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When Cheap Laughs Cost Too Much

When Cheap Laughs Cost Too Much

Some people unfortunately think that the best way to respond to the intolerance of Muslim fanatics is to insult all Muslims.

That’s the twisted thinking behind professional Muslim baiter Pamela Geller’s ill-advised contest in Garland, Texas. Her organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, offered a $10,000 prize to a cartoonist deemed to have drawn the best mocking picture of Islam’s Prophet Mohammad.

Most Muslims quite sensibly ignored the stunt. But when you bait enough people, somebody will rise to the provocation. Two heavily armed and armored Muslim men from Phoenix arrived to shoot up the contest, authorities say, but were blocked by the Garland police force. A traffic cop fatally shot both — and Geller succeeded in making her own organization sound no less reckless than the fanatics she baited.

Oh, sure, there are some people who buy into Geller’s insistence that she is only defending free speech. But that does not excuse her from criticism for expressing reckless speech.

As you probably know, Geller’s contest is just one of the more bizarre reactions to the murderous January assault on the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo by two French Islamic extremists who were offended by the magazine’s depiction of Muhammad.

For the record, Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Jean-Baptiste Thoret and Gerard Biard declared there was “no comparison” between the “equal-opportunity offense” in their criticism of all religions and the Islamaphobic slant of Geller’s stunt.

Yet Charlie Hebdo also has been sharply criticized by many who affirm their right to print what they print but sharply dislike some of what they’re printing.

For example, after the writers’ organization PEN announced that it was giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, six writers who had earlier agreed to be “table hosts” at the gala backed out. While deploring censorship and violence, a letter signed by dissenting PEN members said in part, “(In) an unequal society, equal-opportunity offense does not have an equal effect.”

The letter echoed a criticism of Charlie Hebdo‘s humor in a speech by “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau at journalism’s prestigious George Polk Awards: “Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful. Great French satirists like Molière and Daumier always punched up, holding up the self-satisfied and hypocritical to ridicule. Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”

Trudeau probes a central question in this debate: What is satire for? It is meant to be humorous, but it isn’t always. It should aim to “punch up, not down,” as the old saying goes, but sometimes even a seemingly disempowered minority group can exercise oppressive, lethal power when it runs amok with murderous fanaticism.

With this debate bubbling through the media community, I was not surprised to hear it pop up in a question to Kevin “Kal” Kallaugher, editorial cartoonist at The Economist and the Baltimore Sun. As he accepted the 2015 Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning at the Library of Congress in Washington, he was asked, “Would he enter the Texas contest?”

No, Kal said, and he would not encourage any of his fellow cartoonists to do it, either. “It seemed to me to be a bit of a stunt.” Whatever the contest was trying to prove about freedom of expression, he said, it ended up “bordering on hate speech.”

As a board member of the Herb Block Foundation, which sponsors the prize, I have been in numerous discussions like this centering on an almost mystical question: “What would Herb do?”

Block, perhaps better known by his pen name Herblock, was a four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post. Even as a student, I idolized the Chicago-born artist for his ability to reduce the powerful and pompous through the fine art of ridicule. His cartoons branded red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy with the term “McCarthyism.” He wore his place on President Richard M. Nixon’s infamous “enemies list” like a badge of honor.

Yet, as much as he championed speech and press freedoms, his work is worth our admiration because, among other distinctions, he’d rather sacrifice humor in a cartoon than paint his adversaries with too broad of a brush. Sometimes a cheap laugh isn’t worth the price.

Leonard Pitts, Jr. is off today.

(Email Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.) 

Photo: Fede Falces via Flickr

Novelists Boycott NY Gala In Charlie Hebdo Protest

Novelists Boycott NY Gala In Charlie Hebdo Protest

New York (AFP) — Six prominent novelists are boycotting a New York literary gala next week to protest against French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo being honored with a freedom of expression award.

Australia’s Peter Carey, Canada’s Michael Ondaatje, British-born Taiye Selasi, and Americans Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner, and Francine Prose have withdrawn from the May 5 PEN American Center gala.

They informed PEN over the weekend of their decision not to attend the glittering annual event, which is also a key fund-raiser, a month after the Charlie Hebdo award was first announced.

“They’ve all been in touch with us to say they didn’t feel comfortable attending,” PEN executive director Suzanne Nossel said.

Carey, a two-times Booker Prize winner, told The New York Times that the award stepped beyond PEN’s traditional role of protecting freedom of expression against government oppression.

“A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” the newspaper quoted him as saying in an email interview.

“All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”

On January 7, two brothers claiming to avenge the magazine’s depiction of the Prophet Mohammed — offensive to Muslims — stormed the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, killing 12 people.

The killings sparked debate about freedom of expression and the central role that secularism plays in French public life in contrast to the primacy of religious freedom in the United States.

The Times said Kushner was withdrawing out of discomfort with what she called the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view.”

“In recent years the magazine has gone specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations,” Nigerian-American novelist Cole wrote in a New Yorker article shortly after the attacks in January.

Nossel said more than 800 writers, publishers, editors and supporters were expected to attend the gala, but that no one else apart from the six had communicated their intention not to come.

“We respect their views,” Nossel said. “There’s been a lot of heated exchange about this on social media this morning and that can be healthy but from our perspective we’re a big tent and there’s a lot of room at PEN for differences of opinion.”

Nossel said PEN had anticipated “some degree of controversy” when the organization decided to award the prize in late January but was taken aback by the “intensity” of Monday’s debate.

“We welcome the dialogue and the debate and we recognize that people need to follow their conscience, but there has been no question in our mind in terms of going forward,” she said.

PEN wrote on its website that it did not believe Charlie Hebdo‘s intent was to “ostracize or insult Muslims, but rather to reject forcefully the efforts of a small minority of radical extremists to place broad categories of speech off limits.”

British writer Salman Rushdie, who went into hiding after a 1989 fatwa called for his death over his book The Satanic Verses, said his old friends, Carey and Ondaatje were “horribly wrong.”

“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” he told the Times.

Photo: (©afp.com / Carl Court) Peter Carey, a two-times Booker Prize winner, said the freedom of expression award stepped beyond the PEN group’s traditional role of protecting freedom of expression against government oppression, the Times reported

‘Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers For Democracy’ — Fighting For Freedom With A Jest And A Pencil

‘Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers For Democracy’ — Fighting For Freedom With A Jest And A Pencil

The cartoon’s power to mock seemingly unassailable authority makes it one of the most potent weapons in democracy’s defense. As a consequence, the artists who create the images — an array of wily, irreverent blasphemers — become unlikely sentries on the front lines in the fight for free expression.

The January massacre at the offices of the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo cast renewed attention on the very real dangers cartoonists face from religious extremists. But hundreds of artists continue to work every day under the shadow of possible repercussions from their own governments.

Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers For Democracy, a documentary directed by Stéphanie Valloatto and produced in cooperation with the Cartooning for Peace initiative, is a celebration of the men and women who put their livelihood and liberty on the line to publish their often outlandish, comical artwork, which nonetheless communicates an earnest political message.

The film, which premiered at Cannes last May, prominently features Plantu, the French cartoonist whose work has graced Le Monde for over four decades, and includes interviews with 12 other cartoonists hailing from countries all over the world, among them Russia, Israel, Palestine, Venezuela, and China.

One of the film’s subjects, Jeff Danziger—an American cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The National Memo—said that unlike many of the cartoonists featured in the documentary, U.S.-based artists do not have to contend with censorship on a regular basis, and, outside the occasional terrorist threat, are more isolated from risk. “Most of the other cartoonists [in the film] deal with government oppression,” he said.

The film vividly demonstrates the cartoon’s ability to transcend language barriers, which makes it an essential tool for informing citizens and criticizing those in power. Another cartoonist who speaks in the film, Damien Glez, is based in Burkina Faso, a country where 60 indigenous languages are spoken — several of which are not written down — so cartoons typically end up running on the front page.

Of the cartoons displayed in the film, Danziger said, “A lot of them are funny, but a lot of them are dead serious.”

Jeff Danziger will present and discuss a screening of Cartoonists: Foot Soldiers For Democracy at Harvard Hall (Room 202), Harvard University on Monday, April 13 at 7pm.

You can view the trailer below.

Two Journalists In Turkey Face Jail Over Charlie Hebdo Cartoon

Two Journalists In Turkey Face Jail Over Charlie Hebdo Cartoon

dpa (TNS)

ISTANBUL — Two Turkish journalists could face up to 4.5 years in prison for publishing a cartoon from the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo featuring the Islamic prophet Mohammed, the reporters said Thursday.

Ceyda Karan and Hikmet Cetinkaya were both accused of spreading hatred and insulting religious values.

“The media in Turkey is facing pressure,” Cetinkaya told dpa.

He said his newspaper, the leftist-nationalist Cumhuriyet, had published the image as an act of solidarity after the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris in January, which left 12 people dead.

Cetinkaya said he hoped for a fair trial and had not lost faith that the rule of law governs Turkey.

Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has denounced the paper, saying publishing the cartoon was a “provocation.”

There are growing concerns about press freedom and freedom of expression in Turkey, as part of fears of a wider spread of authoritarianism.

This week, Frederike Geerdink, a Dutch journalist, went on trial for allegedly spreading terrorist propaganda. She denies all the charges. It is the first criminal case against a foreign reporter since the 1990s.

Photo: Başak Ekinci via Flickr