Ten years ago today, two men armed with Kalashinikovs barged into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris and opened fire. They unleashed hell. In less than two minutes, 12 people were slaughtered, eight of them writers or cartoonists at the famously scurrilous weekly. Their crime? Blasphemy. They had mocked Muhammad and they paid for it with their lives.
They were doing a jig on the graves of the dead. It defied moral comprehension
A decade on, this atrocity, this crime against liberty, still chills the soul. I can’t be the only journalist who works in a small, busy office who has found himself imagining the terror of that day. The din of gunfire, the whiff of smoke, the killers’ shrill cries of ‘Allahu Akbar’ so that their victims might know the reason for their pitiless execution. No means of escape, no offer of mercy – it is a horror that stains our age.
It felt like a medieval hysteria had descended on modern-day France. Satirists put to bloody death for the ‘sin’ of mocking a prophet – this was 7th-century savagery in 21st-century Europe. It was an apocalyptic assault not only on life and limb but on France itself, on its founding ideal of liberté. Into the land of enlightenment came the unforgiving violence of a darker, more tyrannous time.
Ten years on, here’s what’s horrifying: the killers have won. The murderous brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, may have been justly slain following the attack, but their grim, despotic ideology still stalks Europe. Their twisted belief that criticism of Islam is so hurtful and sinful that it must be firmly punished is found everywhere now.
Only where they no doubt referred to such devilish speech as ‘blasphemy’, we call it ‘Islamophobia’. And where they believed such unholy utterances should be punished by summary execution, we prefer to punish them with bans or fines or social ostracism.
Morally, though – if not physically – it amounts to the same thing: the penalisation of all foolish mortals who dare to diss the religion of Islam. How has this happened? Why are we upholding, not the roguish libertinism of Charlie Hebdo, but the censorious fanaticism of its persecutors?
After the massacre there was an outpouring of solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. But it was shortlived. It wasn’t long before all those placards declaring ‘Je Suis Charlie’ were trampled under the boot of business as usual. Just a week after the slaughter, a writer for the Guardian slammed Charlie Hebdo’s ‘racist caricatures’ that create such a ‘toxic environment’. Students at Bristol University said Charlie Hebdo could not be sold on campus because it would violate ‘our safe space policy’. Students at Manchester were forbidden from displaying Charlie Hebdo’s covers.
Three months after the massacre, various luminaries of the literary world protested against PEN America’s decision to give Charlie Hebdo a freedom of expression award. Why decorate a mag that causes such ‘humiliation and suffering’ to Muslims, they haughtily cried? Then there was the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s sick stunt: it gave Charlie Hebdo its Islamophobe of the Year award. Two months after Charlie Hebdo’s staff were butchered for being ‘Islamophobes’. They were doing a jig on the graves of the dead. It defied moral comprehension.
The violence of the killers was compounded by the treachery of the intellectuals. The one visited brute force on Charlie Hebdo, the other failed to defend its right to print anything it bloody well pleases. Europe’s fleeting cry of sympathy for Charlie Hebdo gave way to pompous head-shaking over its needless provocations. It was a species of appeasement, with the cultural elites warming more to the grievances of the killers than to the God-given liberty of their victims; more to the mental pain felt by easily offended Islamists than to the fatal pain of the men and women they executed for speechcrimes.
We end up in the truly dispiriting situation where on the tenth anniversary of this massacre over ‘blasphemy’, Keir Starmer’s government is thinking of adopting a new, sweeping definition of ‘Islamophobia’. There are fears the definition will demonise perfectly legitimate criticism of Islam and thus ‘curtail free speech’. That our leaders are mulling over a clampdown on anti-Islamic speech a decade after 12 of our French cousins were butchered for the very same feels unconscionable. I swear, if Starmer so much as says the word Islamophobia today, as we remember the good men and women of Charlie Hebdo, he will not soon be forgiven.
Everyone will condemn the massacre today. Yet the moral logic of the massacre still lives. The ideological fuel of that barbaric act – that criticism of Islam must not be allowed – is now an article of faith in polite society. Hence the movie The Lady of Heaven was withdrawn from British cinemas in 2022 on the basis that it was offensive to Muslims. And the Batley Grammar schoolteacher remains in hiding for the ‘sin’ of showing his pupils an image of Muhammad. And critics of Islam are blacklisted from university campuses.
Our punishment of blasphemy is less barbarous than that visited on Charlie Hebdo ten years ago, but it is equally as yellow-bellied and regressive. Enough is enough. It’s time for a full-throated defence of freedom of speech, the liberty upon which every other liberty depends. No god, prophet, book or fad should be ringfenced from our hard-won right to criticise and mock. Je suis toujours Charlie – et vous?
