THE latest issue of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical French magazine, spotlights Michel Houellebecq, author of a new novel that imagines the Islamisation of France and then the European Union. Critics had denounced Mr Houellebecq’s book (see article), which depicts a near future in which Islamists win France’s presidency and compromise its freedoms, as Islamophobic scaremongering. Then, on the day of its publication, masked gunmen attacked Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris. They yelled “Allahu Akbar” as they murdered 12 people and wounded others, in France’s worst terrorist attack for half a century (see article). The gunmen fled; police have named two brothers as suspects. As anti-immigrant sentiment—especially the anti-Muslim kind—seeps across Europe, from street protests in Dresden (see article) to English ballot boxes, the atrocity in Paris seemed ghoulishly to realise the continent’s darkest nightmare; almost, in fact, to caricature it.
For all the grim, incessant warnings of terrorist threats, naturally the first reaction to this massacre, in France and elsewhere, was outrage. Yet the murders also demand a fuller response. The magazine was targeted because it cherished and promoted its right to offend: specifically to offend Muslims. That motive invokes two big themes. One is free speech, and whether it should have limits, self-imposed or otherwise. The answer to that is an emphatic no. The second is Muslim Europe—and whether episodes such as this are part of a civilisational struggle between Western democracies and extreme Islam, on a battlefield stretching continuously from Peshawar to Raqqa to the centre of Paris. Again, the answer is no.
Cartoons versus Kalashnikovs
Charlie Hebdo has been hit before. In 2006 its decision to reprint inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, first published in Denmark, was described by Jacques Chirac, then France’s president, as a “manifest provocation”. In 2011 the magazine’s offices were firebombed after it published an issue purporting to be guest-edited by the Prophet. That did not deter it: despite pleas from some French politicians, it insisted on its right to free speech. This week, when the gunmen came, they reportedly called for the offending cartoonists by name.
The magazine had the right to publish everything it did, and French law is right to allow it to. There can be no “but” in that sentence. Even when a picture or opinion is imprudent or tasteless, unless it directly incites violence it should not be banned. Charlie Hebdo lampoons all religions, not just Islam—but it would have the right to single out that faith if it wanted to, just as Islamists in Europe are entitled to denounce Western decadence if they so choose. In any case, there is a world of difference, and several centuries of liberal political thought, between giving and taking offence and killing people over it. Nothing can be done with a pencil or a keyboard that warrants a reprisal with a Kalashnikov.
This attack was more insidious than a random fusillade on a street or train. Part of the aim, probably, was to cow the Western media in their treatment of Islam. It must not. If the proper first response to the slaughter was outrage, after considering the argument that Charlie Hebdo made about free speech, the second response should be outrage, too.
Many observers will connect this fresh footage of gun-wielding men not to cartoons but to another kind of image: chaos in northern Nigeria, the snuff videos of Islamic State (IS) and Taliban-inflicted carnage in Afghanistan and Pakistan. All can seem part of a long, ongoing conflict between the values of the Enlightenment and obscurantist barbarism. For those who see things that way, the only solution is to fight back, by cracking down at home and engaging the enemy abroad.
Criminals, not clashing civilisations
They have a point: there may well be a connection between Paris and foreign jihad. Part of it is ideological: in their minds, at least, terrorists in the West are often waging a worldwide battle for their faith, powered by ideas they pick up on the internet. There is a practical link, too. Some of those involved in recent European plots—and one of the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo attack—have been radicalised and trained in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nearby and accessible, Syria is the main destination. This reflux is a worry for security services in France (home of the European Union’s largest Muslim population) and across the continent, precisely because, newly expert and inflamed, the returnees can perpetrate commando-style attacks like that on Charlie Hebdo. Involving small numbers of assailants and “soft” targets, these are much harder to detect and prevent than elaborate plans to blow up airliners.
Islam in Europe - perception and reality
But preventing them is not impossible—indeed European security services frequently do. Slow though some were to spot the danger, the French and other governments have introduced measures to stop their citizens travelling abroad to fight, and to intercept them if they come back. Still, more pressure could be applied to Turkey, notionally an ally, to help stop the flow into Syria. “Deradicalisation” programmes for returnees, which might turn some of them into reverse missionaries for the awful truth about IS, are still in their infancy.
For all that, thinking of Islamist terrorism as a single, coherent adversary is misleading and dangerous. The various groups have different backgrounds and goals, just as Muslim diasporas in the West originate in different countries and cultures. Many French Muslims, for example, have roots in north Africa; some are angered by the ban on wearing burqas in public places. Neither factor applies in, say, Britain. Thinking of Muslims overall as a homogenous group is still more foolhardy—however much some of the West’s demagogues encourage voters to. Most are not extremists; fewer still support violence, as mainstream French imams swiftly pointed out.
The terrorists themselves, of course, are often keen to prove that the West does indeed anathematise all Muslims. To see such killers as representatives of a religion, and to reduce a complex picture to their preferred caricature, would be to reward their crimes—just as circumscribing the principle of free speech would be to bow to their medieval fantasies.