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.”
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