Max Blumenthal doesn't understand
Remember immediately after 9/11 when Le Monde ran the headline "We Are All Americans"? Imagine in the days after if people around the world were rallying around the slogan "I am not an American", explaining that the towers were filled with filthy bankers and hell, they were practically asking for it.
Think about that. If you are an American, how would you have felt? You know many of the victims weren't bankers. You know that even if they were, that doesn't make them evil. And you're mourning. How the hell could the rest of the world kick you when you're mourning? And yet that's what so many Americans did after the Charlie Hebdo attack.
I'm an American and I live in France. I lived in the US during 9/11. It's not an unfair comparison to say the attack on Charlie Hebdo felt an awful lot like 9/11, yet many people felt no compunction about attacking Charlie Hebdo when France was in mourning. And then French comedian Dieudonné got arrested for a Facebook post, leading many people to cry that the French were not only racist, they don't even believe in freedom of speech!
In my reading, almost invariably those people were not French. They didn't speak French. They have no knowledge of French culture. They have no understanding of French law. And yet despite their grotesque ignorance, they assumed the American way was better than the French. Those people were wrong.
A perfect example of the misunderstanding is the (in)famous Charlie Hebdo cover depicting the black Justice Minister, Christiane Taubira, as a monkey. Offhand that looks very, very racist ... and it is. But it's not racism by Charlie Hebdo; it's racism by the National Front, the racist far-right party led by Marine Le Pen. The cover is actually a reference to a National Front (FN) politician, Anne Leclere, calling Taubira a monkey. The tricolor used in the lower left of the image is the symbol of the National Front, and the title, "Rassemblement Bleu Raciste" is mocking Rassemblement Bleu Marine, the slogan of the FN. The cover was viciously skewering the FN by making it clear that this was not really a "lone wolf" comment, but part and parcel of the FN.
Offensive as hell? Yes. Racist? No.
Or maybe you remember the New Yorker cover, depicting President Obama in Middle Eastern clothes while his wife has an A/K 47 slung over her shoulder. Had the Republican party distributed that, people would have argued it was over-the-top racism (the Republicans are
usually more subtle than that). However, because it was the New Yorker using satire to mock the ridiculous view that President Obama was a closet anti-American Muslim, while many felt it was offensive, there was no racist
intent behind it.
Unfortunately, many people only appreciate satire if it's gentle, or they "get" it, or if it falls in line with their personal worldview. Charlie Hebdo's satire was brilliant, often multi-layered, and had the subtlety of a jackhammer root canal. There's actually a great quora.com thread which explains many of the more offensive covers, but if you're not French, it can be very hard to understand the context of those covers, or why this very French publication is found humorous by so many French people (and my black wife with a Muslim-sounding first name used to avidly read it; it's not the case that the magazine was only for white French people). While it wouldn't be true to say that all French people appreciated Charlie, to have a magazine that's fought against racism be accused of the same crime by people who had never heard of the magazine a month ago is somewhat galling (this is me resisting the "gaulling" pun).
If Charlie Hebdo was the wind-up for the internet vigilante ballgame, Dieudonné was the slow pitch.
Dieudonné is a French comedian who, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, wrote on his Facebook page «Je me sens Charlie Coulibaly» ("I feel like Charlie Coulibaly" — one of the terrorists who helped brutally murder twelve of the Charlie Hebdo staff). He was arrested for this and again, people who know nothing of French history, culture, or law, viciously attacked France for hypocrisy.
What was the hypocrisy? Apparently Charlie Hebdo has freedom of speech, but Dieudonné does not.
Quite frankly (pun intended), it was frustrating as hell watching this unfold. Many of my friends used the same line of reasoning, but like the Charlie Hebdo controversy, people who were completely ignorant of what was going on were nonetheless quick to judge.
The French are not hypocrites because they do allow freedom of speech, but they define it differently than the US. The US has numerous exceptions to freedom of speech. The controversy surrounding George Carlin's "Seven Dirty Words" is a great example. And to the French, the furor over Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" is just plain idiocy. How can you possibly have freedom of speech when the most idiotic things are forbidden?
In the US, if I distribute pamphlets claiming that the black guy living next door is a crackhead and murderer, I'm probably in serious trouble. However, if I distribute pamphlets claiming all black people are crackheads and murderers, why, that's A-OK protected speech.
If you can make something protected speech by casting a wider net of hate, well, that seems strange to the French. Thus, while satire is protected in France, hate speech is not and the comedian in question crossed the line repeatedly. He is a strong anti-semite, is famous for spreading a Nazi-like salute, and France very strongly remembers WWII. (This is part of the reason why Holocaust denial is illegal over here).
To give some context to the above, when I lived in Paris, every day I would walk to work past a plaque on a boy's school which read as follows:
Remembering the horrors of WW II
«A la mémoire des élèves de cette école déportés de 1942 a 1944 parce qu'ils étaient nés juifs. Victimes innocentes de la barbarie nazie avec la complicite active du gouvernement de Vichy.
Ils furent exterminés dans les camps de la mort.»
And in English:
"To the memory of the students of this school deported from 1942 to 1944 because they were born Jewish. Innocent victims of Nazi barbarism with the active complicity of the Vichy government.
They were killed in death camps.
Further, traveling around France (and much of Europe) we constantly see reminders of WW II in the form of monuments, ruins, and reconstructed buildings. Many today still have relatives who were killed by the Nazis. It's not that it's a constant "in your face" reminder of WW II, but it's a background noise that isn't going to go away and it's something I didn't experience in the US. WW II and the holocaust were things that happened somewhere else. For the US, WW II is history. For France, it's also personal. France
knows what hate speech can do.
Charlie Hebdo was taken to court multiple times and the courts generally sided with Charlie because they were clearly satire and while trying to provoke thought, they were not trying to provoke hate. Dieudonné was previously convicted of trying to provoke hate. He invites holocaust deniers onstage during his performances to give them a platform. He's used the joke (I use the term loosely) "The Germans should have finished the job in 1945." He's described the infamous «quenelle» gesture that he's invented as intended to «Glisser sa quenelle dans le fion du sionnisme» ("Slide the quenelle into the asshole of Zionism"). Dieudonné appears to trying to get people to hate the Jewish people as much as he appears to. That's a crime in France.
Yes, the French realize that this is a contentious and confusing issue, but they are not
hypocrites about it. They're genuinely struggling to find the line between protecting speech and protecting people. Sometimes I think they're on the wrong side of that line. However, they've experienced the horrors first-hand of what happens when you let people spread hate and condemn an entire race, so they try to find a balance. In the US, spread hate all you want, just don't get caught pointing at a particular person.
Please note that I'm not saying the French way is better; I'm saying the French way is different. The US has a number of free speech exemptions and some of them are different from the French free speech exemptions. France is not a hypocrite for failing to follow the US understanding of free speech.
So why did the Americans completely misunderstand Charlie Hebdo? I think it's because Americans don't seem to have a taste for such vicious satire. Let's be honest, while Jon Stewart is awesome, he's a wine cooler sitting next to Charlie Hebdo's white lightning (have fun with that allusion). The New Yorker Obama cover was, by French standards, rather tame despite the firestorm of controversy in the US.
Why did they misunderstand Dieudonné? For many Americans, the idea of "freedom of speech" is repeated without understanding. Even though the US has many exceptions to said freedom, Americans are quick to condemn others who have a different set of exceptions, not realizing that reasonable people can disagree about what "freedom of speech" means. Further, there's so very little actual information in the US about the rest of the world that it's very hard for the average American to really appreciate just how fundamental some differences are.
Main source on the above: I'm an American who's lived in Europe since 2006, the past two years in France, and is married to a French woman with a Master's Degree in French law and is an ex-political advisor. She's been awesome in helping me understand the French point of view and French law.