Charlie Hebdo and Causing Offence

"‘Je suis Charlie’. It’s a phrase in every newspaper, in every Twitter feed, on demonstrations in cities across Europe. The expressions of solidarity with those slain in the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices are impressive. They are also too late. Had journalists and artists and political activists taken a more robust view on free speech over the past 20 years then we may never have come to this."

- Kenan Malik, "Je Suis Charlie? It's a bit late".

Two main streams come up whenever free speech is discussed, and I think they’re both misunderstandings. First is that people think free speech is peripheral, a luxury. Something we can have later, after other things are sorted out, important things like racism. It isn’t; it is the means to deal with these issues.

Second, people often misunderstand free speech itself. They think free speech means that each statement stands alone in a vacuum and cannot be challenged. That if you reply to what someone says, you are denying their free speech. You aren’t. Free speech is a two way process. It means that someone you dislike can say what they please, but it also means that you can respond. In that way, society at large can hear the exchange, can see the issues at stake, can learn from it. It will be easy to see who are the progressives and who are the racists, the reactionaries, because we will see the exchange.

And here’s the thing, free speech is either for everyone or for no-one. If you restrict it, if the state seeks to legislate on who gets it and who doesn’t, to put boundaries on it, then nobody has it. And this is where we hit the problem. People, for honourable reasons, will say it’s important not to offend oppressed groups. Of course, I want to be respectful; I’m on the side of the oppressed. But that reflex – shut down offence - misunderstands how a plural society can best operate. We are not a unitary culture, if ever such a thing can exist. There are many cultures, many ways of being in those cultures.

When people say it’s important to respect and not to offend oppressed groups, they are ignoring the fact that many of the writers who are vilified by fundamentalists, campaigned against, and often as a result shut down by mainstream society, themselves come from minority communities – Salman Rushdie, Monica Ali, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti. This discussion is not confined to what you can say about minority groups, but also – vitally importantly – within minority groups. It won’t do to say that those are middle class writers and that their concerns are middle class concerns, because what you’re doing, what has been done now for decades, is that you are shutting down dissent within these communities. You are handing power to fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, traditionalism, hard conservatism becomes the only acceptable, the only authentic expression of that community. And this is an important point – mainstream civil society, with all its power and laws, its state and its institutions, NGOs, and so on, put their power behind demarking and imposing what is authentic, what is valid, what it means to be a Muslim, a Sikh, a member of an ethnic minority in Britain today. And progressive strands are edited out of that, by the state and civil society.

So that we have the bizarre situation where people from the Muslim Council are outraged that they are criticised for making homophobic remarks. We are in a situation where we have sectionalised, isolated groups saying “I want to say that about you, but you can’t say that about me”. Not, please notice, “You are wrong in what you say”, but “You have no right to say it”.

The heart of this debate is what we mean by free speech in a plural society. Malik is right: people holding placards about free speech and Charlie Hebdo are too late, because in many ways we have already lost the war.

The question of offence needs to be better understood. We need the ability to offend precisely because we have a plural society. We need, rather than sublimate, to openly confront and resolve. We need, rather than to suppress our beliefs, to allow those beliefs to confront each other.

Today, progressives are saying whatever the principles of free speech and freedom of expression, it is important not to offend deeply held sensibilities, not to offend religious and cultural mores.

But that has led us to a situation where we now may no longer have blasphemy laws, but where blasphemy laws have been secularised.

Our ability to challenge power and oppression has been limited, is being limited, yes, by reactionary religious and cultural sensibilities, but also by liberal relativism, and by progressives afraid of causing offence.



Recommended reading: "From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Legacy", by Kenan Malik.

Dieudonne, the French comedian banned from the UK

“If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all”.

- Noam Chomsky

Why should we care that a man we are told is an anti-Semitic holocaust denier has been banned from the UK? Surely such a man is indeed "detrimental to the interests of peace and security"?

Well, the Home Office, as far as I can see, is not telling us the reasons Dieudonne has been banned, but only hints that there are "public policy or public security reasons". That’s not good enough. Are we going to surrender our civil liberties on such vague and flimsy pretext? - “The Home Office has decided this person can’t enter the UK. It’s for your own good”. That’s a dangerous precedent.

What if it’s not Dieudonne, but someone else? We don’t know the criteria used; all we know is that the Home Office has decided. All those cheering this decision are basing their glee on the fact that the banned person is someone we disagree with, someone with despicable views. But who gets to decide what counts as detrimental? How are these "public policy or public security reasons" arrived at?

I am not at all comfortable with handing over to the state the right, without accountability, without discussion, to debar whoever they like from the country.

What if the Home Office were to say Norman Finkelstein was subject to an exclusion order? He has, after all, also been called an anti-Semite, as have many who oppose the actions of the Israeli state, such as Noam Chomsky, quoted above. Far-fetched? That, in my view, is far too trusting a stance to take.

Remember that Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, supporter of Allende, and Spanish Civil War activist was refused entry to the UK. The singer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson was also denied entry to the UK in 1950 for a peace conference. (The US also revoked Robeson’s passport for many years).

We cannot trust the state only to exclude the people we disagree with. Are we really saying that Theresa May gets to decide what counts as acceptable opinions?

The idea of freedom for expression only for those with acceptable views is nonsense. It is no kind of freedom at all.

What are the foreseeable possible consequences for left-wingers, radicals, anarchists, environmentalists and so on of giving blind support to a policy of denying “extremists” entry to the country?

Furthermore, banning Dieudonne is counterproductive.

Dieudonne is not someone I had heard of until very recently. I have no intention here of going into the controversy over his trademark gesture, the "quenelle". I have read the reports that he is anti-Semitic and a holocaust denier. He does seem to be an unpleasant bigot. But if we ban someone who says “the Jews control everything” from entering the UK, all we are doing is giving anti-Semites the ammunition to say “see, he was right, they do”. They will say, “See, there is a conspiracy to silence ‘the truth’”. You want to fuel those ideas and give them legitimacy? Go ahead, back the ban.

If someone tells lies about the holocaust, challenge their facts. If someone says something you don’t like, disagree with them. Tell them where they’re wrong. Explain why you’re right.

This is not a defence of Dieudonne, it’s a defence of us all, because once we allow the principle of freedom for expression only for those with acceptable views, then mission creep sets in, and finally we find, too late, we were sleep walking into a situation where our own freedoms were eroded.