by Greg Mayer
Following up on Jerry’s post, I note that in a piece in the New York Times op-ed pages yesterday, Andrew Solomon and Suzanne Stossel, the leaders of American PEN, defend giving an award to Charlie Hebdo, and defend Charlie Hebdo itself. The piece is quite good, suffering only from a bit of accommodationism toward the opponents of Charlie Hebdo, calling them “well-intentioned people with shared values [who] interpret and weigh principles differently.”
I especially like that they defended Hebdo by quoting Christiane Taubira, the French justice minister (the black woman in the monkey cartoon), who rose to their defense. They note:
[Taubira] delivered a poignant elegy at the funeral of one of her supposed tormentors, Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, saying that “Tignous and his companions were sentinels, lookouts, those who watched over democracy,” preventing it from being lulled into complacency.
And, Solomon and Stossel added this:
The leading French anti-racism organization, SOS Racisme, has called Charlie Hebdo “the greatest anti-racist weekly in this country.”
In the print version, a subheading reading “It’s an award for courage, not cartoons” is quite misleading. The piece makes it clear that it is not an award for mere courage (you could give that to a German soldier at Stalingrad), and Solomon and Stossel give an explicit endorsement of the cartoons as anti-racist—a necessary defense of the “norms to which free societies subscribe”.