Charlie Hebdo's True Goal

The Muslim terrorists who murdered the staff at Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, claimed to be retaliating for the magazine’s attacks on Islam and on Muhammad, its founding prophet. Islam was not Charlie Hebdo’s only religious target. Jews, Catholics, the Pope and even Jesus were often subjects of the publication’s cartoons.

The killings of Charlie Hebdo’s staff are horrific, both for the loss of life and for the shockingly appalling way they were carried out. And the “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) phrase brought together the people of France, and indeed people around the world, in mourning, resolution and protest.

But, as David Brooks pointed out in his New York Times piece last week, most of us are not Charlie Hebdo. The satirical publication is widely hated in religious and political circles of all stripes. And before the murders, so few French people read it that it was in serious financial difficulties.

The publication launches rather sophomoric attacks on just about everything that some segment of western society holds dear. If you were not offended by something in one issue, wait for the next one. A recent sketch featured the Holy Trinity in an explicitly sexual ménage a trois, while another made fun of gay marriage. Many of its graphic covers could not be displayed on the magazine shelves of American shops.

But Islam and Catholicism were not Charlie Hebdo’s primary target, even when they were the cartoons’ subject matter. Jonathan Turley pointed out in his Jan. 8 New York Times essay that the French government, in recent years, has passed legislation that restricts the free speech of French citizens. Charlie Hebdo worked to push back against these new laws.

The new restrictions on speech gained ground in France after the worldwide protests (and deaths, both planned and accidental) over the Muhammad cartoons in 2006. France and other European nations passed a variety of laws restricting anti-religious speech, in part, out of a concern for public safety.

But since then, actress Bridget Bardot has been sentenced for criticizing gays and Muslims in a letter to the French president, while fashion designer John Galliano was convicted and fined for making anti-Semitic remarks in a café. The “speech police” have gone beyond public speech to monitoring semi-private and private speech here; whether or not you agree with these speakers’ views, this is an insidious development.

This situation reminds us of a truth that America’s founding fathers recognized: Namely, freedom of religion is linked to freedom of speech, even though speech can be for or against particular religions or religion in general. Our Constitution’s First Amendment states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech.” The free exercise of speech and religion go hand in hand.

Of course, even in America, freedoms are not absolute. The rights of a single individual must be balanced against the rights of every other individual, as well as against the rights of various groups, including religious and ethnic groups, educational institutions, governments and so on. We usually refer to this opposition as the individual vs. society. The question is, where do you set the fulcrum to ensure the correct balance? This is the ongoing debate.

In western countries, where the Enlightenment has freed us, as Lincoln said in his Gettysburg Address, for government rule “of the people, by the people, for the people,” we put the fulcrum quite close to the individual side of the bar. To move the balance toward the society end of the scale, as France has done by protecting religious groups from criticism, not only removes freedom of speech about these groups, but freedom of speech within the nation as a whole.

If one group can be protected from criticism, then other groups can be protected (e.g., businesses, politicians, government). It becomes only a matter of legislative whim. The ability to deprive people of their freedom of speech thus strikes at the very heart of democracy and the French value of Liberté.

By its extreme satirization of religions, Charlie Hebdo worked to create a safe place for free speech, where average French citizens could discuss and debate without fear of arrest or accusation. It aimed to re-establish the fulcrum of free speech way over on the side favoring individual rights.

Egypt's Good Guys and Bad Guys

The news coming out of Egypt these past couple weeks tells a dramatic story. Millions of Egyptians protested the authoritarianism of a political party that controlled not just the presidency but both houses of parliament. These demonstrations led to a military take-over and the appointment of a civilian government led by a high court judge.

According to the western media, the villains of the story are clear. They are the Muslim Brotherhood and Muhammad Morsi, the party’s leader who had been elected president. The Brotherhood is an “Islamist” religious party, which became a political force after spending decades as an outlawed religious organization.

The media likes stories that have clear good guys and bad guys. And so, in the months following the 2011 Arab Spring revolution, the good guys became the people who had protested, who were presented as civil heroes interested in the public good of the nation; and the bad guys were the Islamists, who were suspected of putting religious beliefs above the interests of the Egyptian people.

And so the ouster of President Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the installation of a secular interim government, forms a fitting climax to this story.

The problem is that matters are much more complicated than that. And, to be fair to the press, some writers have tried to present a broader picture as well. These stories have usually focused on the role of democracy in the Arab world and whether these events will make the democratization of Islamic countries more or less likely.

But there is an even deeper struggle in Egypt, as well as other Muslim nations, and that is the divide between Islam and western secularism. In Egypt, this divide began when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798 and defeated the Egyptian armies with his superior weaponry -- namely, cannons and guns that had been developed by cutting-edge science.

From that beginning, western powers brought to Egypt superior science and technology, as well as western culture and ideas, but did so nearly always through foreign oppression. The French and the British used their economic power to run the country beginning in 1875, a role that became official in 1914. Even though Egypt gained independence in 1922, British troops remained there until 1952.

In 1952, a revolution led by the Free Officers Movement resulted in rule by a long series of military officers serving as president. The last one, Hosni Mubarak, stayed in power from 1981-2011. These governments often had the trappings of democracy, but not the reality.

Military rule required a source of weapons, and these came either from Soviet Russia or the United States. Along with them came western-style education in science, engineering and other western subjects. This resulted in a large portion of Egypt’s population becoming secularized and westernized.

Egypt’s Arab Spring revolution in 2011 was primarily promoted by this secular section of society. But its success resulted in a political power vacuum. Into this vacuum stepped the only organized political party, the religious Muslim Brotherhood. Their superior organization enabled them to win both the parliamentary and presidential elections that followed.

This July 3, these elected bodies were overthrown by the branches of government controlled by members of the secular wing of Egyptian society, the judiciary and the military. The western nations applauded. But none of these officials have ever been elected. In fact, most of them are holdovers from the Mubarak regime.

So the irony is that in our media reporting Egypt’s good guys of this July turn out to be the remains of the bad guys from the 2011 revolution. The military and the judiciary may be western-style secularists, with a scientific world-view and a diplomatic orientation towards the U.S. and Europe, but they are not necessarily in favor of democracy, at least not when election results do not go their way.

In the United States, we think that democracy and western secularism go hand-in-hand. (This is true even for our religious believers, for in comparison to Egypt’s religious believers, our religious believers are western secularists, no matter how much they may disclaim that label.) But, in Egypt, the problem may be that apparently that neither the religious side nor the secular side of society sees democracy as necessary to the successful governance of the country. Only the future will reveal whether either side is truly democratic or whether democracy is rather a means to acquiring authoritarian political power.