TheGuardian.com reports today [1-13-15]:
The front cover of Wednesday’s edition of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the first since last week’s attack on its Paris offices that left 12 people dead, is a cartoon of the prophet Muhammad.
The cover shows the prophet shedding a tear and holding up a sign reading “Je suis Charlie” in sympathy with the dead journalists. The headline says “All is forgiven”.
Zineb El Rhazoui, a surviving columnist at Charlie Hebdo magazine who worked on the new issue, said the cover was a call to forgive the terrorists who murdered her colleagues last week, saying she did not feel hate towards Chérif and Saïd Kouachi despite their deadly attack on the magazine, and urged Muslims to accept humour.
Wow. Just wow. It’s more astonishing and shocking than I can say, to publicly offer forgiveness to people who have just shot up your colleagues and blown up your place of business.
Doesn’t forgiveness imply that somebody is sorry? We (rationally) forgive someone when we realize they experienced a lapse in judgment or focus, one that we can imagine ourselves being guilty of, or perhaps have been guilty of, in the past. We also forgive people when their actions are minor enough to be forgivable. Does any of that seriously apply here? If you think it does, then you must ask yourself if you subscribe to any standards or principles, of any kind, at all.
One of my favorite sayings is: “Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” [attributed to Adam Smith] When you treat a hateful killer as no different from a remorseful person guilty of a minor lapse, you’ve made meaningless moral hash out of what was once a fine principle.
When you subsidize, endorse or tolerate something you should not tolerate, you will almost certainly get more of it. When you offer forgiveness to the willfully unrepentant, you’ll absolutely get more of it. If you want to guarantee more attacks on free speech like this most recent one in France, then applaud the forgiveness being offered by its primary victims.
“We don’t feel any hate to them. We know that the struggle is not with them as people, but the struggle is with an ideology,” she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.
But when people act consistently or deliberately based on any ideology, the individuals are, in fact, the ideology. How could anyone miss this?
How do you divorce people’s ideas, attitudes or beliefs from their actions? People’s bodies are not mindless automatons who are injected by some external source with an ideology which they’re destined to act upon, for better or worse.
She added: “The two terrorists who killed our colleagues, we cannot feel any hate … The mobilisation that happened in France after this horrible crime must open the door to forgiveness. Everyone must think about this forgiveness.”
Forgiveness, in such a context, is like a drug. You might as well be reaching for a drink, or a shot of heroin or cocaine. The impulse to escape a recent trauma or horror is understandable. But let’s at least call it what it is: An attempt to irrationally escape, a sad and ludicrous statement masquerading as a high-minded moral ideal.
All is forgiven? Seriously? How do you forgive the unforgivable? And by what logic do you claim to uphold individual rights, freedom of speech and separation of church and state by telling people who (literally) blow holes in those principles that you forgive them? Earth to forgivers: They’re not sorry.
As for “hate,” I have two questions here. One, why is hate absolutely and always wrong and irrational? If you love or even adore a particular person in your life (a spouse or child, for example), then what emotion are you supposed to feel towards someone who deliberately and ruthlessly takes that person’s life? What does it say about your alleged love for that person if you claim not to feel any hate or revulsion for the one who seeks to destroy your beloved?
To give you just a mild dose of how “remorseful” some people are for the actions of the killers, check this out (from the same article):
Omer el-Hamdoon, president of the Muslim Association of Britain, said: “My reaction to the cartoon is disgust, but tending more to annoyance as well because I feel that what’s happening here is not that different from what we witnessed back in 2005 with the Danish cartoons when media outlets went into a cycle of just publishing the cartoons just to show defiance. And what that caused is more offence.”
I suppose this is one of the moderate Muslims we’re supposed to consider as representative of that faith’s dominantly peaceful focus. It doesn’t sound too peaceful to me. The one good thing you can say about the actions of Charlie Hebdo in the wake of the shootings is their choice not to back down with the cartoon satire that they have every right to publish in their privately owned magazine. But el-Hamdoon doesn’t agree. In fact, he’s implying that now, after the shooting, the magazine should hunker down, accept the verdict of terrorism and give the killers exactly what they demanded all along: censorship.
Actually, if freedom of speech is what you support, now is the time to publish the offensive cartoons as widely and liberally as possible. If you agree or sympathize with the terrorists, then of course you should listen to their bullets bombs and shut the hell up.
Incidentally, el-Hamdoon went on to say, according to the article, causing offence “just for the purpose of offending” was not freedom of speech.
There you go. Freedom of speech is now motive-dependent. If you intend to be mean-spirited or hateful — at least towards Islam — then off with your head. Or to jail with you. Is that where we’re heading?
Freedom cannot sustain itself in a world where we forgive the unforgivable, abandon all rational standards and give people a “right” not to feel uncomfortable by living in a world with others who do not share their views, attitudes or customs.
Sooner or later, we’ll have to choose. Yes, that means taking a definite stand and even allowing for unpleasant, albeit rationally justified, emotions. The advocates of militant Islam are ruthless and consistent in their dedication to faith and force. Why won’t the rest of us, when it comes time to defend freedom and reason?
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