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.
Comments are closed.