If you thought there might be one thing that writers and cartoonists could agree on, it would be that survivors of the savage attack on the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January deserve to be honored for their commitment to free speech.
But you’d be wrong. Six writers have withdrawn as literary hosts to the PEN American Center’s annual gala on May 5 because the group is giving its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award to two Charlie Hebdo staffers.
Novelist Rachel Kushner’s reasons appear typical. Among other things, she cites what she considers the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” in relation to Muslims,
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Doonesbury’s Garry Trudeau for the George Polk career award blasting Charlie Hebdo — and by implication the murdered journalists — for indulging in “hate speech,” while pretty much blaming them for the attack.
Trudeau maintained that great satirists “always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”
Listening to Trudeau, you might think radical Islamists’ intolerance for free speech was a reaction to crude cartoons and not the other way round. And you might think that “free-expression absolutism,” which Trudeau believes has become “its own kind of fanaticism,” is a major threat to social stability.
You don’t have to admire everything Charlie Hebdo published — we certainly don’t — to appreciate that either society defends free speech from bullies and censors or it doesn’t.
Once we start telling violent bullies they have a point — and especially after they’ve slaughtered a newsroom full of journalists — there will be no end to demands to silence speech in the name of someone’s sensitivities.
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