the idea they had of France. That is to say, freedom. Today they are our heroes, and that is why I have decreed that tomorrow will be a day of national mourning. At 12:00, there will be a moment of contemplation across public services, and I invite all the population to take part in it. The flags will be half-mast for three days.
AMY GOODMAN: French authorities identified the gunmen as Chérif and Said Kouachi. Their whereabouts are unknown. An 18-year-old student named Hamyd Mourad turned himself in on Wednesday at a police station in northern France after he was publicly named as the third suspect. According to French TV reports, he told police he’s innocent.
The two brothers were known to French intelligence services. In 2008, Chérif Kouachi was sentenced to three years in prison for his involvement in a network of sending volunteer fighters to Iraq to fight alongside al-Qaeda. At the time, Kouachi told the court he had been motivated to travel to Iraq by images of atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib prison. There are reports the two brothers, who were born in Paris, returned from fighting in Syria last summer.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Tension in Paris heightened this morning when a policewoman was shot dead, but it’s unclear if the shooting was linked to yesterday’s attack. French officials said several mosques have also been attacked over the past day.
Earlier today, the remaining staff at Charlie Hebdo announced it will continue publishing on schedule. In a statement, they said, quote, "We have all decided, the journalists who survived and their ex-colleagues, that we are going to have a meeting tomorrow to publish the next Charlie Hebdo, because there is no way, even if they killed 10 of us, that the newspaper won’t be out next week."
AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the rest of the hour on the Charlie Hebdo attack. Later in the show we’ll be joined by the legendary cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, and the Lebanese-French academic Gilbert Achcar. We begin with the leading European Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, author of a number of influential books on Islam and the West, including Western Muslims and the Future of Islam and In the Footsteps of the Prophet: Lessons from the Life of Muhammad. Ramadan was named by Time magazine as one of the most important innovators of the 21st century. He’s joining us from Doha, Qatar. And here in New York is John "Rick" MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine. In 2006, the magazine became one of the first U.S. publications to reprint the controversial Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that sparked international protests.
We begin with Tariq Ramadan. Can you respond to what has taken place, the attack on the magazine and what has ensued over these last hours?
TARIQ RAMADAN: Look, thank you, first, for giving me the time to respond to what we are listening to these days. And I think, as I repeated, we have to condemn what is happening, and nothing can justify what happened in the killing of the cartoonists and now the police officer in France. What is important for us is to make it clear that we stand by our principles. And while I was debating, you know, the journalists in France about the cartoons and the way they were coming to or nurturing controversies about, you know, insulting the prophet, insulting Islam, I made it clear from the beginning this is your freedom to do so, I don’t think it’s good, I don’t think it’s an intelligent and decent way to deal with freedom of expression, but you need to be protected as to your right to do it. And I said to the Muslims, right away, in the States as well as everywhere, even in the Muslim-majority countries, that we need to get it right, that we are not going to convince our fellow human beings or fellow citizens that we are a religion of dignity and freedom and responsibility if we start by censorship. That’s not the way it has to be, neither in the West nor in Muslim-majority countries.
Now the point is that we stick to our principles, and there is a second principle that I want to make clear, make it clear about here. It’s really, for all of us, while we are shocked about what is happening in the West in the killing of cartoonists or innocent people, we should stand also by the same principles when it comes to things that are happening around the world in Muslim-majority countries, because the most important number of victims of violent extremism are Muslims in Muslim-majority countries. And very often we are—you know, you have a government saying we are not counting bodies, where they are dropping, you know, bombs on people, and then we are shocked by other things. So I think that our principles also should be, we stick to our principle, innocence and innocence and the dignity of any life, it’s the same dignity, and there is no difference.
And then the third thing that I would add to this now is that we have to come together in the West as Western citizens and understand that it’s not a Muslim business. We are not talking here about, you know, these are murderers, and it’s only Islam that has—or Muslims who have to talk about this. We have to come together to understand that we have a common enemy, which is, of course, violent extremism, and all the reasons and causes that are upstream nurturing this, when it comes to supporting dictators, not giving the freedom for the people to find their way in the future. We need to be consistent as to our condemnation of the consequences in our analysis of the causes and the principles we stand for.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Rick MacArthur, you’re the publisher of Harper’s, and Harper’s Magazine made the decision—it was one of the first publications to publish excerpts of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and then also published, perhaps more controversially, the cartoons from the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in 2006, and now. So, could you respond to what’s happened now and how you feel this ought to be dealt with, this issue of freedom of speech versus what some construe as hate speech?
RICK MACARTHUR: Well, this is a long-term fight. This goes on for centuries, remember? We did this with Rushdie. We excerpted The Satanic Verses. We took the heat. We led the counterattack, actually, after the fatwa was declared. And we’ve been fighting this for a long time at Harper’s. We’re not alone, but it’s always a beleaguered minority that fights for freedom of expression, unfortunately.
And you hear, in the responses to a lot of well-meaning—by a lot of well-meaning people in the aftermath of this horrible, horrible murder, these qualifications: "Well, we agree with the right to do it, but we disagree with the way it was done." And as Art is going to say, I think, more articulately than I can, later, the provocation itself is part of the discussion. And if you can’t have provocation, you can’t have an authentic discussion. And the reason we published the images was so that Art Spiegelman could critique them in front of an audience, to explicate them and to give people a chance to draw their own conclusions in an intelligent way. If you can’t show the images, you can’t have the critique. You can’t have the discussion. So, I’m a little uneasy with the response of some of my well-meaning liberal-minded colleagues who are condemning the killings, who are at the same time saying, "Well, but I wouldn’t have done it that way." Well, how else could you do it? The New York Times today, in their main story, reproduced two images, two cover images from Charlie Hebdo, neither of which was one of the ones that offended the Muslims.
Now, second point I want to make, which is essential, is that to say—to back off and to say, "We don’t want to offend Muslim sensibilities," is to generalize to the point of caricature of Muslims, as if all Muslims agreed that this was offensive or offensive enough to merit murdering people, when in fact a vast—the vast majority of Muslims disapprove of this, think it’s the wrong thing to do, think it’s the wrong response, as did a lot of Iranians at the time of the Rushdie crisis. I know a lot of Iranians. I’m very close to the Iranian world. And so, I am—I’m troubled by the response. And I feel reinforced when I talk to my friends, like Art, and the people who fight for these kinds of things over the long haul.
AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ramadan, when we spoke yesterday, just as all this news was breaking, you said you knew, is that right, the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo?
TARIQ RAMADAN: Yes. Yes, I knew him, and I debated him in, I think, two TV programs in France and were disagreeing. You know, I think that—
AMY GOODMAN: He was one of those killed.
TARIQ RAMADAN: Yes, and I think—I’m sad about this. And once again, you know, straightaway, I send my sympathy to the victims’ families. And I think that this is something which is unacceptable. Now, once again, I think that the freedom of expression and the way we are dealing with this, it’s a serious matter, and we cannot just, in any way, justify what was done. And my own take, you know, I was one of the first in the West taking the position by saying the fatwa against Salman Rushdie is a political fatwa, is not a religious fatwa, I am not supporting this. And I think that, really, we have to come to this understanding. And by the way, if you look at the Western Muslims today, the great, great, great majority of the Muslims today are quite clear on this: They are not supporting in any way even censorship. They are not going that way. So there is a trend, which is very important now.
What is problematic is that sometimes in even the statements, some of the people who are living in the West, they don’t know the impact of what they are saying, not on Western Muslims only, but on Muslims around the world, that are now using the frustration of some Western Muslims, in fact, to instrumentalize Islam by saying, "Look, at the end of the day, make it as you want. Be whoever you want. Try to be invisible in the West. You are targeted by people." So I think that we should be very clear on even the double standards, that there are things that you can say about Muslims today that you cannot say about Jews. Let it be clear, what we can’t say about Jews, which is anti-Semitism, it’s completely wrong. Islamophobia is wrong. Don’t have these double standards and just target the weak people. And this is why I said to the chief editor of Charlie Hebdo, "What you are doing are is"—you know, in French, I said, "This is the humor of the people who have no courage. You have a lack of courage in the way you are dealing, because you know who you are targeting." So my point is not your freedom of expression. It is the freedom that you have to target the people who are weak within your society, and I don’t think that this is the right way of using your freedom of expression. Now you have the right to say whatever you want to say. Principles are principles, but decency and responsibility are also important in this discussion.
AMY GOODMAN: Rick MacArthur?
RICK MACARTHUR: Yeah, well, the important thing to remind you, again, is that—well, I didn’t say it at first, was that in Art Spiegelman’s essay in Harper’s Magazine, we made a point of including anti-Semitic caricatures, anti-Semitic imagery, so that Art could make the point that this all depends on whose ox is being gored. And he takes the position, uncomfortably, as a Jew who’s written brilliantly about the Holocaust and about Auschwitz—
AMY GOODMAN: And he will speak for himself in one moment.
RICK MACARTHUR: He’ll speak for himself—that, you know, we are Catholic in this, in our approach to this, we’re open-minded. And we understand that as journalists and as writers and as critics, we have to be able to take the worst offense ourselves in order to be able to justify on principle offenses committed against other people. My example is always the Nazis marching in Skokie, which to me is vastly worse, more offensive to my sensibilities, than these caricatures of the prophet. But I stood up, and so did a lot of other people, for the right of free expression, so that the Nazis would be permitted to march in Skokie, which is a place where a lot of Holocaust survivors live. That’s how seriously people like Art and I take freedom of expression.
TARIQ RAMADAN: And can I ask you a question about that? If you look at the situation in the West, really, now, if you are, you know, a citizen, as I am a citizen, when you speak here about equal citizenship and equal rights for each, can you—can you feel the fact that there is a double standard, that there are things that we can say in the West and things we cannot say, and, for example, this is also part of the frustration? It’s as if today whatever you want to say about Muslims, you can say.
Once again, I come to the principles. I will be the first to defend this right to say whatever you want to say. But the reaction, the emotional reaction, is a selective reaction. And it’s not the same depending on what you are talking about. You are very—if you are targeted as anti-Semitic, it’s over for you. But when you are having Islamophobic statements, that’s fine. That’s the normalization of this discourse. And the problem is that it’s not only coming from the far-right parties. The problem that I have in the West now, wherever you are—look at the demonstrations that we had in Germany recently—is the normalization in the political discourse of Islamophobic statements. So don’t you feel that there is a double standard? Don’t you feel that we are talking about freedom of expression targeting the Muslims more than others? This is at least the feeling of Western Muslims, and you cannot just drop it and dismiss it as if it’s not existing.
RICK MACARTHUR: Well, I’m uncomfortable with the expression "the feeling of Western Muslims," because, again, I fear generalization, as opposed to what specific Muslims are saying, what specific newspapers are saying.
TARIQ RAMADAN: I’m talking about your feeling.
RICK MACARTHUR: Yeah, yes, of course—yes, but of course there are double standards.
TARIQ RAMADAN: About your feeling. Talk about—tell me about your own feeling.
RICK MACARTHUR: But of course there—but of course there are double standards, and all over the place, but that doesn’t change the point that I’m trying to make, which is that we should be striving to defend the most extreme examples of satire and provocation as a matter of principle, and not apply a double standard. Of course, as I said, I was more offended—I’m more offended by Nazis marching in Skokie than I am by the Prophet Muhammad being satirized in Charlie Hebdo, but it doesn’t change my commitment to defending both forms of provocation as a matter of principle. It doesn’t mean I approve of them. And I’m just nervous about people starting to back and fill and say, "Look, if you had just done it in a nicer way, it would have been acceptable, or a less offensive way." Well, how do you—how do you address these questions?
TARIQ RAMADAN: You know—
RICK MACARTHUR: You can’t.
TARIQ RAMADAN: You know, at the end of the day, I agree with you on the principles. Now, we are living in pluralistic societies, and you cannot just—I understand your point: You cannot generalize on feeling, and you are right.
RICK MACARTHUR: Yeah.
TARIQ RAMADAN: But still, if you say the only—just the statements that you made right now, saying, "Of course there are double standards," that’s the "of course" of it which is problematic, that this is why we have to stand together. It’s not—we are not going to live together only by principles and rights; we also have to deal with, you know, feelings, sense of belonging. And this has to be built on in a responsible way. I don’t think it’s just, "Oh, give me my rights. I should be able to say whatever I said." You know, you have sometimes the right to say silly things, but silly things in time of controversies, of tensions, are idiotic. It’s not the way forward. So I would say, yes, the right of freedom of expression, but one of the—the right of freedom of expression should also be the responsible way of using it.
RICK MACARTHUR: If I could—
TARIQ RAMADAN: And it’s not—it’s about human dignity. It’s about living together.
RICK MACARTHUR: If I could just quickly interrupt you, because I—to say at the end that there’s a political question here which we’re not dealing with, which I keep trying to deal with, while separating it from the principle of freedom of expression, and that is, yes, there’s a huge Western, violent Western presence in the Middle East and in the Arab world that didn’t exist 25 years ago. When we sent troops to Saudi Arabia before the first Gulf War, we tore something in the Muslim world. We outraged people. But this is a political question that you should also be talking about. The American Army sending troops to holy soil in Saudi Arabia is a different issue and a different provocation from a French magazine publishing satires of the Prophet Muhammad. And if people don’t begin to look into—make the connections or discuss the political context of the Western presence in the Middle East, the military presence, I think we’re going to have a hard time getting around this roadblock.
TARIQ RAMADAN: I really—I really agree with you on this. I think that this is essential. It’s essential for us, as Westerners, and Western Muslims should be involved in this discussion. We cannot cut this discussion from the big picture. And the big picture is, yes, the way, for example, our Western governments are dealing with dictatorships, are dealing with Gulf states, and by being silent about freedom, about dignity, and even supporting regimes where there is no freedom of expression. And this is the right point to make, but this is part of the whole discussion. And you and me, as Westerners from the United States as well as from Europe, we have to be clear: We are not going to defeat anything which has to do with violent extremism, if we are not dealing with justice, with freedom for the people, with the real reform—reformist approach in the Muslim-majority countries. And what is happening today is exactly the opposite. We have the West supporting the worst dictatorships and coming to us, as Western Muslims, say, "OK, now apologize for the consequences of what is happening." So, we should stand to principles, but we cannot avoid talking about the big picture, and a political one is essential.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave, and also Rick MacArthur will be leaving us, Rick MacArthur who’s publisher of Harper’s Magazine, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, published the Danish cartoons as well as the excerpts of Satanic Verses when a fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie. But he will be replaced by the man he invoked, Art Spiegelman, the famed Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, editor, comics advocate, best known for his graphic novel Maus. We will also be joined by Gilbert Achcar, the professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, and Tariq Ramadan will stay with us. This is Democracy Now! We’re back in a minute.
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We continue our coverage of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris by looking at the magazine’s background and its controversial history of satire. We are joined by two guests: Art Spiegelman, the renowned American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate whose Pulitzer Prize-winning "Maus" is considered one of the most important graphic novels ever published and one of the most influential works on the Nazi Holocaust; and Tariq Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University and one of Europe’s most prominent Muslim intellectuals.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to turn to Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. He was among the 12 who were killed on Wednesday. In 2012, Charbonnier appeared on Al Jazeera and defended his publication’s decision to publish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
STÉPHANE CHARBONNIER: [translated] It’s been 20 years that I am part of this newspaper. It’s been 20 years that we have, quote-unquote, "been provocative," on many different subjects. It just so happens that every time we deal with radical Islam, we have a problem, and we get indignant or violent reactions. We are in a country of the rule of law. We respect French law. Our only limit is French law. It’s that which we have to obey. We haven’t infringed French law. We have the right to use our freedom as we understand it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was Stéphane Charbonnier, the editor of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, who was killed in yesterday’s attack.
We are joined now by Art Spiegelman, the renowned American cartoonist, editor and comics advocate. In 1992, he won a Pulitzer Prize—he won the Pulitzer Prize for Maus, considered one of the most important graphic novels ever published and one of the most influential works on the Holocaust. Spiegelman also founded the comics magazine Raw. In 2005, he was named one of the hundred most influential people by Time magazine.
So, Art Spiegelman, could I begin by asking you to kind of situate this magazine, Charlie Hebdo? What kind of work did they do? How did they fit into the broader public sphere in France?
AMY GOODMAN: And why are they called Charlie Hebdo?
ART SPIEGELMAN: OK. They had been called Hara-Kiri. That was a satirical magazine in the '60s, way off to the wonderfully lunatic fringe of—it's something like the National Lampoon or something, far, far over the edge compared to, say, The Onion. I would say the only thing in American culture—somebody brought up this analogy for me when I talked to them yesterday—is South Park. South Park is closer to the spirit of Charlie Hebdo than anything else in American culture, in that to say that they’re provocative is to say their mission statement. Hara-Kiri had a subtitle, which was le journal bête et méchant, "mean and nasty." And their point was not to afflict the afflicted, as was just coming up from Mr. Ramadan as an idea that somehow, oh, well, the Muslims are outsiders, they have no real power in France, and therefore they were subject to these cartoon attacks. Quite the contrary.
The reason that they changed their name was Hara-Kiri published an anti-Charles de Gaulle cartoon the minute after his death. It was kind of, in the France in which Charles de Gaulle was France, this was beyond whatever mourning—America went through its own conniption fit when Ronald Reagan died. Even NPR was off and sanctifying him. Charles de Gaulle, who maybe, arguably, there might have been more reason to sanctify in France, was—he died a week after a horrible fire in a discotheque in a small town in France in which 20 people or so died. And the headlines all over France were, whatever town it was, "Tragedy in (whatever town it was), 20 dead." And the next week Charles de Gaulle dies, and the cover of Hara-Kiri is "Tragedy in Paris, One Dead," keeping these people equivalent. That enraged France so much that that magazine was muzzled and censored and not able to come out the week after. But the week after that, they said, "OK, no problem, we’ll just change the name." And from what I understand, and the magazine that I know, did reprint Peanuts at a time where that seemed interesting to do in the late '60s in France. And they just, "OK, if we're Charlie Hebdo, then we’re out again, because they only banned Hara-Kiri," exactly the same magazine, new title.
AMY GOODMAN: And the name "Charlie"?
ART SPIEGELMAN: Charlie, I believe, comes from Charlie Brown. What you mentioned before we came on the air is interesting, and maybe they had that in mind. It’s more than I know. But I would like to point out—
AMY GOODMAN: Did it also have to do with Charles de Gaulle?
ART SPIEGELMAN: That’s what I mean, yeah—oh, I’m sorry, that’s what you had said off the air, and that seemed like a possible explanation. But the magazine I know always had Peanuts in it. So, I believe it could have come from either.
But the point that was most important about it was the relentlessness of their taking on whatever targets came into view. And I think that when we talk about provocation, the biggest provocation, of course, was putting Salman Rushdie under fatwa, the riots, the deaths that happened all over the world after the cartoons were published in the Jyllands-Posten, which were intended as a provocation in a different way than the one engaged in by Charlie, because their provocation in the Jyllands-Posten really was afflicting a minority in their culture. It was covered, I think, wallpapered over by, "Well, we have to have the right to portray Muhammad in our secular country," but the reasons for doing it had more to do with the other inside an otherwise rather homogenous country, Denmark.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: But why do you make the argument—I mean, that’s exactly what you wrote in that Harper’s piece—
ART SPIEGELMAN: Yeah.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: —right, in 2006? And in the case of the Danish cartoons, it was, you know, afflicting the afflicted in Denmark, whereas in France now with these cartoons and what Charlie Hebdo does, you don’t think it’s the same. What is the distinct—how do you compare the two publications?
ART SPIEGELMAN: OK, the mission—the mission of the Jyllands-Posten was to be a conservative right newspaper. The mission of Charlie was not even necessarily to be left-wing. You know, it was—their mission is to rant against all authority. You know, they’re asking for a radical kind of freedom that we don’t get in America very often. That’s why South Park might be closer. South Park is one of the places that did try to show the Prophet Muhammad right after the problems that came from the Danish cartoons. But they did it because they were told not to. This is like the great adolescent impulse. It’s not a sophisticated dialectic about freedom of speech. It’s just taking it for granted that we must have freedom of speech to be able to do what we do, and as a society and culture. And they’ve gone after every religion possible. They’re equal-opportunity defamers. And politically, they’ve gone after both sides. Houellebecq is on their side of the ledger, let’s say, politically, and yet the cover is mocking him, that was out the week that this all happened.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So could I just ask you to respond to what Tariq Ramadan said earlier, that it’s permissible to say things about Muslims in the public sphere in France, that it’s not permissible—because you just made the opposite case—that it’s not permissible to say about Jews, for instance, because it’s branded as—
ART SPIEGELMAN: Well, there’s a kind of touchiness about Jews that has to do with the fact that they were collaborators during World War II, so that makes them have a guiltier conscience there. Nevertheless, I mean, I remember when the mass graves were found in Srebrenica. The Charlie Hebdo cover that week was "How Can You Call It a Concentration Camp When There Isn’t Any Orchestra?" That was their headline. So, it’s hardly a magazine that’s trying to, like, afflict the afflicted. It’s a magazine that’s just trying to afflict. It’s trying to take full advantage of the ability to stir things up. And that’s—in a world where everything is stirred up, I’ve heard all of these discussions about, "No, no, no, we mustn’t stir things up, because it’s such a fraught situation." But what are we supposedly—in our culture clash of civilizations, we’re not trying to find a culture that’s so repressed it can’t function; it’s one where we have to look at various issues from various points of view.
And what’s interesting to me is how great cartoons are at doing that, where it puts things in a high relief. And when they’re in a high relief, you can see them. You can then surround them with lots of words trying to contain them. But the images cut past all that. They move so directly into your brain that there’s no place to avoid them. They’re in there. Then you try to, like, put this salve around them, which is language. And that’s where we got that—whatever the currency rate has, a thousand words for each picture? Takes 10,000 words, because pictures keep leaking out in ways that weren’t intended even by the artist making it, but that are thereby functional—functioning as Rorschach tests for what actually are we living through right now. And it does that in a way that is so high relief that you can’t avoid it. And that allows us to have, hopefully, more language, more pictures, until these things all settle. The idea isn’t for it to turn into Kalashnikovs. I don’t think that was Charb’s goal, although he was willing to stand by the consequences of his magazine’s operating philosophy.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, do you think, Art, that there’s anything—you know, there’s a principle of what’s called hate speech. Do you think that can ever apply to cartoons?
ART SPIEGELMAN: It does, and it has, even in France, where they—actually, my French wife and I debate this all the time, because I, along with Rick, was going, "Man, the Skokie thing really stinks," marching on a small town outside of Chicago that had a large Holocaust-surviving population. Having the Nazis in America choose that as their place to entertain their own rights of free speech was a dismal thing to do. And yet, OK, that’s the line, and we have to live by that line. I have to live with anti-Semitic caricature. There’s a lot of it in Islamic countries, incidentally. And I think that it’s part and parcel. You then have to, like, counter it. I think Maus functions as a counter to the anti-Semitic cartoons, while ruffling a lot of Polish feathers, for example.
AMY GOODMAN: And in a nutshell, the description of Maus, your Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel?
ART SPIEGELMAN: Oh, in a nutshell, yikes. OK, it’s a narrative about my father and mother’s experiences as Jews in Poland and how that passed down to me as a story, and me trying to understand that story as a cartoonist by giving it visual shape. The visual shape involved borrowing, actually, some anti-Semitic caricature, viewing Jews as rodents, so all the Jews are portrayed as mice, sometimes rat-like mice, in Maus. The Germans are portrayed as cats, because I grew up with the Tom & Jerry cartoons that gave me my operating system. And the Poles were portrayed, actually, as pigs. So these are all, except for the cats, defamatory caricatures by definition. Within the course of the book, I insisted that these animals stand upright and insist on their humanity. So, Poles who behaved incredibly well in the narrative my father was telling me about what happened to him are portrayed as behaving incredibly well. And these things are portrayed even visibly in the course of the book as Woolworth masks, with little strings hanging off the back of the masks. So these are masks of animals that are reducing people to their racial, ethnic, national stereotypes, and within that there are us poor, fraught humans acting whichever way we act, in some cases Jewish policemen behaving rather badly, Poles behaving rather well, even a German with a qualm of conscience, as that came up in the story, while still portrayed in his Nazi cat uniform.
AMY GOODMAN: Tariq Ramadan, when you listen to Art Spiegelman, your thoughts?
TARIQ RAMADAN: No, look, I cannot agree with him on one point, the way he is describing Charlie Hebdo. He’s talking about Hara-Kiri, that was much before Charlie Hebdo became what it is now. Why don’t you say in 2008 that one of the cartoonists was fired because he dared to say something about the—connecting this to the son of Sarkozy and making a joke about the fact that, you know, he was a Jew? And he was fired. So, tell me and give me one example over the last few—two years, for example, coming from Charlie Hebdo targeting another community than the Muslim community, because it’s easy.
And we know that also, just to be clear on that, they had financial problem, and these controversies and ongoing controversies, they were making some money out of it. And I am not saying this as somebody who is outside. This was said by many, many people, saying they are going too far with a target. So, to tell me today that they were courageous, no, don’t talk about Cavanna, what he did—
ART SPIEGELMAN: No, after—after their offices were firebombed, I think all bets are off in terms of discourse. At that point, they were mandated to respond.
TARIQ RAMADAN: No, no, it’s the last six years. The last six years, they have been targeting mainly the Muslim—
ART SPIEGELMAN: You know, I don’t read Charlie Hebdo. I don’t read French that well, so I have to only look at the pictures, and pulling from that.
TARIQ RAMADAN: So, it’s—no, no, I’m sorry.
ART SPIEGELMAN: But I’ve seen anti-Semitic caricatures in Charlie Hebdo in the last six years. So, that’s not true.
TARIQ RAMADAN: No, no, I can tell you that six—so tell me. Tell me, why did they fire somebody? And the question was freedom of expression. And, you know, their response was what, coming from Philippe Val, who is now the director of France Inter? Saying, "No, there are limits to freedom of expression." This was six years ago. And you are telling me now that they are not—they are freedom—
ART SPIEGELMAN: That’s why he’s not the head of Charlie anymore.
TARIQ RAMADAN: No, no, no. That’s the point. That’s the point. It’s not because of this, because the president gave him the direction of France Inter, if you just look at the dynamic with him. So the point here, once again, is for us to say, please, if this is your take on equal treatment, we have to go as far as to assess this on facts, not on the past of this magazine.
ART SPIEGELMAN: OK, I agree—I agree that it’s more seemly when the power and poison of cartoons are directed at the powerful. And that’s the point I was making, actually, in the Harper’s piece that came up before. And yet, Siné, speaking of making money and whatever, that way of stomping on the impulses there, very cheerfully went on and did Siné Hebdo the week or two after. He started his own countermagazine that has been functioning—right after that, it was functioning quite well. And so, in the larger society, there’s room for your Muslim anti-Semitic cartoons, for French anti-Semitic cartoons, as well as all others, but the operating system—
TARIQ RAMADAN: No, no, I’m not—no, no, we are not talking about that. I am not talking about the society at large, that you have the right and you can’t even create your own.
ART SPIEGELMAN: You’re talking about Charlie Hebdo.
TARIQ RAMADAN: We are talking here about a policy that was said by Charlie Hebdo over the last years that is mainly targeting the Muslims. My point here is, once again, I’m not—
ART SPIEGELMAN: But why?
TARIQ RAMADAN: I’m not—
ART SPIEGELMAN: Why were they targeting Muslims? Do you think it’s—
TARIQ RAMADAN: I’m not—you know why? You know what? You know why? It’s mainly a question of money. They went bankrupt, and you know this. They went bankrupt over the last two years. And what they did with this controversy is that Islam today and to target Muslims is making money. It has nothing to do with courage. It has to do with making money and targeting the marginalized people in the society.
The point for me now is just to come with you, as somebody who is involved in this, and to come with the principles that you are making now, and to come and to say, look, now, in the United States of America as well as in the West, everywhere, we should be able to target the people the same way and then to find a way to talk to one another in a responsible way, not by throwing on each other our rights, but coming together with our duties, our responsibilities to live together.
I think that what you are saying now could be dangerous if you are not coming to the facts, but just with the impression that their past is similar to the present. Charlie Hebdo is not the satirical magazine of the past. It is now ideologically oriented. And Philippe Val, who was a leftist in the past, now is supporting all the theses of the far-right party, very close to the Front National. So, don’t come with something which is politically completely not accurate.
ART SPIEGELMAN: The focus on the Muslims really had to do with the riots about the original cartoons. It was their responsibility to show those cartoons, and they rose to that occasion admirably. Ever since—if you tell a provocateur, "Be quiet, be nice," it doesn’t work that well if their mandate is to be provocateurs.
TARIQ RAMADAN: You’re right.
ART SPIEGELMAN: Which is why Siné immediately went out and created a magazine that allowed him to do whatever toxins he had to express. I don’t argue that the cartoons aren’t toxic. I do argue that that toxin is a necessary part of an ecosystem. And Charlie estimably filled that, even though I don’t know its—you probably know it a lot better than I do over the last two years. I know its history and its impulses.
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, and we’re going to bring back with us, in addition to Tariq Ramadan, professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University, and Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, graphic novelist, best known for Maus, we’ll bring in Gilbert Achcar. Stay with us.
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We discuss the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris with the Lebanese-French academic Gilbert Achcar, professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. "We have to put all this in context," Achcar says. "The Western intervention, the Western action in the Middle East, has been creating the ground for all this. This is what I called previously the clash of barbarisms, with a major barbarism represented by Western intervention." Achcar also discusses the close relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, which he calls "the ideological source of the most fanatical, most reactionary interpretation of Islam."
Tune in on Friday for our continued discussion with Gilbert Achcar.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. The French newspaper Le Monde has just published a horrific photograph of the insides of the magazine office of Charlie Hebdo covered in blood. Nermeen?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: We’re joined now by Gilbert Achcar. He’s a professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, or SOAS, at the University of London. His most recent books are Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism and The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Gilbert Achcar. I’d like to begin by asking you about your response to the fact that all the suspects so far identified in this attack yesterday appear to have been French citizens. So could you talk about the position of Muslim communities in France and your response to what happened yesterday and the news about these suspects?
GILBERT ACHCAR: Well, I think that in France or elsewhere in Western countries, and obviously in Europe, the migrant, the communities—sorry, the communities of migrant background, especially when they come from Muslim-majority countries, are subject to forms of racism and various forms of discrimination and oppression, which are the breeding ground for the kind of hatred in response to that societal hatred that I just mentioned. And so, it’s not—I mean, it’s not surprising, in this way.
And more generally, I would say, this is also part of a general dynamics created by facts that were mentioned during the discussion, the previous discussion here with you. The Western intervention, the Western action in the Middle East, has been creating the ground for all this. And this is what I called previously the clash of barbarisms, with a major barbarism represented by Western intervention, by especially the United States’ conduct in this region, provoking a counterbarbarism, which is minor compared to the major one, but which is nevertheless a barbarism, this is. And this, we just had a new illustration of that. But this is part of a clash of barbarisms. We have to understand this. And this—I mean, even if we think of rampage killing, this action, which is absolutely shocking and appalling, but, I mean, it comes—you know, in the list of rampage killing for religious-related reasons, it comes far beyond the Norwegian Islamophobic murder of over 75 people and with—can’t remember the figure, but something like in the hundreds of people wounded—
AMY GOODMAN: Anders Breivik.
GILBERT ACHCAR: —and beyond Baruch Goldstein, the ultra-Zionist extremist who killed over 29 people in ’94 in Palestine.
So, I mean, this—we have to put all this in context and understand that all these appalling features come from somewhere. And this somewhere is, before everything, the action of the West, the responsibility of the West, and also the responsibility of the West and the United States, in particular, in fostering the source, the ideological source, of all this—of the most fanatical, most reactionary interpretation of Islam, that is the Saudi kingdom. The Saudi kingdom has—I mean, the United States has been the godfather of the Saudi kingdom practically since its inception, or since, let’s say, 10 years after it came to existence and when—with the discovery of oil in that country. And this country has been the oldest, most ancient ally of the United States in that part of the world, much, much older ally than Israel or anyone else, and the best ally of the United States, in some way, with a lot of connections and, of course, a lot of economic advantage being taken by the United States from the connection with this kingdom, which is based on the worst possible interpretation of Islam. So, just imagine you had the same, you know, with—
AMY GOODMAN: On that note, we have to end. We’re going to get a minute’s comment from you after the show and post it online, Gilbert Achcar, professor of the School of Oriental and African Studies at University of London.
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France Holds Day of Mourning Amid Manhunt for Charlie Hebdo Killers
France has declared a day of mourning as it continues a manhunt for two brothers wanted for killing 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. On Wednesday night, thousands of people took part in vigils to condemn the attack. Many held signs reading "Je Suis Charlie," or "I am Charlie." The attack killed several prominent cartoonists including the magazine’s editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, who was better known as Charb. He was placed on al-Qaeda’s most wanted list in 2013. The paper had come under threat and was firebombed in 2011 after publishing controversial caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. In a televised address, French President François Hollande said the "message of freedom" of those killed will live on.
French President François Hollande: "This shooting of extreme violence killed 12 people and injured several more. Greatly talented cartoonists, courageous journalists are dead. They left their mark on generations and generations of French people through their influence, through their insolence and through their rare independence. I want to tell them that we will continue to defend this message — this message of freedom — in their name."
Charlie Hebdo Suspects Known to Authorities for Militant Ties
French have authorities identified the gunmen as Chérif and Said Kouachi. Police say they have located them in a district in northern France, but it remains unclear if they have been detained. Another suspect, 18-year-old Hamyd Mourad, turned himself in on Wednesday at a police station in northern France. Mourad, a recent high school graduate, proclaimed his innocence. The two brothers were known to French intelligence services. In 2008, Chérif Kouachi was sentenced to three years in prison for his involvement in a network of sending volunteer fighters to Iraq to fight alongside al-Qaeda. At the time, Kouachi told the court that he had been motivated to travel to Iraq by images of atrocities committed by U.S. troops in Abu Ghraib prison. There are reports the two brothers, who were born in Paris, returned from fighting in Syria last summer. The remaining staff at Charlie Hebdo, meanwhile, has announced it will continue to publish on schedule.
Pentagon Opens 1st Probe of Civilian Deaths in ISIS War; U.S.-Led Coalition Drops Nearly 5,000 Bombs
The Pentagon says the U.S.-led coalition has dropped nearly 5,000 bombs in more than 1,600 strikes on Islamic State targets in Syria and Iraq. The figures come as the United States has disclosed for the first time it is investigating several attacks that may have killed civilians. In Washington, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby repeated long-standing assertions that the United States does not conduct body counts. Kirby also said a program to train Syrian rebels in allied Middle Eastern countries could begin this spring.
Rear Admiral John Kirby: "We look forward to, in the new year, you know, getting it up and going. I think if we continue to make the progress that we’re making now, that we believe we could start conducting some training of moderate opposition by early spring. We don’t have the ability to — to count every nose that we schwack. Number two, that’s not the goal. That’s not the goal. The less of these guys that are out there, certainly that’s the better, but the goal is to degrade and destroy their capabilities. And we’re not getting into an issue of body counts."
U.N.: Palestinian Membership in International Criminal Court to Begin April 1
The United Nations has confirmed Palestine will join the International Criminal Court. Palestinian leaders applied to join the ICC last week, vowing to seek the prosecution of Israeli officials for war crimes in the Occupied Territories. Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, said Palestine’s membership in the ICC will take effect April 1.
Stéphane Dujarric: "Relating to the accession of Palestine to 16 multilateral treaties in respect — which the secretary-general is a depository, including the Rome Statutes of the International Criminal Court, I can say that in conformity with the relevant international rules in his practice as a depository, the secretary-general has ascertained that the instruments received were in due and proper form before accepting them for deposit, and he has informed all states concerned accordingly."
U.S. Rejects Palestinian Membership in ICC, Vows Review of Aid to Palestinian Authority
The Palestinian move came after the United States and Israel successfully lobbied against a U.N. Security Council measure calling for an end to the Israeli occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state by 2017. In retaliation for the ICC membership, Israel has halted the transfer of hundreds of millions in tax revenues needed to pay for Palestinian salaries and public services. The United States has also opposed Palestinian membership in the ICC. In Washington, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said the United States doesn’t believe Palestinians qualify to join the court.
Jen Psaki: "The United States does not believe that the state of Palestine qualifies as a sovereign state, and does not recognize it as such and does not believe that it is eligible to accede to the Rome Statute."
On top of Israel’s freezing of Palestinian revenue, the Obama administration has also threatened to retaliate against the Palestinian Authority by reviewing $440 million in annual aid.
FBI Director: Sony Hackers Used North Korean Servers
The FBI has disclosed evidence it says ties North Korea to the hack on Sony Pictures. The cyber-attack led to the release tens of thousands of Sony emails and files, and prompted the studio to change the release of a comedy depicting the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Speaking to the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York, FBI Director James Comey said the hackers had used North Korean servers.
James Comey: "The 'Guardians of Peace' would send emails threatening Sony employees and would post online various statements explaining their work. In nearly every case, they used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from, in sending those emails and in sending and pasting and posting those statements. But several times they got sloppy. Several times, either because they forgot or they had a technical problem, they connected directly, and we could see them. And we could see that the IP [Internet Protocol] addresses that were being used to post and to send the emails were coming from IPs that were exclusively used by the North Koreans."
Comey says he is seeking the declassification of further evidence. His comments come after security experts raised doubts about North Korea’s involvement.
Cuba Frees More Prisoners Ahead of U.S. Talks in Havana
Cuba has released more prisoners as part of its obligations from last month’s historic restoration of ties with the United States. The Obama administration had called on Cuba to free a group of 53 people Washington considers political prisoners. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said the releases are underway ahead of new talks between U.S. and Cuban officials later this month.
Jen Psaki: "They have already released some of the prisoners. We’d like to see this completed in the near future, and certainly that’s something we’ll continue to discuss. … While we’re still finalizing the agenda for the migration talks, we plan on discussing human rights issues directly with the Cuban government at the migration and normalization talks in Havana later this month, and that will certainly be a topic that continues to be a focus of our discussion."
Shell to Pay $84 Million in Compensation for 2008 Nigeria Oil Spills
The oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to pay nearly $84 million in compensation for a pair of oil spills in Nigeria. The claimants say the 2008 spills devastated their small Niger Delta community with the leak of 500,000 barrels of oil. Shell initially claimed the spill was only a fraction of that size, but later acknowledged it could have been bigger. It is the largest ever out-of-court settlement for an oil spill in Nigeria, but much smaller than cases in other countries. In a statement, Amnesty International said: "While the pay-out is a long awaited victory for the thousands of people who lost their livelihoods in Bodo, it shouldn’t have taken six years to get anything close to fair compensation."
FBI: NAACP Bombing in Colorado Could Be Domestic Terrorism
The FBI says a deliberate explosion outside a Colorado office of the NAACP may have been an act of domestic terrorism. An improvised explosive device was detonated on the NAACP building’s wall in Colorado Springs Tuesday morning. A gasoline can was placed nearby, but did not ignite. An FBI spokesperson says a hate crime is among the potential motives. Police have announced a person of interest in the case, a white male around the age of 40.
Report: Corporate Media Ignores Bombing at NAACP Office in Colorado
The bombing of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, has received almost no attention in the corporate media. According to the website ThinkProgress, a search of news coverage over a close to 24-hour period through Wednesday afternoon found just one mention on CNN and none on MSNBC and Fox News. MSNBC’s Al Sharpton and Chris Hayes did cover the explosion on their MSNBC programs Wednesday evening. According to the NAACP, the attack follows the shooting of a school bus that was traveling with the group’s 120-mile protest march in Missouri last month.
3 More Women Accuse of Bill Cosby of Drugging, Sexual Assault
Three more women have come forward to accuse the comedian Bill Cosby of drugging them and committing sexual assaults. Appearing with two other alleged victims, Lynn Neal said Cosby raped her after drugging her in a Las Vegas restaurant.
Lynn Neal: "So we left the restaurant. By the time we walked back to his dressing room, I was having problems walking. I felt disoriented and confused. I didn’t understand what was happening to me; I had never felt that way before. When we entered the dressing room I sat on the couch, and he started taking my pants down. I said, 'What are you doing? Stop!' But he didn’t."
Nearly 30 women have now accused Cosby of drugging and sexually assaulting them in attacks dating back to the 1960s. Cosby is facing at least two lawsuits over the allegations as well as a Los Angeles Police Department investigation.
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Close Guantanamo—Then Give It Back to Cuba by Amy Goodman
This week marks the 13th anniversary of the arrival of the first post-9/11 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, the most notorious prison on the planet. This grim anniversary, and the beginning of normalization of diplomatic relations between the U.S and Cuba, serves as a reminder that we need to permanently close the prison and return the land to its rightful owners, the Cuban people. It is time to put an end to this dark chapter of United States history.“The detention facilities at Guantanamo for individuals covered by this order shall be closed as soon as practicable,” President Barack Obama wrote nearly six years ago, in one of his first executive orders, on Jan. 22, 2009. Despite this, the prison remains open, with 127 prisoners left there after Kazakhstan accepted five who were released on Dec. 30. There have been 779 prisoners known to have been held at the base since 2002, many for more than 10 years without charge or trial. Thanks to WikiLeaks and its alleged source, Chelsea Manning, we know most of their names.
Col. Morris Davis was the chief prosecutor in Guantanamo from 2005 to 2007. He resigned, after an appointee of George W. Bush overrode his decision forbidding the use of evidence collected under torture. Davis later told me, “I was convinced we weren’t committed to having full, fair and open trials, and this was going to be more political theater than it was going to be justice.” Obama did create a special envoy for Guantanamo closure, although the person who most recently held the position, Cliff Sloan, abruptly resigned at the end of December without giving a reason. In a just-published opinion piece in The New York Times, Sloan wrote, “As a high-ranking security official from one of our staunchest allies on counterterrorism (not from Europe) once told me, ‘The greatest single action the United States can take to fight terrorism is to close Guantanamo.’”
The U.S. has imposed a crushing embargo against Cuba for more than half a century, ostensibly to punish the small country for its form of governance. What kind of alternative does the United States show Cubans on that corner of their island that the U.S. controls? A hellish, military prison beyond the reach of U.S. laws, where hundreds of men have been held, most without charge, and many beaten and tortured.
President Obama rightly chastises Egypt for imprisoning three Al-Jazeera journalists, Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed. “They should be released,” Obama told reporters last August. Yet, sadly, Egypt only needs to look to the U.S. to determine acceptable treatment of Al-Jazeera journalists. Sami al-Hajj was a cameraman for the network. He was covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 when the Pakistani military picked him up and handed him over to U.S. forces. After 17 brutal days at Bagram Air Field, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he was held without charge for more than six years. He was tortured, beaten and humiliated. Al-Hajj went on a hunger strike for 480 days, and was subjected to forced feeding through nasal tubes. He was released in May 2008.
I sat down with Sami al-Hajj in December 2012 at Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar, where he was heading the network’s Human Rights and Public Liberties desk. He said the U.S tried to coerce him into spying while he was imprisoned:
“They [offered] to give me a U.S.A. nationality and take care about my family if I work with them in CIA to continue my job being journalist with Al-Jazeera, just send them information about the link between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaida and the terrorist people and some people in the Middle East. Of course, I refused to do that. I told them, ‘I’m journalist, and I will die as a journalist.’”
The United States knew he was innocent, but wanted him to spy on Al-Jazeera, so it subjected him to years of harsh imprisonment in an attempt to break him?
The United States took Guantanamo Bay by force in 1898, during the Spanish-American War, and extracted an indefinite lease on the property from Cuba in 1903. Returning Guantanamo Bay to Cuba will begin to right more than a century of wrongs that the U.S. government has perpetrated there. Most importantly, the return of the Guantanamo Bay prison and naval base will make it harder for any future war criminals, whether in the White House, the Pentagon or the CIA and their enthusiastic cheerleaders in Congress, to use Guantanamo as their distant dungeon, to inflict torture and terror on prisoners, many of them innocent, far from the eyes of the people of the United States, and far from the reach of criminal courts.
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 1,200 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “The Silenced Majority,” a New York Times best-seller.
(c) 2015 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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