Du kannst mich nicht beleidigen

(Some comments on the Charlie Hebdo Catastrophe)

   That German phrase translates as “You can’t insult me.” But, since it is itself insulting, it must be understood as it is intended: not that you won’t succeed because I am impervious—that is, resistant to, hardened against, insults—anybody’s, yours included. What it means is that you, you can’t insult me because of who you are, because you have no standing.

   If fervent adherents to the religion of Islam had taken that position, many lives would have been saved. Who are the cartoonists and writers of Charlie Hebdo so that they can insult anybody? They are not lapsed Muslims who once revered Muhamed and then left the faith to become its critics. Nor are their targets former Jews who reacted against their religion, nor Catholics who stopped believing in the divinity of Jesus, not to mention the authority of the pope. Adherents to these faiths might be justified to feel animosity to defectors, formerly my fellows and now aliens. Nor are they fervent adherents of other (than Muslim) faiths, in “competition” with Islam. Even they would be  subject to the principle that they are not their brothers’ keepers, not to mention that no one has given them the authority to act on negative judgments they might have about their former confrères.

   The fact is that the Charlie Hebdo writers and cartoonists are not adherents of any faith—not in their capacity as journalists, whatever their beliefs, if any, as private citizens. Their concern is with public discourse, pushing the claim that one should be able to say anything in public. Free speech is not as ingrained elsewhere in the world as it is in the United States, where the limit is yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

   But you don’t get heard, you don’t sell publications, you don’t derive even a modest salary, unless someone wants to listen to what you have to say. Thus a humorous magazine of insults is born: insult alone does not sell, but insult that is funny does—if only modestly so, even in France.

   The Islamists who murdered those journalists were deeply wrong in their target. They looked at the words and the drawings without assessing the motive that brought them into existence. Muhamed was not insulted, because no one intended to denigrate Muhamed: he was the victim, so to speak, of strenuous free speech advocates or, more closely, perhaps, of intellectuals who thought—or at any rate professed—that no one should believe anything they can’t see or that science has not shown to be the case. Yesterday it was someone else, tomorrow it will be another.  (Sextus Empiricus, the grandfather of skepticism, lived nearly 2000 years ago.)  But is skepticism blasphemy? Or are we here just dealing with a kind of loose talk. And were we to punish loose talk, none of us would go free, including the murderers now themselves dead.

   It would be very worthwhile for there to be a discussion not only about “Islam’s Problem with Blasphemy,” as launched by Mustafa Akoyl in The New York Times of January 13, but about the nature of blasphemy itself. To have a case of blasphemy, there needs to be an act and a motive. Much more clarity is needed about both.