#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

#JeSuisCharlie: A View from London

I am, as I write this, standing at the edge of a small crowd of people gathered on the steps of the National Gallery in London. It is one of a series of such gatherings now taking place around the world; a show of solidarity with the journalists and cartoonists of the magazine Charlie Hebdo who were murdered by Muslim fanatics yesterday.

It also purports to be a demonstration in support of free speech and expression. Paris briefly became the latest battleground in the fight between free speech and the forces of jihad, and it is a relief to see people on the streets in support of right side of that dichotomy. Never mind that many of them will not have read the magazine in question, and never mind that many of those gathered here, if they had seen some of Charlie Hebdo’s more risqué cartoons and caricatures, would have, under other circumstances, decried the magazine as a racist screed not worth the paper it’s printed on. Tonight at least, the principle is the right one.

The demonstration began some time before I arrived. I overheard one reporter as she was speaking to her camera; apparently there had been as many as seven hundred people in the crowd before I arrived. And there are still over a hundred of them here now, some holding pens and notepads, some holding cartoons, and some holding signs and placards bearing the Twitter hashtag that has come to represent the movement: #JeSuisCharlie.

The reverent atmosphere here feels slightly out of place. The magazine in question, and its spiritual counterparts in countries around the world - the likes of South Park, the offices of which were attacked in 2010, and Jyllands-Posten, the Danish magazine that caused its country so much trouble when, in 2006, it printed a set of cartoons that were deemed offensive by rabid mobs in Pakistan and elsewhere – celebrate irreverence. That is the crime for which they have been deemed worthy of death and destruction, and that is the reason their offices are now, and have been for many years, under heavy police protection. These are the sorts of magazines that would shout to interrupt a vigil, and so, with that in mind, this seems to me to be a very quiet demonstration in support of free speech.

It is, though, pleasingly diverse. There will undoubtedly be people who want to excuse these attacks or misdirect the blame for them; people to whom the notion of moral responsibility is alien; people who will look at the attacks in Paris, and those that have happened before and will almost certainly happen again, and claim that they are in some way excused by our own actions. “We had it coming,” in other words, for our criminal governments and our oppression of Muslims and our drone strikes and our obsession with oil. Well, tell that the man who goes by the name of Ken, and who is one of four or five people here bearing the flags of the Kurdish YPG, and its women’s’ wing the YPJ. They have placed a sign on the floor, adding to the pile of newspapers, comic strips, pens, candles and placards, which reads: “The Kurds will never forget you.” These men and women are themselves an counterargument against the nihilists and the masochists who believe these attacks were a just response to imperialism.

I asked Ken whether he wanted to issue his own pre-emptive response to that line of argument, and he duly obliged. He told me he believed that what motivated him to stand there, in the cold and the wet, holding his flag, was the same thing that motivated his brothers and sisters in Iraq and Kurdistan. He is not in a position to take up arms, but he felt obligated to show, in some way, his support for the values that motivate the Kurdish and Iraqi forces in their fight against barbarism. And he made the point, so often missed by idiot commentators like Glenn Greenwald, that the fight against the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State – the fight against Islamic extremism in general – is not one of foreign imperialists against beleaguered freedom fighters, as the likes of Michael Moore would have us believe, any more than it is a regional, territorial struggle between competing tribes. The Iraqi and Kurdish forces fighting against Islamic State are, as Ken rightly says, fighting for us in a war that much of our own public would rather not acknowledge or engage with; the war between the civilized world and the forces of jihad who would see it all burn.

It is not a conflict in which our allies in the region enjoy the unqualified support of Western governments, and it hasn't been for some considerable time. Since the US-led intervention became a bungled and, for then-President Bush, a near impeachable farce of an occupation, public opinion in the US and the UK has been marshalled far too easily by those from the ostensibly anti-war movement; those who spoke for far too many people when, in their guise as MoveOn.org, they glibly labelled the impressive General Petraeus “General Betray Us.”

The same bold cowardice provided ammunition for much of the success the Democrats enjoyed in the 2008 election, and was still seen as a sufficient giver of momentum when the Obama administration chose to sabotage the talks with the Iraqi government over the renewal of the Status of Forces Agreement. (I have yet to see anyone make the argument that the complete withdrawal of forces from Iraq made the current crisis less likely.)

But we do occasionally see tentative shifts in the direction of good sense. The crimes committed by the likes of Islamic State have, at the very least, deprived George Galloway of some of the platforms he once enjoyed. And time will tell whether this attack – an attack that took place not in some remote part of the world but in the capital city of France – will move us toward a little righteous blowback of our own. (By blowback, I do not mean the unfortunate and all but inevitable support for Front National, or the Pegida movement in Berlin.) The response has, thus far, been a vast improvement from that seen in 1989 and 2006.

But, still, many high profile news outlets have been reporting on the story – a story generated by images, from an attack which was itself a response to those images, and which has taken place in the age of the image – without showing the images in question. I have asked the question of three different media organisations, including the BBC and ITV: Will you show the cartoons when you report on this story (as the likes of Slate magazine have, to their credit) or opt for the cowards' approach; the one taken by outlets from CNN to The Telegraph? I almost succeeded in cornering Nick Robinson of the BBC, but he was dismissing all questions with the disappointing stock response: “Sorry, I'm in a rush.” The cameramen, who were more talkative, were unable to tell me whether their employers would stand up for the freedom of speech and expression and, as it transpired, the answer was disappointing.

As I finish writing this, I am sitting on the tube. I have looked at stories on the websites of those organisations I have already mentioned; I have not seen a single cartoon.

This is not brave, and this is not 'appropriate', this is capitulation to those who, at their most moderate, believe that free speech is licensed on condition of banality; on condition that it does not offend. Well, brothers and sisters: fuck that. I hope you agree with the sentiment, but it doesn't – or shouldn't – matter either way.