Reflexão (Courier International) - Nesrine Malik (The Guardian) 03.04.2016

(sublinhados meus)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/charlie-hebdo-islam-terrorism

How did Charlie Hebdo get it so wrong? | Nesrine Malik

This week, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published an editorial that answered once and for all the question “Is Charlie Hebdo racist?”. In a dispatch that read like a call to arms, the magazine – the target of a horrific terrorist attack last year that killed 11 people – considered what had happened in Paris and Brussels over the past year and asked: how did we end up here?
The editorial then laid the blame squarely on two factors – the complicity of the average, unaffiliated Muslim, and the erosion of secularism by a conspiracy of silence. Terrorism was fomented, it said, and people died because society could not voice discomfort at the many little “iceberg tips” of religious expression that had cumulatively eroded laïcité – the secularism written into the French constitution. Terrorism happened, in short, because freedom of speech was curbed.
The editorial gives credence and sanction to the view that there is no such thing as an innocent Muslim. That even those who do not themselves commit terrorism, somehow by just existing and practising, are part of a continuum that climaxes with two men blowing themselves up in Brussels airport.
This is a publication whose supporters claim we misunderstand its very niche commitment to minorities, essentially saying the problem is not that the public are Islamophobic, the problem is that they have not been Islamophobic enough.
How did we end up here, where a publication lauded by writers’ association PEN for its courage in pursuing freedom of expression clearly states that the problem is not with some Muslims, but with all Muslims? That small, ostensibly innocuous things, such as wearing the hijab or refusing to sell bacon, or even having a long beard, are the opening credits to a final scene of death.
This is not Hebdo treading hesitantly, this is seminal. And it is part of a wider phenomenon. This is not about freedom of expression any more. It is about licence. Licence to suspend intelligence and fair judgment, and any faculties that restrict anger, confusion or prejudice from being unleashed against a clear target.
One understands the difficulty. It is hard to witness the death of colleagues or family and blame it on a complicated (and not exhaustive) medley of religious radicalisation, failure of integration, the limitations of the secular nation state and regional instability in the Middle East. What catharsis does that give?
But to blame, as Charlie Hebdo did, the man in the deli with the beard serving you the delicious pastries, or the mild-mannered academic and religious scholar Tariq Ramadan, these are clear, satiating targets. “It’s not easy to get some proper terrorism going without a preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension,” Hebdo says.
The editorial asked some of the right questions, but drew the wrong conclusions. There are indeed some who will not contemplate religious or scriptural criticism. Too much of the defence of Islam as a vehicle for radicalism refuses to be introspective or critical. But one could be more or less certain that Charlie Hebdo would draw the wrong conclusions. The climate, so toxic with righteous fear and anger, demands it.
It has never pretended to be a nuanced parser of subtleties, but prides itself on being vulgar and irreverent, and takes the view that if people’s feelings are mangled in the spokes of its crude machine of satire, then so be it. It believes that to be nuanced or thoughtful is to be timid, and that the truth is only reached by trampling recklessly over all that is sensitive. This is Hebdo’s widely known “virtue”.
How then have we reached a point at which such a magazine can be exalted as the troubled liberal conscience of secular Europe? Because it has benefited from the adulation offered by compatriots in the media. There has been no meaningful interrogation of its positions. Instead, its sneering disregard has been allowed to grow into a state of worthy pomposity.
Hebdo has been allowed to drive a debate on Islam and immigration because there are so few mainstream institutions on the left discussing these issues responsibly, and so few Muslims in the public domain doing so without either being overly defensive or exploiting antipathy towards Islam.
The magazine characterises its mission as war with a “silencing” establishment, and sees only one way to prevail: more freedom of expression, more secularism. But its thesis needs to be challenged. Is this silenced, hesitant, subdued France that Hebdo describes the country in which a minister called women in hijab “negroes who accept slavery”? If that is too timid, what would it propose: banning hijabs, banning beards?
To employ Hebdo’s own concluding rhetorical device, let us ask “the world’s oldest and most important question”: how the hell did we end up here? Imagine being that liberal, energised by the moral certainty of your secularism, sustained by belief in the supremacy of your values and righteous indignation. Mightn’t you ask yourself: how the hell did I end up here, advocating bigotry and prejudice?