Charlie Hebdo - a history of violence

In the classic film The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock, there is an early scene where the protagonist notices a raven standing on the metallic bars of a children’s playground scaffold (if memory serves). Just then, a few other ebony harbingers floated down to join the solitary raven to form a small but portentous murder. Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, for which he was given a fatwa in 1989 by ayatollah Khomeini, the theocratic dictator of Iran, who publicly offered money for his murder, said with a wry smile in an interview about 9/11, “I was the first bird.” Sadly, not many have learned from the frontal assault on liberty that day and the spates of attacks, culminating most recently in the tragic murders of the staff at Charlie Hebdo is proof that the raving fanatical swarm have come.

When the fatwa was announced on Valentine’s Day 1989, the zeitgeist in Western political, literary and theocratic world, instead of uncompromisingly condemning and denouncing this barbarous, callous and bloodthirsty cry for the murder of an English novelist, sided with the fundamentalists, the majority of whom probably haven’t read the work as it is banned in many Muslim countries. Overtures were simpered, of course, against violence but much sneering, jeering and deriding remarks were made to the effects that Rushdie knew what he was doing and had it coming for insulting a great religion. Among those are many British politicians from both sides of the house, Jimmy Carter, intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and John Berger, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Roald Dahl, John le Carré, the archbishop of Canterbury, the chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, the chief Sephardic rabbi of Israel and the Vatican. This is in the light of the following: bookstores having been bombed, attempted murders on Rushdie carried out, who was forced into permanent hiding with police protection, the actual murder of his Japanese translator Hitoshi Igarashi and the attempted murders of other involved in the publication, including his Italian translator Ettore Capriolo who was stabbed in his home in Milan, and his Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, who was shot multiple times outside his house in Oslo.

The Egyptian Nobel Literature prize winning author Naguib Mahfouz was one of very few voices supporting Rushdie from the Islamic world. As a result he, in his 80s, was stabbed in the back by a fundamentalist. Luckily some writers were brave enough to voice their support, including Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller. A heartening book, entitled For Rushdie: Essays by Arab and Muslim Writers in Defense of Free Speech was also published in 1994 and contains pieces by luminaries such as the Syrian poet Adonis and the Syrian-Kurdish author Salim Barakat. Courageously, 127 Iranian writers, artists and intellectuals signed their names in a letter denouncing the Iranian fatwa and defending artistic liberty and the freedom of speech. For those in the West who whine and whimper or denounce with spleen-rupturing screeds of vituperative about not offending the delicate religious sentiments of the minorities, their indiscriminate acceptance of the fanatical and fundamentalist as the spokespeople and representatives of Muslims is itself truly racist and insulting and ignore those like the feminists, socialists, libertarians and secularists who, at the risk of their lives, wish to instigate liberal change in their homelands run to the ground by theocratic dictators.

Since the Rushdie affair, countless examples of bloody attempts to curtail the freedom of speech have been made by Islamic fundamentalists in the West and importantly, in the Muslim world. A trail of blood leading to the Charlie Hebdo attack. The submission of Western society to the violent demands of Islamists has been shameful. To focus on the problem of the Islamic assault on the freedoms of the West, I shall skip over the well-known but  very much related attacks such as the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing, the Mumbai bombings in 1993 that killed hundreds, the killing of 35 intellectuals in Turkey, also in 1993, the Luxor massacre where scores of tourists were killed, the US embassy bombing in Kenya in 1998 which killed hundreds and wounded thousands, 9/11, Madrid bombings, 7/7, Bali bombings, The Mumbai train bombing in 2006, the killing of hundreds of Yazidi by car bombs in 2007, the Lee Rigby murder, the spate of kidnappings, slaughter, rapes and tortures conducted by Boko Haram (meaning ‘Education is forbidden’), the Peshawar school massacre where 132 school children were killed, the shooting at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, the hostage crisis in a café in Sydney, Australia, the taking of hostages in a kosher supermarket, the execution by Islamic State militant of 150 women, some of whom were pregnant, for refusing to marry their fighters, and many more.

In 2004, Theo van Gogh, a film maker (as well as being a descendent of Vincent), was murdered as he rode his bicycle to work in Amsterdam by Mohammed Bouyeri. The reason for his murder was a short 10-minute film he had made with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author, activist and politician, about violence against women in some Islamic cultures (IS recently released a pamphlet telling their followers what the Qur’an says about how to treat their sex slaves). The killer sprayed bullets at van Gogh, hitting him multiple times and wounding two bystanders before fatally shooting him at close range. The murderer then decapitated him and pinned a note onto his corpse with a knife that contained a death threat to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jews, and Western countries. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, herself a refugee from forced marriage arranged by her Muslim family in Somalia was forced to have permanent police protection. An attempt was made on her, as well as another Dutch politician Geert Wilders in 2004 when two attackers with grenades were captured in The Hague.

Wilders, the leader of the fourth-largest party in the Dutch parliament, was condemned and threatened for his critical views on Islam and his short film Fitna, meaning a test of faith, which shows excerpts from the Suras and Qur’an as well as media clips showing acts of violence by Muslims and calls and justifications for violence by various Imams and ayatollahs. Reactions, ironically, included a fatwa by al-Qaeda calling for his assassination. Accusations of ‘hate speech’ and ‘inciting hatred’ were thrown at him from Western media. Indeed, he was tried for criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups and inciting hatred in 2010 but was acquitted in 2011. It begs belief that Wilders was put on trial for inciting hatred and violence for a 15 minute film consisting of the raving and ranting of extremist preachers and scholars including Yusuf al-Qaradawi. But when Qaradawi, who actually preaches from the pulpit things such as wife-beating, female genital mutilation, lashings for homosexuals and the holocaust as Allah’s punishment on the Jews, visited London on the invitation of the mayor Ken Livingstone, he was received on a red carpet. How is it that quoting Qaradawi asking for violence is considered inciting hatred while being Qaradawi is fine? Wilders was denied entry into Britain in 2009 when invited to show the film to the House of Lords by Lord Pearson of Rannoch and Baroness Cox although the decision was revised upon contest. Roll it around your tongue a bit – a man calling for murder and violence against women and homosexuals is received as an honoured guest whereas a man pointing this out is accused and tried for inciting violence and has to fight for his right as a Dutch parliamentarian to speak, upon invitation, to the House of Lords.

The infamous Danish cartoons controversy in 2005 bears sharp relation to Charlie Habdo for obvious reasons. Jyllands-Posten, a right-wing Danish newspaper published 12 cartoons, many of them depicting Muhammad. Whilst shirk and taghut or the worship of images or objects as a god is forbidden in certain sections of Islamic interpretation such as Wahabbism, the most orthodox strain, what needs to be stressed is that the cartoonists, like those gunned down in Paris, are not under any obligation to conform to these imperatives and have the right to draw any historical or fictional characters they see fit. Ambassadors from various Muslim-majority countries wrote a letter to the Danish prime minister asking him to use legal means to influence the editorial processes of Jyllands-Posten and other media outlets whom they thought ‘offended’ Muslim sensitivities. The prime minister quite rightly replied that freedom of expression is a fundamental right in Denmark and the government has no power and means to influence the press. This exchange highlighted the fundamental lack of understanding of liberal principles on the parts of those asking for legal gaging of views unfavourable toward one particular ideology – thought crimes in other words. Angering them further, this led to condemnation from the Muslim world, legal actions, assassination attempts and deaths threats. Danish embassies were raided and burnt, diplomatic rights violated and economic sanction imposed on Denmark. Mass protests in Islamic theocracies where protests are normally banned were fanned by fake cartoons added to the 12 fairly innocuous and, truth to be told, not very funny cartoons published in the newspaper – one of the fakes being a picture of a man in a pig mask, a contestant in a pig-squealing competition in rural France, but which was altered by the Islamists to pretend that it portrayed Muhammad as a pig. In a news story, like the recent case of Charlie Hebdo, about pictures, most major news outlets did not have the courage to show the actual pictures so that people can make up their own minds about how offensive they are or are not. Whereas while accusing Jyllands-Posten of insulting the prophet, the clerics saw fit to inflame the situation by concocting an actually insulting picture of their prophet by their own hands in a vile lie. In fermenting the zealous fever and goading the masses to protest, over 100 people died as crowds turned violent. The Editor Flemming Rose and the cartoonist Kurt Westergaard were subjected to death threats and Westergaard barely escaped with his life when an attacker attacked him and his young granddaughter in his house. Luckily he and his granddaughter made it into the panic room and called the police who arrested the Somali man who is now in prison.

But let’s not forget the reason why these cartoons were commissioned in the first place – in 2005 a writer called Kare Bluitgen was trying to write a children’s book aimed at teaching Danish children about the Qur’an and the life of Muhammad in a multiculturalist gesture in a country where immense Muslim immigration (escaping persecution, poverty and war caused by the Islamic theocracies) was already causing social unease. He couldn’t find any artists willing to do the illustrations for fear of reprisal. One artist finally agreed on condition that he remains anonymous because of what happened to Theo van Gogh a year ago and the attack on a lecturer in the University of Copenhagen for reading the Qur’an to non-Muslims during a lecture. This story led to the discussion in Denmark of media self-censorship out of fear of Islamist violence and hence the cartoons. And of course the Islamists resort to violence. On that occasion, Charlie Hebdo, a far Left publication, reprinted the cartoons in solidarity, for which they were taken to court (but acquitted). Now 11 people from Charlie Hebdo have been murdered in their office in Paris, a Muslim police officer executed, and four Jewish shoppers were killed by a friend of the Charlie Hebdo shooters, just because they were Jews.

I skip the case of Daniel Pearl, the journalist decapitated when he was investigating the link between Richard Reid the shoe bomber who tried to blow up American Airlines Flight 53 in 2001 and al-Qaeda, of which Reid was a convert. I skip over Larks Vilks, the Swedish artists who is under death threat from al-Qaeda for cartoons highlighting media self-censorship. I also skip over Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani Nobel Laureate who, at just 15, was the victim of an assassination attempt in 2012 for advocating education for girls against the Taliban’s edict that girls are banned from attending schools. These cases are well known enough and to be frank going over them again might be surplus to requirements. The point being that what the Islamists want is very clear. What is being imposed by violence upon Western society by is for all to live, de-facto, under the most regressive and reactionary interpretation of Islamic blasphemy laws under penalty of death. The so-called ‘radical’ Islamists are in fact the most reactionary and wants to spread the most backward, literal, un-ironical and suppressive version of Islam all over the world, first starting with all Muslims. In this war of ideologies, with the morals of the enemies so clearly on display, our stance should be clear. Unfortunately, this is not the case. And those who open the gates for the barbarians are the so-called moderate Muslims, liberals and multiculturalists who fail to or are too cowardly to see the problem for what it is and insist on finding excuses like foreign policy, unemployment, disenfranchised youths etc. for the murderers that they didn't ask for while ignoring the reasons the assassins themselves keep telling us. Worst of all, they are most strident when attacking others who raise these issues, helping the Islamists to extinguish the flame of freedom of expression.