After you’ve perused Charlie Hebdo cartoons for a while, and learned about the magazine’s history and views, you can look at the cartoon below, drawn by Charlie Hebdo’s new editor Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, and understand what it’s trying to say. To ensure accuracy of translation, I’ve asked Matthew, who speaks nearly perfect French, to give us the English:
Top: “What would have happened to little Aylan if he had grown up?”
Below: “He’d have become an ass-groper in Germany!”
“Aylan”, of course, is Aylan Kurdi—more correctly spelled as “Alan Kurdi“—the 3-year-old Syrian boy who drowned trying to make it to Europe as a refugee. His death symbolizes the terrible plight of those refugees, as well as the soul-searching of countries trying to deal with a huge wave of immigrants. And the photo of the dead boy aroused the sympathies of many people, bringing out the better nature of those who decided that absorbing as many refugees as possible was the right thing to do.
When I saw that cartoon, and made out the caption in my rudimentary French, I knew exactly what it meant: it was mocking the anti-refugee camp who argued that letting in Muslims would lead to a wave of rape and thuggery like that inflicted on hundreds of women in Cologne on New Year’s Eve.
As Grania wrote here a week ago, and I agree with her completely:
Whatever the investigation eventually uncovers about the attacks in Cologne on New Year’s Eve, three things will remain true: it is not the fault of Europe’s trying to help as many refugees as they can; the overwhelming majority of Muslim immigrants to Europe arrived there only to seek a new and better life for themselves and their families; and the mass attacks on women in Cologne that night were not an example of “everyday sexism”.
The nearly 700 complaints of harassment that resulted from the Cologne attacks haven’t yet worked their way through Germany’s judicial system, but people are already arguing that the cartoon shown above is actually supporting calls to restrict immigration, and claiming that it’s racist and “Islamophobic.”
In fact, it shows the opposite. Charlie Hebdo has had a history of mocking the racist and anti-immigrant French Right, like Marine Le Pen and her National Front Party. The cartoon clearly satirizes the extremist views of that Right on immigration, in precisely the same way that this famous New Yorker cartoon mocked those who questioned Barack Obama’s origins and sympathies before the 2008 election:
Yet, as the BBC reports, the Charlie Hebdo cartoon has lit a fuse of outrage. Here’s some of it
From an Iraqi journalist in London:
From British journalist Sunny Hundal:
From a British politician and former MP:
But least one person got it: a Sudanese-born writer and columnist in Britain:
In a piece at the Guardian, “Charlie Hebdo’s refugee cartoon isn’t satirical. It’s inflammatory“, Jonathan Freedland, while admitting that the cartoon might be mocking anti-refugee sentiment (he’s not sure, which shows how clueless he is), it simply gives fuel to the bigots:
Perhaps the cartoonist wanted to take a stand against the current hardening in attitudes to those seeking refuge. In fact, he simply provided another example of that very shift. His image takes its place alongside the Danish decision this week, apparently echoed by the Swiss, to confiscate valuables from new arrivals – everything except their wedding or engagement rings – and Turkey’s illegal policy of sending refugees back to the Syrian hell they fled. It doesn’t challenge the current mood of fear and loathing, it just adds to it.
Freedland even says that the New Yorker cartoon of the Obamas, which I found thrillingly appropriate, did the same thing:
The [New Yorker] insisted it was “clearly a joke”, sending up all the scare stories about Obama. But despite that noble intention, the cartoon served to hone – more elegantly than any of the candidate’s enemies had done – the rightwing caricature of Obama into a single, memorable image. Up to that point, no opponent had explicitly said Obama was a terrorist-loving Muslim but now they didn’t have to. Now there was an image lodged in the consciousness that did the job for them.
That’s just wrong. Maybe no famous political opponent of Obama had called him out as a secret Muslim, but plenty of regular American opponents already had. The cartoon produced, as far as I can see, no inflammatory effect. Likewise, the denigration of refugees by the European right began well before the Charlie Hebdo cartoon appeared (which was clearly in early January). In the end, Freedland resorts to the trope of Keyboard Warriors everywhere:
Maybe a couple of the satirists’ own rules might be helpful. The former Spitting Image writer John O’Farrell says he adheres to the time-honoured maxim that the comic should always be “punching up”, not down. Laughing at the weak is never funny, and there is nobody weaker than a dead child washed up on a beach. As for the second rule, O’Farrell recalls David Attenborough’s advice to the Monty Python team: “Use shock sparingly.”
Can Freedland get any wronger than that? I largely reject the “punching up” versus “punching down” distinction, for harmful views and bad behavior deserve to be criticized or satirized regardless of who espouses them, but what Freedland doesn’t seem to get is that the cartoon is indeed “punching up”! It’s not laughing at the weak, but laughing at European right-wingers, bigots and fascists. Is it “punching down,” for instance, to mock the views of Marine Le Pen? I don’t think so.
Now you can question whether Riss’s cartoon is tasteful, in that it mocks the right by showing the dispossessed, but I don’t know a more effective way to do it. It’s certainly an outrageous, even shocking, cartoon, but it makes its point clearly. Does it offend me? Well, I find it a bit shocking, and it surely offends the family of Alan (reports are that it did), but one has to ask if that offense is necessary to make a greater point: showing the stupidity of stigmatizing all refugees. Call the cartoon tasteless if you will, but you can’t call it racist or Islamophobic. And if that’s Islamophobic, than so were the Danish cartoons of the Jyllands-Posten, and the earlier Charlie Hebdo cartoons of Mohammed. By what light can we satirize the malevolence of the Catholic Church, but not that of Islam, or of bigoted right-wingers?
h/t: Randy
