Reader Hardy sent me a link to a SoundCloud discussion between an ex-Muslim artist/activist and a Charlie Hebdo critic; and I found a better version on YouTube that I’ve embedded below. Hardy noted this:
You may be aware of an ex-Muslim artist of Pakistani origin, who goes by the Twitter handle @NiceMangos. [JAC: she also has a website, Nice Mangos.] She keeps her identity secret, since she faces very real death threats. In her latest podcast she interviewed the Canadian journalist John Semley, who just wrote a terrible article on Charlie Hebdo (the typical regressive left drivel, unfortunately). Anyway, if you have time, the conversation is really worth listening to, because her arguments are so good…. and she is so funny and brave.
The column by Semley under discussion, “Charlie Hebdo editor Charb’s Open Letter is problematic“, appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail as a review of this book (click on screenshot to go to the book site, and note that the foreword is by Adam Gopnik):
Here’s a bit of Semley’s misguided review:
It became increasingly difficult to square the image of the slain Hebdo staffers as secular saints with their crude drawings depicting the Prophet Mohammed prostrated on his stomach, splayed anus pointed at the reader, or Jesus Christ having anal sex with God, drawings that began to strike me as inciting, offensive, sometimes racist and, more than anything, just stupid.
This is not meant to diminish their deaths, or the tragedy of it. But making an overstated case for the political, social and satirical relevance of the kind of infantile scribblings that you might find on a White Power message board online strikes me as oversimplifying. That Charlie Hebdo was racist and idiotic doesn’t justify the murder of its staff. But it doesn’t justify their work, either.
Charb drapes his racism and intellectual feebleness inside basic counterintuitive inversions of logic, as if he’s playing the role of Baby Žižek. The basic thrust of Open Letter is, “Well, are not the real Islamophobes the ones who automatically assume that all Muslims would be offended by our silly doodles?” Again: no.
. . . Again, I say this not to devalue the Hebdo shootings, but to dispel something of the aura of martyrdom surrounding it. Their ethics of freedom of expression and unchecked expression are all noble and good and all. But they’re built for a perfect world. And a world in which cartoonists who earn their livings doodling the genitals of major religious figures are hailed as vanquished heroes strikes me as the furthest thing from a perfect world.
Apparently, in Semley’s perfect world there would be no biting criticism of religion! But Semley’s review shows arrant ignorance of what he’s criticizing. I’ve written before about how many people who decry the Charlie Hebdo cartoons as racist or “Islamophobic” go by the images themselves, having no idea what the cartoons are really supposed to mean. In reality, the magazine itself was pro-immigrant and anti-racist, often using its cartoons to mock the anti-immigrant French Right, like Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party. Critics like Semley are in fact railing against something they don’t understand, and in fact haranguing those with whom they largely agree.
At any rate, here’s Semley’s one-hour discussion with Nice Mangos and her co-host, “Paul”. Semley does not come off well, raising every trite argument against mocking religion that’s ever been made.
I sent the interview above to Jeff Tayler, who knew many of the murdered writers for Charlie Hebdo and is intimately acquainted with the publication. Here’s his response (quoted with permission):
“Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists are all progressive. There wasn’t a racist among them. This Semley guy cannot, I assume, read French, so he cannot understand the captions and context, which would have destroyed his entire argument. Eiynah [the first name Nice Mango uses on her sites] does a great job of wearing him down, and clearly defeated him, reducing him to gibberish a couple of times.No progressive person in France considers Charlie Hebdo racist. The argument there against them comes from Islamists and their apologists.”
Put my feelings regarding Western liberals & their double standards in a table. #Exmuslim #AnApostateExperience pic.twitter.com/dcgvEbRklE
— Eiynah — (@NiceMangos) April 9, 2015
Believing that Charlie Hebdo is racist is as dumb as believing that All In The Family was racist. And when you realize that people who hold this position are intelligent in other ways it is even more maddening.
Semly has trouble forming complete sentences with his foot lodged in his mouth.
Hi Jerry,
Thank you so much for posting our chat with John Semley. I am so glad u enjoyed it 🙂
I was wondering if i could request the embedded video be changed to the one from our podcast’s YouTube channel. Its been hard to establish a viewership for the channel since its been banned and removed from youtube twice already in our short existence. If its not too much trouble – here’s the link to the original https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBve1K6u2X8
Thank you!
Eiynah
Hi Eiynah,
Thanks for stopping by. Yes, you did a good job countering every one of the “I favor free speech but. . ” arguments made by Semley, as well as his claims that religion should not be mocked or satirized strongly. I’ve changed the video to the one from your channel.
Keep up the good work, and I’m sure most of my readers are with me on that! Let us know when you have other podcasts up.
Thanks Eiynah – the bravery exhibited by non-western liberals like yourself is incredibly impressive.
I’m twenty minutes in to this alternately fascinating and infuriating podcast and Semley has just reacted in disbelief at the idea that your freedom to draw Mohammed might possibly be curtailed. I just had to take a break to lower my temperature, and also to write here in praise of your ability to remain polite. Listening to Semley’s clear lack of interest in counter-arguments, the way refutations of his position slide over him like ice over the surface of water…there’s no way I’d hold my temper for an hour. But never mind him – if it’s worth anything to you at all I hope you know that there are a lot of people who see you and other progressives outside the west as genuine heroes. Keep on keeping on.
Even if the CH staff had been frothing-at-the-mouth racists who drew their cartoons to mock, insult and incite hatred against muslims, that still wouldn’t justify or mitigate their murders to even the smallest degree. Even racists have the right not to be gunned down in cold blood by self-appointed judge/jury/executioners.
Hi Prof Coyne:
Your title says “………..Charlo….”.
(Typo)
Speaking of Jeff Tayler, I haven’t seen him on Salon for a few weeks. Perhaps I just missed a column or two. I do hope to see more of his stuff.
If you used Semley’s views as examples of cultural relativism, cultural relativists would claim you were strawmanning them. He’s a poster child for the worst of that ideology.
I won’t even go into what has already been pointed out regarding his failure to understand CH’s cartoons.
After about half an hour of that interview I had to take a break. Eiynah gets my respect for remaining so patient with this fellow. The best she is doing for us here is to show, live and up front, an example of the kind of left wing apologist we talk about and see out there corrupting this whole subject. If he said – “it’s not a level playing field” one addition time, I could be guilty of bodily harm. He is the train wreck of bad ideas and worse conclusions.
Well, you lasted longer than I did…
What most frustrated me was that one side was engaged in a genuine conversation, carried out in good faith, whilst the other wasn’t. Semley was completely uninterested in Eiynah and Paul’s arguments, to the extent that after they spoke there were short, dithering silences on his part, during which his brain machinery presumably switched itself back into ‘engage’ mode… then he started carrying on as though he hadn’t heard them. Infuriating.
It’s funny to hear the cognitive dissonance in Semley’s voice, as Eiynah repeatedly tells him that he is denying her the right to criticise her institutions the way he can criticise his – “Wait a minute” cogs whirr “I’m for the oppressed, right? But why am I not standing up for this oppressed person?” It’s because rather than the defenders of Charlie Hebdo having ‘moronically reductive’ arguments, it is he who has a simplistic grasp of the issues. Viz:
But as Eiynah says and personifies, what of the minorities within? He chooses to ignore the fact that CH and anyone else arguing against blasphemy, say, are standing up more for the minority ‘[p]eaceful, law-abiding Muslim and Arab communities’ than they are for themselves. They are doubly discriminated against; so why does he refuse to support the double underdog?
Yes! That’s the reason people should depict the prophet; if the things we’re allowed to depict are constrained by an authoritarian ideology for no other reason than to protect that ideology then that’s the very definition of an illegitimate infringement of free speech, and should be resisted.
He later says “Of course you can mock Mohammed”, but I would like to see him really go at it, as he might ridicule atheists. For example, see here – http://www.partisanmagazine.com/blog/2015/3/17/after-the-last-trumpet – and note how mockingly he refers to atheists like Eiynah in this podcast. Maybe that’s why he refuses to support this double underdog?
If he’s the expert on how to criticise Islam, then go on, show everyone how to do it. But no, in the end Semley thinks it’s counterproductive to ridicule Islam, because their apologists are best at manufacturing an offence specifically designed to protect their beliefs.
There can be no free speech unless speech is free for ideas and sentiments that are deplorable.
So saying X is okay because it is not really detestable is not a defense of free speech. It is the opposite: a concession that political speech should be regulated, but this discourse doesn’t fall outside the bounds of permitted thought.
Speech controls are fine, but can you be assured that your political faction will have the power to police the boundaries? You can look at America, would you want Trump’s people censoring what it viewed as “hate speech”?
The Academics who are trying to indoctrinate on campus might be surprised when they realize that they don’t live on islands separated from the broader society and political structures. How hard would it be for a Republican Congress to revisit the funding of higher education or to look at a national curriculum?
The other thing that escapes people is that totalitarian mind control doesn’t work as well as the tabula rasa folks imagined. The Soviet Union did not become a happy socialist society. Communism fell, and with it the lies and half-truths that had been suppressed with censorship fell too. The tables will turn, and your side will get what they gave.
There can’t be a democracy without a political opposition that can meaningfully challenge the other side. This means when a political faction uses its power to suppress political speech it doesn’t like, it undermines democracy.
The so-called liberal “double-standard” can be explained by examination of the demographic composition of Leftist voters.
Having heard cogent explanations of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons from native French speakers steeped in the French satirical tradition, I am convinced those cartoons are not racist, xenophobic, or anti-Muslim.
But it matters not a whit if they were; the murdered cartoonists would still be free-speech martyrs. Freedom of speech does not depend at all on whether I or anyone else approves of that speech, or on whether it meets any of our standards for political correctness. Repugnant speech is as entitled to a public airing as speech deemed salubrious (and, indeed, more in need of such an airing to disinfect it). Hell, if George Lincoln Rockwell (someone whose ideology I could not have been opposed to more vehemently) had been murdered to silence his speech (rather than by a fellow member of the American Nazi Party for personal reasons), then he would have been a martyr to free speech.
I’ve noticed that in all the supposedly most vile, slanderous, insulting, etc. cartoons, the characters are never identified (as is typical in American political cartoons) as to who they are supposed to be. Thus it is left up to the reader to assume (or psychologically project) that a bearded figure with a cloth on his head is not only supposed to be a Muslim, but is in fact supposed to be Muhammad, the prophet of Islam.
But none of the cartoons actually state that. Thus those who are insulted are seeing exactly what they want to see, not what is actually there.
Additionally, as a large percentage of male Muslims are named “Muhammad” or one of its variant spellings, actually naming a character as “Muhammad” also means nothing. There are tens of millions of people named Muhammad. But the cartoons don’t even do that.
Insults, or blasphemy, are all in the mind of the beholder.
The cognitive dishonesty displayed by John Semley is ridiculous. What makes this whole situation worse, considering critical thinking is supposed to be a basic skill of journalists, is his recent response to a question about the outcome of the podcast discussion.
John Semley was asked, on Tw*tter, if the discussions had caused him to changed any of his positions. His short answer: None
https://twitter.com/johnsemley3000/status/701108520373133313
That simple word reply is an incredibly worrisome response & sadly represents a wider reality of poor critical thinking evident in society (in this case, that of Canada.)
Should have included the original tw**t posed to John Semley. I have added it below, with Semley’s response:
https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/701108207175925760
https://twitter.com/johnsemley3000/status/701108520373133313
Not too much else to say about this!
Semley is being either dishonest or obtuse here. From his reaction during the recording, it is clear he had never before considered Eiynah’s minority-within-the-minority point, where an outside satirist is standing up for those inside a minority community who are prohibited by that community from speaking out on their own.
You could actually hear his lazy lack of interest in their arguments every time he replied. Eiynah and Paul’s points just sailed right past him. I think it’d be fair to say he was not acting in good faith.
Not to comment on the issue at hand, but just by way of informing readers: Open Letter is a very short and pretty lightweight piece of writing. Worth reading, but consider it a bit of a luxury with respect to your book budget.
Islam does present a unique challenge for Islam. If we look around at society (true in Australia, at least), we see the anti-immigrant bigoted intolerant rhetoric directed towards Muslims. So it’s easy to see any criticism of Islam and its ideas in that same narrative, irrespective of intention and outcomes.
What it does, I think, is show the tension between tolerance and progressivism. That we can see that there’s an overlap in what we would have to tolerate within others, that we would not otherwise tolerate if it were within ourselves. Can we stand up for LGBT equality and equality for women while being tolerant of cultures where there are oppression? My thinking on the tension is that we can’t, for it removes the warrant for standing up for those ideals. What recourse would we have for challenging the misogyny or discrimination if they are part of the culture?
The aim of tolerance is noble, and there may be some pragmatic reasons to tolerate certain practices and cultural impositions, but we cannot shy away from the aims of progressivism just because we fear conservatives might take vindication from it.
I think Elynah & Paul did an excellent job here and demolished Semley’s arguments, but would like to add a couple additional thoughts:
Elynah & Paul’s argument that some restrictions on Muslims in the West (in the example given, the prohibition on the wearing of niqab) are justified by the restrictions imposed on westerners traveling to the East is invalid. The rights extended to the immigrants in the west should never depend on what rights are extended westerners in in those immigrants’ nation of origin.
Western immigrants should, instead, be extended exactly the same rights and opportunities as are available to the host nation’s native population. In this regard, there should be no religious exemption for facially neutral laws applicable to all (unless there is evidence that the law, although neutral on its face, was enacted with a specific religious animus).
Elynah & Paul also missed the opportunity, when comparing the niqab to a KKK hood, to make the point that the Klan also claimed religious motivation for its policies, of a piece with the religious convictions espoused by the Klan’s close allies (often resulting in overlapping membership) in the Christian Identity movement.
Finally, whether we deem those murdered in retaliation for their speech to be “heroic” will depend upon how much we value what they had to say (which will, in turn, usually devolve to whether not we agreed with them). But whether we adjudge their speech noble or noxious, the diminution to free expression resulting from their being silenced is precisely the same.
“…some restrictions on Muslims in the West (in the example given, the prohibition on the wearing of niqab)”
I do not see this prohibition as a restriction. In our court system the exposed face is assumed to be necessary for ascertaining the truthfulness of the testimony. Whether this is actually justifiable or not may be questioned, but until that is settled it is the obligation of new residents to abide by our customs in a courtroom. So the niqab could be seen as a cut-away or special allowance, not a prohibition.
I see it the same way you do, Rick; but in the audio, both sides seemed to address it as a restriction (as it applied to photographs of Muslim woman for French government IDs, I think), contrasting it to the restrictions imposed on western male visitors in Qatar. That’s the reason I posed it as such.
Right. I thought the point being made was a bit confused. Whether Muslim countries enforce their rules is kind of irrelevant. I think a more important comparison would be whether Sikhs should be allowed to carry knives (or box cutters) on airplanes.
Regarding that tweet from Eiynah about liberal double-standards. I’m of mixed feelings about it. It certainly hits on a valid point insofar as we can find a tendency among liberals to be softer on the practices of other cultures and religions.
On the other hand, it does imply a level of blindness from liberals that seems exaggerated.
To the extent I’ve tried to take in the views from “both sides” of the liberal debate, it only emphasizes to me that there is typically more common ground going on, and each side tends to start exaggerating the differences they have with the other.
For instance, I don’t know that I’ve yet actually seen purported “regressive left” folks saying they aren’t concerned about misogyny within Islamic cultures, or simply ignoring the problems of LGBTQ persons have within those cultures. When I see the question posed to them, they tend to acknowledge such problems. And when it comes to the religious motives of Islamic terrorists, they also generally acknowledge that reality, even if they go on to emphasize “but we have to look at OTHER factors behind such behavior…”
Now, critics of the “regressive left” like Sam Harris will point to this and rail that the RL are failing to acknowledge the extent to which Islamic beliefs are behind these problems.
But the thing is, I see a similar issue with how Harris (and others) approach the problem.
When other factors are brought up to explain the behavior of Muslims, or of Islamic Terrorists, Sam will say “Yes, certainly there ARE other factors at play, but we can’t ignore the influence of their religion. We have to take a hard look at THAT factor, which people don’t seem to want to do.”
Which certainly makes sense. If you think an important factor in Muslim society, or Islamic Terrorists (note that’s not equating the two!) is religion and no one else is shining a spot light on this, then it may fall to you to shine that spotlight. Because, yes there are other factors, but since those are already being over-emphasized, you don’t need to repeat them.
So it ends up as being a question of what you are emphasizing, not what you are denying.
Unfortunately result of this is that – even though it’s valid, such emphasis comes with trade-offs: you end up with a similar look as your opponents, paying a sort of quick lip-service to your opponent’s points “Yes, I acknowledge X is ALSO a factor, but I think we need to more fully acknowledge Y factor..”
So both sides have a “Yes..BUT…” position, and it makes each side look disingenuous to the other.
Which brings me back to that tweet. Aside from Sam Harris’ Moral Landscape anecdote about meeting someone who said we had no grounds to criticize another culture’s treatment of women and children, I’m not aware of many (if any) other examples of this, where so-called regressive leftists have actually refused to acknowledge human-rights or social justice problems within any Muslim communities or countries. Or who have implied the Muslim community is somehow outside the bounds of criticism on such issues.
If anyone has links to “regressive left” groups saying this, I’d be interested in what I missed.
Here’s an article explaining why campaigning about FGM is “racist”. http://tinyurl.com/joxndnf
I don’t think its so much what so-called “regressive leftists” do, its more of what they don’t do: ACTIVELY supporting those who are minorities within minorities. Also constructing over-simplistic models of the world based on “privilege” and identity based group membership, and completely failing to recognise the diversity within those groups.
It’ very, very common to hear “islamophobe” or “racist” hurled at anyone criticising islam. A previous post on Whyevolutionistrue:
http://tinyurl.com/hfjjzdg
I’ve been a big fan of Eiynah for a while now. I thoroughly recommend following her blog and podcast.
Not only did Eiynah and Paul make Semley sweat in his boots and sound ridiculous, as the name of their podcast points out they did it entirely via polite conversation.
I don’t think one is being a tone troll by just acknowledging how very effective that tactic can be, esp. in light of all the yelling heads on broadcast media these days.
Ultimately this encounter was a failure because of Semley’s bad faith, shared of course by the regressive left who on the one hand regard enlightenment vslues as oppressive when applied to those who don’t share them but on the other as a stick to beat those who believe that no group is entitled to special treatment which vitiates the commonality holding western societies together.
If the French themselves say that the only people sayin Charlie Hebdo is racist are Islamists, shouldn’t we listen?
These are, after all, the alleged victims of the racism, not some white people who know other white people who make their living drawing offensive cartoons of someone else’s prophet who THEY hold in the highest regards