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Living in outrageous times: Charlie Hebdo and the culture of offence LSS Secretary Charlie Klendjian UCL Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society Thursday 29th January 2015 Hello everyone. Je suis Charlie. I have to say, when I looked at Twitter on 7th January and everyone was talking about “Charlie”, and “Je Suis Charlie” was trending, I thought to myself: what have I done now? Sadly this is as funny as it gets. Well we’re here to talk about “Charlie Hebdo and the culture of offence” so let me start by offending you. I don’t think the discussion about Charlie Hebdo is necessarily one about “offence” at all. Why do I say that? Well, people are quite happy to offend each other every day, and our newspapers, TV stations and creative industries simply wouldn’t be able to exist without causing offence and creating shock value. Disagreement, and the causing of offence, are indispensable aspects of our democracy because they enable us to debate the merits of one political ideology over another; disagreement and offence are crucial to the principle of free speech, and our way of life wouldn’t be our way of life without them. Do you think Mehdi Hasan, of the Huffington Post, who is considered by many to be a moderate Muslim but who has called non‐Muslims “cattle of no intelligence”, and who wooed the Question Time viewers recently with his strange thoughts on Charlie Hebdo, lies awake at night worrying about offending Tory voters when he writes articles criticising David Cameron and George Osborne? Do you think Mehdi Hasan worries about offending the “deeply‐held political beliefs” of Tories? Of course not. And nor should he. Think of the principle of free speech as parallel lines. So long as those lines are running parallel, i.e. so long as people are in agreement, there is absolutely no problem. But it’s the point at which those lines diverge that the principle of free speech becomes so important. And that’s the whole point of free speech – it’s to enable the airing of views that people disagree about, even very strongly. It’s to enable the scrutiny, criticism and yes even outright ridicule of ideas. Shutting down free speech by claiming you’re “offended” is basically an admission that you’ve failed to understand free speech. And if you don’t understand free speech, you don’t understand freedom. There are what we can probably call some “objective” forms of offence, such as racism, anti‐ Semitism, intruding into people’s grief – but I would call these “secular” forms of offence, that pretty much all decent people could agree are offensive, whether you are religious or not. But we’re still allowed to cause these types of offence; it’s not forbidden. The crucial thing about these “objective” or “secular” forms of offence is that accepting they are offensive does not require the acceptance of any article of faith. And let’s remember, people don’t generally enforce these “objective” or “secular” examples of offence at the point of an AK47. Arguing that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were “offensive” is different, because it does require accepting as a given, a particular article of faith – in this case the prohibition on depicting Mohammed – or accepting that all tenets of all faiths should be respected. And as we saw, this form of offence was enforced at the point of an AK47 in Paris. What’s more, it was the fact Mohammed was depicted that caused the problem, rather than the nature of the actual depictions. The test case for proving this to us was the image that the former extremist Maajid Nawaz, who I have a lot of respect for, tweeted over a year ago and which landed him in hot water – he received numerous death threats and there were calls for him to step down as a parliamentary candidate. Maajid tweeted the most banal Jesus and Mo picture imaginable – it was literally Jesus saying “Hey” and Mohammed saying “How you doing?”. Maajid deliberately chose that image to show it was the fact Mohammed was being depicted that was “offensive”, rather than the nature of the depiction. So, somehow we have accepted that we are allowed to cause offence generally, and we’re even allowed to offend virtually all religious sensibilities, for example with films such as the Life of Brian, artwork showing a crucifix in urine, or plays about Mormonism. So it appears there is one exception to this rule that we’re generally allowed to cause offence. That exception, as we have seen, is Islam. Islam is refusing to play by the rules. We are not allowed to offend Islam. I think we need a different word to “offence” for the purposes of this discussion. Don’t you? How about, I don’t know, the word “blasphemy”? Shall we just call it what it is? It’s blasphemy. Because when we use the term “offence” we are really using a code word for blasphemy. Today, we are living under a blasphemy law. And the saddest thing is, most people can’t even bring themselves to admit this. And there is other coded language that creeps in. When people say they don’t want to cause “offence” by depicting Mohammed, they are really saying “I do not want to be killed”, or “I do not want to be called a racist and lose my job.” And there’s more. Other coded language that creeps in is “sensitivity” and “respect”. Apparently, we must now be “sensitive” to those who want to kill us and we must “respect” them. Since when, exactly? Maybe I didn’t get the memo. So not only do we have a blasphemy law that we have to comply with, but we’re not even allowed to say we have a blasphemy law. This is what I call a blasphemy law on stilts. We are not even allowed to say there are things we are not allowed to talk about. This is what a blasphemy law does. It creates surreal situations. It is also a democracy‐killer. In January 2011 in Pakistan, the governor of Punjab, Salmaan Taseer, suggested that maybe, just maybe, it might be a sensible idea to reform Pakistan’s murderous blasphemy laws. Do you know what happened to him? He was murdered. Not by some random nutcase, but by his very own bodyguard. This is someone who hadn’t even blasphemed himself. This is someone who – as the journalist and author Nick Cohen described it – “blasphemed against the blasphemy law”. Unfortunately I have to report that nothing has really changed since the Charlie Hebdo massacre, as far as I can see. Of course everyone found it very easy to condemn murder, as they should, but they didn’t find it quite so easy to unequivocally defend the right to free speech – and in particular the right to depict Mohammed. And they found it harder still to actually physically exercise that right to depict Mohammed. Charlie Hebdo wasn’t a turning point; it was just the next step in a rapid downward spiral. If anything was going to be the turning point, it should have been this. If anything was going to create the “I am Spartacus” moment across the media and the press, it should have been this. Unfortunately it didn’t happen. There were some exceptions, for example the Independent and even the Guardian of all newspapers printed an image, and the BBC showed an image on the 10 o’clock News, on Newsnight, on Panorama, and on its website. But the other papers bottled it, the Spectator bottled it, and even Private Eye bottled it. I feel particularly let down by the Spectator and Private Eye. Private Eye makes a living out of being offensive. A year or so previously, the editor of the Spectator, Fraser Nelson, proudly said he would go to jail rather than sign up to Lord Justice Leveson’s press reforms. But he wasn’t prepared to allow his magazine to depict a man with a beard. Why? It’s because Fraser Nelson and the Spectator are living under a blasphemy law. Well who could blame someone for wanting to live, you might say. Fair point. But there is one simple rule here. If you are scared you have to say you are scared. You can’t use stupid phrases like “not wanting to cause offence”, or “respect”, or “sensitivity” or “people’s deeply‐held religious beliefs”. There is no shame whatsoever in being scared. It’s a natural and necessary human emotion. But there is shame in not admitting you’re scared, and there is double shame in saying you respect something when really you fear it. And take a moment to consider just how shameful it was of all the TV stations and newspapers who chose not to show the images. It was shameful for two reasons. Firstly, it showed a complete lack of solidarity with their professional colleagues; their fallen fellow journalists. And secondly, by refusing to show the images they failed to do their job. The images were the story. You can’t tell the story without them. Even if the press and the media said clearly that they had decided not to depict Mohamed because they were scared, that would have been an enormous step forward and I would have been very happy with that, because we would have started to identify the problem. Unfortunately, for the most part, people are still in denial about this problem. Forget all the analysis you have read over the last few weeks because it all comes down to two simple points.

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