After Charlie Hebdo

Terror, Racism and Free Speech

Gavan Titley, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany, Aurélien Mondon, Gavan Titley, Des Freedman, Gholam Khiabany, Aurélien Mondon

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781783609390
• eBook ISBN: 9781783609413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the world looked on in horror at the Paris terror attacks of January and November 2015, France found itself at the centre of a war that has split across nations and continents. The attacks set in motion a steady creep towards ever more repressive state surveillance, and have fuelled the resurgence of the far right across Europe and beyond, while leaving the left dangerously divided. These developments raise profound questions about a number of issues central to contemporary debates, including the nature of national identity, the limits to freedom of speech, and the role of both traditional and social media.

After Charlie Hebdo brings together an international range of scholars to assess the social and political impact of the Paris attacks in Europe and beyond. Cutting through the hysteria that has characterised so much of the initial commentary, it seeks to place these events in their wider global context, untangling the complex symbolic web woven around 'Charlie Hebdo' to pose the fundamental question - how best to combat racism in our supposedly 'post-racial' age?

PART I

THE CONTESTED REPUBLIC

 

 

1 | CHARLIE HEBDO, REPUBLICAN SECULARISM AND ISLAMOPHOBIA

Aurélien Mondon and Aaron Winter

The attack against Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015 took place in a context in which Islamophobia had become increasingly mainstream in France.1 The widespread albeit uneven use of the slogan ‘Je Suis Charlie’ across France and the Western world represented for many an assertion of solidarity, and more specifically identification, with Charlie Hebdo and its championing of liberal Enlightenment and Republican values of freedom of speech. This reaction, we were told, was in response to the threat posed by Muslim extremists and terrorists. However, the boundaries between a critique of extremism and terrorism and that of Islamophobia (and anti-Muslim hate), as well as that between the defence of liberal values, Islamophobia and securitisation, have become increasingly blurry. The string of deadly attacks by those identified or self-identifying as ‘Islamist’ and linked to IS (however tenuous that link may be) which have taken place since in Paris, Nice and Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray have rendered them ever fuzzier. It is for this reason, and the mapping of these discourses and practices as they relate or are deployed in relation to Islam and Muslims, however loosely defined, that we employ our concepts of illiberal and liberal Islamophobia (Mondon and Winter 2017).

The illiberal articulation of Islamophobia, or ‘anti-Muslim’ hate, is closest to traditional racism based around exclusivist notions and concepts of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion, as well as identity itself, and is commonly associated with the extreme right and authoritarian treatment of minority groups and rights. Liberal Islamophobia, on the other hand, apparently rejects but in fact displaces and conceals traditional racism and overt prejudice by constructing a pseudo-progressive binary and narrative. It constructs a stereotypical notion and image of Muslim or Islamic belief and culture inherently opposed to some of the core values espoused in a mythical and essentialised culturally homogeneous, superior and enlightened West, or specific Western nation. In this fantasised picture, the West is argued to embody progress, such as democracy, human rights, free speech, and gender and sexual equality, and, ironically, particularly in terms of the way in which Muslims were and are targeted, tolerance. Although liberal Islamophobia claims to target religion and belief (Islam) on behalf of liberalism as opposed to people (Muslims) to claim its liberal credential and non-racist defence, it does retain the same target – Muslims – as its illiberal counterpart, often under the auspices of ‘culture’, and is part of a long legacy of anti-Muslim hate in France and wider Europe, dating to colonialism. It can also be used to justify illiberal practices, such as the racialisation, profiling and securitisation of Muslims and Muslim communities, as the boundaries between the two are at times functional and thus blurry. Even before the attack, Charlie Hebdo used its satirical cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to prove the point about a fantasised version of Islam and Muslims’ ‘backwardness’ (recalling, in a French context, not just liberal Enlightenment Republican ideals, but racist colonial and neo-racist particularist ‘cultural’ discourses), in an expression of free speech.

In the aftermath of the attack, Charlie Hebdo appeared as a flagbearer for such a civilisational project: ‘Je Suis Charlie’ was the assertion that the West and France in particular identified with the magazine as its symbol or proxy for freedom of speech, and stood together in solidarity with the West and France for freedom of speech and the attack on it/them/us. However, this was accompanied by developments that would seem contradictory to the liberal values of freedom that Charlie Hebdo allegedly championed and to which Islamists posed a threat: securitisation, states of emergency in which civil liberties would be suspended, a crackdown on so-called ‘extreme’ speech and a boost for the extremists on the right. In this context, the extreme right Front National (FN), long the standard-bearer of racist hate and right-wing authoritarianism, was able to normalise itself further. By strategically embracing a liberal form of Islamophobia in defence of the Republic, the FN has now placed itself in perfect alignment with the mainstream.

This chapter will examine these developments, focusing on the rise of the FN and the mainstreaming of Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate in France under the banner of liberalism. It will argue that, while Islamophobia has often taken an illiberal shape, a more mainstream, acceptable and accepted form within a liberal framework has become commonplace within the mainstream political discourse of twenty-first century France, particularly in relation to discourses about Republicanism. It will examine such developments in light of tensions in the Republican tradition between liberalism and reactionary politics that go back to the founding of the Republic and throughout French history. These are revealed and articulated in responses to social and political crises: for example, the transformation and mainstreaming of Islamophobia in the context of and response to the Charlie Hebdo attack, and the debate surrounding freedom of speech, which should be seen in the context of a wider crisis of faith in democracy that lends itself to hate and scapegoating, as well as extreme-right opportunism. Finally, it will examine the development and changes to this discourse in response to attacks that followed the one on Charlie Hebdo.

The Republic has fallen, long live the reactionary Republic!

To understand the current situation and the normalisation, if not normalcy, of Islamophobic discourses, both liberal and illiberal, in mainstream political debates, it is essential to place the return of reactionary politics in France in a broader historical context. Since the late nineteenth century, France’s history has been marred by the struggle between the Republic and its own contradictions, and reactionary ideologies and movements, such as those based on various iterations of racism. From the Dreyfus Affair and the role played by Charles Maurras’ Action Française and colonialism, to the interwar fascist leagues and the failed coup of February 1934; from the Vichy Regime to the post-war nostalgic and anti-decolonisation movements, the French extreme right’s virulent opposition has played a key part in defining the Republic as the progressive alternative, despite its own shortcomings and responsibility with regard to systemic racism (see Selim Nadi’s chapter in this book). In this context ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. The contested republic
• 1. Charlie Hebdo, Republican secularism and Islamophobia
• 2. The meaning of ‘Charlie’: the debate on the troubled French identity
• 3. After the drama: the institutionalisation of gossiping about Muslims
• 4. A double-bind situation? The depoliticisation of violence and the politics of compensation
• Part II. The long ‘war on terror’
• 5. The whiteness of innocence: Charlie Hebdo and the metaphysics of anti-terrorism in Europe
• 6. The visible hand of the state
• 7. Symbolic politics with brutally real effects: when ‘nobodies’ make history
• 8. Extremism, theirs and ours: Britain’s ‘generational struggle’
• Part III. Media events and media dynamics
• 9. From Jyllands-Posten to Charlie Hebdo: domesticating the Mohammed cartoons
• 10. #JeSuisCharlie, #JeNeSuisPasCharlie and ad hoc publics
• 11. Mediated narratives as competing histories of the present
• Part IV. The politics of free speech
• 12. Media power and the framing of the Charlie Hebdo attacks
• 13. We hate to quote Stanley Fish, but: “There’s no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too.” Or is it?
• 14. Jouissance and submission: ‘free speech’, colonial diagnostics and psychoanalytic responses to Charlie Hebdo
• Part V. Racism and anti-racism in post-racial times
• 15. Not afraid
• 16. ‘Je Suis Juif’: Charlie Hebdo and the remaking of antisemitism
• 17. Race, caste and gender in France
• 18. The ideology of the Holy Republic as part of the colonial counter-revolution
• About the contributors
• Index