PEN and Charlie Hebdo

On Tuesday, the writers’ organization PEN will present its Toni and James C. Goodale Free Expression Courage Award to the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack.  Many prominent authors have objected to the award – including Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, and Michael Ondaatje – while criticizing Charlie Hebdo’s “Islamophobic” cartoons.  Francine Prose put it this way:

The ‘narrative’ of the Charlie Hebdo murders—white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists—is one that feeds neatly into the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East.

Others, including Salman Rushdie – who knows a thing or two about courage in the face of death threats – have supported the award.  Rushdie, in fact, called the boycotters “authors in search of a bit of character.”  He also said,

If PEN as a free-speech organisation can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organisation is not worth the name.

Here are links to some other writers who support giving the award to Charlie Hebdo:

               Katha Pollit in The Nation.

               Nick Cohen in The Spectator.

               Andrew Solomon and Suzanne Nossel (of PEN) in the New York Times.

               Masha Gessen in Slate.

Finally, it should be noted that Charlie Hebdo is an explicitly anti-racist publication.  The editors mock all organized religions, and they have satirized Christianity (especially Catholicism) and Judaism (especially orthodoxy) much more often than Islam.  The head of SOS Racisme (a leading French civil rights organization) has called Charlie Hebdo the country’s greatest anti-racist weekly.  This has evidently escaped the notice of the protestors, at least one of whom admitted that he had never seen an issue.

Comments

[CHS]

Making fun of everyone, when society is drastically unequal, helps to preserve the status quo. And being on the left does not mean that one cannot be racist, or a perpetuator of racism. That said, no one should be killed for expressing their views, even if those views perpetuate racism.