Douglas Murray
Will we keep on blaming the victims? Perhaps
the media assume that it is easier to force good people to keep quiet, or keep
their own media offices from being attacked, than to than to tackle the problem
of Islamic extremism head-on. It is easier to blame Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi
Ali, Lars Hedegaard, Suzanne Winters, Salman Rushdie or Charlie Hebdo --
and even put some of them on trial -- than to attack the attackers, who might
even attack back!
The press and the media seem to prefer coerced
self-censorship: It is your own fault if you get hurt: none of this would be
happening to you if you had only kept your mouth shut. It is easier to
denigrate the people warning us about a danger than it is to address the danger
they are warning us about.
Do you think a country should change its
policies because segments of one community will run into newspaper offices and
gun people down if you don't?
If those in positions of influence do not deal
with this problem now, we will not like those who deal with it later.
Wednesday's massacre at the Paris offices of
the magazine Charlie Hebdo was not just a barbaric act of
jihadist violence. It was also a test for the West and for the freedom of
speech in the West. It is a test that we all have been failing.
Those of us who have proposed that all Western
-- and in particular European -- news outlets should multilaterally publish the Charlie
Hebdo cartoons have been greeted in return with a terrified and
terrifyingly self-conscious silence. The papers and broadcasters do not want to
do it. Last time they refused to republish the cartoons, from Denmark's Jyllands
Posten, they said it was because the cartoons were from a "right
wing" newspaper. This time they refuse to republish cartoons from a
"left-wing" newspaper. It does not matter what the politics are -- it
is not about the politics, it is about the cartoons. The sooner the press at
least has the guts to admit this, the better.
But there has been much worse than the cringing
surrender that this refusal denotes. Consider just a couple of even worse
examples from the mainstream media's coverage of these barbaric events.
In the United Kingdom on Wednesday, the Daily
Telegraph newspaper was straight out of the starting blocks. Within a
couple of hours of the attack, as the bodies of the slain journalists had not
even been identified, The Telegraph chose to run a report
headlined, "France faces rising tide of Islamophobia"!
The press was already blaming the victims.
Commentators on CNN opined that Charlie Hebdohad been "provoking
Muslims" for some time. Perhaps they assum that it is easier to force good
people to keep quiet, or keep their own media offices from being attacked, than
to tackle to the problem of Islamic extremism head-on. It is easier blame Geert
Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Lars Hedegaard, Suzanne Winters, Salman Rushdie or Charlie
Hebdo -- and even put some of them on trial -- than to attack the
attackers, who might even attack back!
The press and the media seem to prefer a policy
of coerced self-censorship: It is your own fault if you get hurt; none of this
would be happening to you if you had only kept your mouth shut. It is easier to
denigrate the people warning us about a danger on than it is to address the
danger they are warning us about. The same holds true for Europe's policy
toward Israel: It is easier to bully an open, pluralistic democracy than to
take on all those terrorists and the countries that support them, and it is to
do what is necessary to get them to stop. That is also what Germany's
Chancellor Angela Merkel broadcast in her New Year's message when she warned
against the anti-Islamic "Pegida" marches in Germany: she said it was
the marchers against Islamic extremism that have "coldness" in their
hearts, not the propagators of Islamic extremism.
And so the Telegraph's first
response piece listed the terrible events of the rise of right-wing and other
forces -- as though the attack were the response to radical Islam, rather than
even suggest that it might be radical Islam itself that was at fault. Once
again, the "backlash" against Muslims took precedence over the actual
murder of non-Muslims at the hands of Muslim fanatics.
Over in New York, The New York Daily
News is not a newspaper that tends to pull its punches. But consider
what it did while the dead were still lying in the magazine's offices. It ran a story which showed images of a Parisian policeman at the
moment that the terrorists -- shouting "Allahu Akhbar" ["Allah
is Greater!"] -- gunned him down in cold blood. It also showed an image
from 2011 of Charlie Hebdo editor and publisher Stéphane
Charbonnier standing outside his firebombed offices, the last time the magazine
was attacked, holding up an edition of the paper with an image of Mohammed on
the front. But the image was pixelated. Yes -- that's right. The paper was
willing to show a man who had been alive that morning in the process of being
murdered. But they chose not to publish a cartoon of a historical figure who
died 1400 years ago.
This is the pass that the free press has come
to, even in countries such as America, and even in places where there has been
no attack on a newspaper's offices for "insulting" somebody else's
prophet. And then again, in the tide-wave of bafflement, the same excuses have
begun to get rolled out:
"Has this to do with France's foreign
policy?" interviewers and pundits have mused. In this particular instance,
the answer to that question is "no more than usual." But the follow-on
bit of the answer should be even more easily said: "So what if it
were?" Let us say that you do not like France's foreign policy. Do you
think that a country should change its policies because segments of one
community will run into newspaper offices and gun people down if you don't?
Another diversionary question has been, has
been, "Does this have something to do with the situations in which many
French Muslims find themselves – the banlieues (less-affluent
French suburbs) and so forth?" The only answer I have so far managed to
give to this question is that there are really people out there who may not
like where they live but do not run into newspaper offices with Kalashnikov
rifles and start firing off. Many people do not like their neighborhoods. It is
not the point.
Other media have gone straight for the
placatory option. Across in Britain, from left to right, the response was the
same: "British Muslim leaders all come out in opposition to Paris magazine
attack." As though head-shaking constituted some great breakthrough. There
seems to be a long-term pattern -- no matter how often the attackers shout
"Allahu Akbar!" or announce, as yesterday, that, "The Prophet
[Mohammad] has been avenged" -- of condemning terrorist attacks in general,
accompanied by bewilderment at the thought that they that it could have
anything do with "Islam."
There are also great loud woolly condemnations
of "terrorism," but never accompanied by naming the men or groups
involved. And will we keep on blaming the victims? This all bodes very ill.
Charlie Hebdo was -- I hope I can still say
"is" -- a magazine that satirizes any and all ideas. Their targets
have included not only Mohammed, but also Christians, Jews, the French novelist
Michel Houellebecq and the Front National leader Marine le Pen. At this moment,
mainstream media and politicians should be ensuring that they understand the
concerns of their publics, rather than treating them as radioactive
"racists" and "Islamophobes." If those in positions of influence
do not deal with this problem now, we will not like those who deal with it
later.
Douglas Murray, Gatestone Institute, January 8, 2015 at 5:00 am
If the murderers had been Jewish what would the media reaction have been.
ResponderExcluirThe mainstream media, once again guilty of supporting terrorism by under-reacting, treading warily (so as not to offend Islam) and thereby placing blame on the victims when radical Muslims commit blatant and criminal acts of terror. Had the perpetrators been Jewish then it would no doubt have caused an international media storm of condemnation against Israel.
Russell (South Africa)
Good luck. if you're expecting the western national media, let alone its international spin offs, to do anything but cower behind their own lack of scruples, or rather their scrupulous toadying to a view of multicultural equality that makes Islamic jihadists more equal than western gangsters, you'll need a couple of scuba oxygen tanks to hold your breath with. I cant imagine the Guardian doing anything but blame Islamophobics like Hebdo or Le Monde doing anything but protesting for a few days (as long as they can sell more papers thereby). And seriously, do you?
ResponderExcluirAs for the French govt, well it all depends on the actual orders they give their Surete and National Police... and the latter are reasonably afraid to police the banlieus without army help and judicial backing -- neither of which they're likely to get. The good old days of proactive riot police are gone... unless the dreaded right wing restores them... IF they don't sell out to the banlieus for their votes.
Richard Sherwin (Israel)