When Charlie met Said in Paris

When Charlie met Said in Paris --Tragic Encounters of Zealots
A Satire by Lostalley  

The latest news from Paris informed that Said Brothers, arguably the most dramatized terrorists of our time, are dead, after Charlie Hebdo’s lethal assassination by the former. The spectacle prompted such an orgy of sympathy, fury, and irony that this onlooker can’t sit idle.

Four slain cartoonists look like a band of ultimate warriors with a pen: a communist sympathizer (Charb), an anarchy aficionado (Cabu), a religion demolitionist (Tignous), and a pornography purveyor (Wolinski). Cabu and Wolinski served in French army in Algeria in 60s. According to Haaretz, a Jewish daily, young Wolinski witnessed the murder of his Jewish father by his Tunisian Muslim employee and was haunted since. The two killers, Said brothers, were of Algerian descent and raised in orphanage in France. Strangely, they remind me of the usual suspects rounded up by Captain Louis Renault played by Claude Rains to cover for Rick played by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. In tackling terrorism, connecting dots is crucial, as any anti-terror specialist would tell you. So, history may play a role here, on both sides.

When I saw the banners of "Je Suis Charlie", a symbol of solidarity and defiance, fluttering from London to Hong Kong, I followed by holding my own,"Je Suis Charlie. Mais Je Suis Sontre Ses Caricatures". I also wonder, did the same people saying “Je Suis Charlie” now, came out to say, “Je Suis Gaza” then, when the densely populated ghetto city had been bombarded indiscriminately for weeks with thousands dead or maimed, many of them innocent women and children? Logically, an act of state terrorism of such magnitude should prompt an outcry of proportional scale. Hardly did I see that.

Of course, grievance, no matter how justified, is no excuse to kill. But provocation at all cost, in the words of the late editor-in-chief Charb, “I rather die standing up than live on knees”, suggests a weird martyrdom by a fringe and arrogant elitist. Eerily, radicalization seems an end instead of means for this ethically obscure and financially insecure weekly. Charlie is more a juvenile rebel without a justified cause than a mature provocateur with a worthy agenda. While moaning for the Famed Four, my hat is off to the inconspicuous Muslim bodyguard who died of protecting the people insulting his faith.

Democracy protects freedom of speech but also prohibits hate speech. Slandering a religious symbol such as Prophet Mohammed, vulgar or subtle, is not a legal crime in France. However, the argument in defense of protecting freedom at the expense of offending Islam is a selective justice at best and racist dice at worst. For the lack of poking fun at Holocaust, or demeaning Israel in similar vicious manner, is self-evident of the self-censorship by Charlie Hebdo editorial board. Their banner of upholding freedom is stained not only with their own blood, but also with their own moral contradiction that betrays the lofty ideal they die for. Let alone the fact that the very government they ridicule is the one to provide around-clock security protection and shut down some 20 embassies overseas in 2012 because of the paper’s outright rejection to remove a profane caricature of Prophet Mohammed, in the name of liberty but not fraternity, thanks to French taxpayers’ largess. Reversely, Charlie Hebdo’s predecessor, Hara-Kiri, was banned for satirizing the death of Charles de Gaulle in 1970 by French government who 45 years later unabashedly proclaims that it’s French tradition to uphold freedom of speech. Power of irony reigns above and beyond cognitive capability and collective memory.

I suspect, treating this tragic event as an existentialistic fight between barbarity and civilization, as defined by Secretary Kerry at French Embassy eulogy, is pitifully misguiding for a frightful majority and readily exploited by a cynical minority. Lionization of Charlie and demonization of Said are equally wrong and willfully perpetuated by major media here and in Europe. When the public fail to see the moral equation between the innocent Muslims killed by drones and Charlie Hebdo victims killed by AK-47, the war profiteers and hate-mongers are lurking in the dark gleefully. The urge to get even is strong and dangerous. It can spin out of control with ugly consequences.

I may sound like an absolute moralist, but I am not. I was seduced by the same vengeance when Uighur terrorists killed innocent civilians in China’s restive Muslim region. Short of annihilating the entire tribe, retaliating terrorism with terrorism is futile and unbearably costly. Until the root cause is uprooted, terrorism is unstoppable, unless outrage over Charlie Hebdo can produce enough hardcore vigilantes to kill their Muslim counterparts. In reality this scenario is highly unlikely. As Italian philosopher Umberto Eco once laments, “In today’s fragmented Christian world, it’s hard to find a new generation of holy knights to task like Kamikaze pilots in an all-out crusade against radical Islam”. A tongue-in-cheek but astute assessment of western hedonistic and selfish X- generation. Sure, West still has superior weaponry and can simply bomb Muslim infidels into submission or oblivion. Well, nature always reserves rescue for the underdog. Muslims can resort to their birthrate, as they are populating Europe and western China, fast and vast. What the tech-savvy fail to realize is that the most potent weapon is not the stealth bomber but the womb. What is true in the natural world, where fecund insects rule, can be true in our artificial one too. So, we go back to a less desirable option—compromise. Unfortunately, this may sound politically incorrect to retaliatory ears both in France and here in certain sector of America, a.k.a, War Party.

I conclude with this prediction. When idealogical zealots meet religious zealots, tragedy tends to occur. When that happens, the world may not suffer that much as perceived or imagined. We are left with less extremists. The murderers are condemned and the murdered inspire little. But, the legacy of Charlie vs. Said, like radioactive nuclear waste, needs a safe burial site, which is, to say the least, challenging.

Vive la France, the last remaining bastion of satirical freedom. 

Jan. 9, 2015, Bethesda, Maryland