Monthly Archives: January 2014

Je suis Larry Flynt

Posted by on 2014-01-15 No comments

This spring will be the 27th anniversary of the shooting of Larry Flynt. As they have each year since March 6th, 1978, millions of Americans will take to the streets, carrying banners that read, “You can paralyze a man but not an entire nation” and “I am Larry Flynt,” arm in arm, some crying softly, all silently remembering the day that Western democracy suffered its greatest test in decades. European heads of state will join arms with their American counterparts to defend the West’s battered secular freedoms from those who would end it with more bullets.

This is more-or-less the Charlie Hebdo fable as presented by the mainstream press.

But when an Evangelical Christian named Joseph Paul Franklin (who just happened to be a Nazi, a member of the Ku Klux Klan and insane to boot) finally copped to the crime, his complaint was familiar: Larry Flynt’s Hustler Magazine had run an offensive picture of an interracial couple. Flynt and his lawyer, Gene Reeves, Jr. were then ambushed by Franklin with a sniper rifle. Flynt’s intestines were blown out and he was paralyzed. Franklin had also tried to kill Vernon Jordan, Jr., and was trying to start a race war.

Yet nobody made a big deal of Franklin’s religion or asked: Where are all the moderate Christians? Instead, rather than react with revulsion, many Americans actually felt that killing someone like Flynt would have been no great loss. What Franklin had done was lost in the wash along with his satin robes and his dog-eared Bible.

Courts and communities have never looked kindly on Mr. Flynt’s publications and he has been charged countless times with obscenity and pornography. For his part, Mr. Flynt has some very uncharitable things to say about journalistic freedom and justice in America, and that includes the Supreme Court. Unfortunately you’ll have to check Wikipedia for what he said about SCOTUS since this is a family newspaper (Mais sacrebleu! Même les journaux américains sont censurés!). Which is to say, yes, even this column is censored.

The point is that no one in the West really defends tasteless garbage masquerading as journalism – unless it happens to be something that, predictably and deliberately, will offend another culture. And not just any culture but one we hate, Islam. Judeo-Christian culture has its protections. In some European countries cartoons and articles perceived to be anti-Semitic are actually illegal. One of Charlie Hebdo’s writers was fired for such a piece, which alone calls into question the “je suis” propaganda. In the U.S. we have no such laws but we know that newspaper editors have been called on the carpet or have been pressured to issue apologies, such as when the Standard Times ran a Pat Oliphant cartoon of a goose-stepping Israeli soldier right after one of the Gaza invasions.

Zut alors! If we’re Charlie Hebdo, then maybe we should also be Larry Flynt or Pat Oliphant.

But we’re not. We have no such absolute, high-minded support for journalists and their profession. Au contraire, mon ami, we are a nation that has actually begun hounding and prosecuting journalists for doing their job. Just ask James Risen, among others.

The real issue is not the depiction of a prophet or assaults on journalistic freedom. The real issue is the West’s hubris – its perceived “right” to denigrate the rest of the world, initiate “regime change” any time of its choosing, its “right” to foist austerity programs on “lesser” nations, its “right” to choose who shall have nuclear weapons and who shall not, and its “right” to maintain military control throughout the world along with colonial era privileges in the Security Council. These are all political issues, and the young Western-educated terrorists who seethe with political insult more than they do with outrage at the depiction of the Prophet know much more about “our” politics than they do about “their” Quran or hadiths. They are easily deceived into battle, just as we are.

We do our best to convince ourselves that the anger that terrorist attacks represent comes out of nowhere, out of unknowable religious fanaticism, out of the complete rejection of democratic values by people who want to roll the clock back a thousand years. But the manifestos and communiques we’ve heard over the years are strongly political in nature – we just don’t want to hear of it. And so we dumbly ask: Why do they hate us so? – almost rhetorically, as if no real answer could possibly exist. Yet if we are really interested in ending terrorism, we need to face the real answer to this question.

And this involves looking in the mirror.

I am James Risen

Posted by on 2014-01-13 No comments

When the American war of choice in Iraq began, and the French opposed it, Congressional Republicans gave the french fry a new name. What a love-hate relationship we have with the French. One day it’s Freedom Fries, the next it’s nous sommes tous Charlie Hebdo. But long before Charlie Hebdo, the press in general had proven to be a disappointing pack of cowards. Today’s paeons to murdered satirists seem to reflect some guilt by mainstream journalists for never, truly, doing their jobs.

One expects it of the war mongers, but even the liberal press now preaches that an attack on a satire magazine is an attack on journalism and secular liberalism. Everyone seems angry that, as a consequence of the terror attacks, people living in Western “democracies” – getting weaker by the minute as Americans shed the Bill of Rights and Europeans move to the Right – are forced to feel the same fear as victims of our drones, torture, and extraordinary rendition.

The Parisian terrorists may have been monsters, but they were monsters who correctly recognized Charlie Hebdo as part of a greater – in this case cultural – war by the West on the Muslim world. It seems our historical insecurities about Mohammedan hordes storming the gates of Vienna just won’t go away. Gratuitous insults to Islam are nothing new, and are part and parcel of an ongoing war on many fronts. It is no coincidence that insult to Islam was also part of a system of abuse at American prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and implicit in illegal FBI and NYPD harassment of Muslim communities domestically.

As Juan Cole, a Middle East scholar, notes: “Having American troops occupy [Iraq] for 8 years, humiliate its citizens, shoot people at checkpoints, and torture people in military prisons was a very bad idea. Some people treated that way become touchy, and feel put down, and won’t take slights to their culture and civilization any longer. Maybe the staff at Charlie Hebdo would be alive if George W. Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney hadn’t modeled for the Kouashi brothers how you take what you want and rub out people who get in your way.”

Indeed, besides Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, former Abu Ghraib prisoner and now the head of ISIS, Abu Ghraib is the gift to terrorism that just keeps on giving. Sharif Kouashi, one of the Paris killers, was radicalized in 2003 by the invasion of Iraq and specifically by the U.S. torture facility. Long before Charlie Hebdo began running insulting cartoons, Kouashi began the all-too familiar transformation from native-born, dissolute, disaffected man into seething religious fanatic, and then into a terrorist.

One need only look as far as Charlie Hebdo itself to discover that selective insult – not “journalistic courage” – was the point of its satire. In 2009 Maurice Sinet wrote a column for the magazine which some regarded as anti-Semitic. He was fired tout de suite by Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Philippe Val. Here in the United States the press routinely launders almost all criticism of the Jewish state, accepting charges it is anti-Semitic or a “blood libel.” It is impossible to have a full, public discussion about the Israeli occupation in this country, thanks to the self-censoring press. There is also a journalistic double standard if a Judeo-Christian religion has to take it on the chin.

Likewise, we will never have a completely open discussion in the press of poverty, racism, climate change, militarism, religion, or our native oligarchs. Ultimately, journalists draw a paycheck from businesses owned by rich white guys with friends in powerful places. No need to offend them. Fact and analysis are simply replaced by platitudes. Let us agree that this is just the way it is in a “market economy” – but, please, let’s not hype the journalistic courage possible in such a system.

We have never seen the photos of the worst abuses at Abu Ghraib or held to account the monsters in our own midst – the torturers, invaders by false pretense, assassins, those who have subverted our democracy. With some exceptions, the press just isn’t interested in it. From the moment journalists became “embedded” with the military in the first Gulf War, self-censorship began. In the last two wars reporters couldn’t or wouldn’t run pictures of flag-draped caskets. ISIS videos are sanitized. Journalists and editors routinely agree to embargos, gag orders, or censors. Fear of the domestic security apparatus, including the Justice Department, makes journalists think twice before telling certain stories or penning certain sentences. Government attacks on real journalists like James Risen are increasing so quickly one would think we live in Russia or Mexico. Why has this provoked no soul-searching?

It is not unfair to accuse journalists, as a profession, of failing to do their jobs, of holding their tongues, of playing along, of failing to speak truth to power, of choosing their themes timidly, of holding back, and pulling their shots. As the NSA affair demonstrates, journalists – even the brave ones at the Guardian in Britain – had to be grabbed by their collars and noses firmly rubbed in the facts for the story to be reported aggressively.

The slaughter of twelve people of any kind is horrific and society rarely knows how to react, other than to mouth platitudes or come up with odd symbolic gestures. Let France bury the martyred satirists – for that’s what victims of culture wars are, martyrs – in the national Panthéon, as has been suggested. For that matter, we could set aside a grave for Larry Flynt, the Hustler publisher, in Arlington National Cemetery.

But journalistic freedom is more than defending tastelessness and mouthing fancy French paroles. If courage means anything to journalists, I suggest we say instead:

“I am James Risen.”