When blasphemy is bigotry: The need to recognise historical trauma when discussing Charlie Hebdo – Mondoweiss
I first learned of the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices through a photograph of one of the cartoonists’ studios posted to Instagram by his daughter. ‘Papa is gone not Wolinski’, the caption read. My reaction was instant and visceral: my own father was a cartoonist with a workspace much like Wolinski’s, and I have experienced the same aching pain caused by seeing it after his departure from it.
I have also spent enough time in France to know that to reduce those cartoonists’ collective body of work to a project of pissing off Muslims is wrong. For the most part, these men spent decades engaged in creating satire of the best sort: that which punches up, ridiculing the powerful – particularly the French State – and providing comfort to the underdog. There is no question that their deaths are an unforgivable tragedy.
But it is seriously misguided, I believe, to channel the palpable grief these deaths have inspired towards an archly Voltairean project of defending free speech at all costs.
