Many Of Those Outraged About The Murders At Charlie Hebdo Would Not Care If The Dead Were Muslims In A Muslim Country

See update below

The murders of the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo are the big news of the day.   The murders, in Paris, are heinous and wrong and the murderers should be caught and punished.  Murder should always be punished, when possible.  But only those guilty of murder are guilty of it and those are the only ones who bear any responsibility for the act of murder.  Though the use to which this kind of incident is generally put is to blame people based on their identity instead of any act they were involved in or even supported.  I've been reading that done on blogs and websites of any number of political persuasions, in the routine on a day like this pseudo-leftists as well as self-declared fascists speak the same language.

But punishing the guilty is no where near enough, or even the most important thing.  Merely punishing people after murders have been committed is nowhere near enough of a response.  Unfortunately, the more important need of preventing more deaths will not be taken seriously.   We know nothing will be learned because the cartoons believed to be what incited the murderers to murder today were, themselves, an example of people choosing to provoke anger in a way that they fully knew could get people killed.   The excuse for creating these images is the violence, including deaths, which previous provocative images of that kind produced.   I am certain the people at Charlie Hebdo knew they were doing something that could get people killed, though I would expect they didn't really anticipate they would be the ones who got killed.

Most of the people who have gotten killed when Western media companies have purposely provoked the anger of Muslims have been Muslims in Muslim countries.  And members of religious minorities in some of those countries, some of them Christians.  There is every reason to expect someone is going to get killed when these kinds of cartoons and other intentional provocations are published.  So, the people who do that are prepared for people to die as a result of their actions. After a decade of seeing this ritual played out, there is no excuse for someone who works in the media to pretend they don't know how it goes.

Last summer I wrote this about another pointless, provocative act here in the United States:

In one of the idiotic comments, the over-the-top claim is made that what is being done in this case is "akin" to issuing an assassination threat over drawing a cartoon of Muhammad, which it clearly is not.  Though that brings us to the fact that no matter how much atheists want to ignore it, the fact is that what offends people is not for them to say.  Nor is it for them to say how offended people will be by things they say and do.   And it is certainly not within their ability to prevent people from acting on that offense, by voting against the side they believe has intentionally offended them or, in the most extreme case, responding in ways that get people killed. 

People on the play left had better get used to the fact that it is not going to convert The United States to atheism or even a form of dereligionized secularism in their political behavior.

I will repeat the part of that which is my point:

no matter how much atheists [or other people] want to ignore it, the fact is that what offends people is not for them to say.  Nor is it for them to say how offended people will be by things they say and do.   And it is certainly not within their ability to prevent people from acting on that offense, by voting against the side they believe has intentionally offended them or, in the most extreme case, responding in ways that get people killed.

The cartoonists, publishers, etc. who produce these cartoons do so with the full knowledge that people can get killed by what they do.  I looked at the Charlie Hebdo cartoons and they are pointless,  stupid and intentionally provocative. They are racist and certainly meant as an insult and offense to Muslims, of whom a large number live in France due to its long history of colonization of Muslim countries.   The people who produced those cartoons knew they could get someone killed, that was in their power to do, they had no power to keep people who they chose to provoke from killing people, other people, or themselves.

It is one of the few advantages to writing a blog without compensation that there is nothing to lose by telling the truth.  I am sure that this post will make a lot of people very angry because it doesn't follow the acceptable ritual for this occasion in which anger and condemnation and an assertion that the crimes were unprovoked because they were an expression of liberté is supposed to make any mention of the fact that they were an intentional provocation which were very likely if not nearly certain to get people killed, unspeakable.  Ironic is the fact that pointing that out is to be condemned and subjected to censorship by coercion even as the stupid cartoons will be replicated, themselves further incitements and their production presented as a sacred duty.

Furthermore, the anger that these kinds of pointless Western  provocations incite is useful for just those terrorist groups that are believed to have been involved in the murders in Paris today.   I doubt Al Qaeda or other Islamist radical groups' recruitment will suffer at all if they are assigned guilt for these killings.  They will profit from it far more than anyone else, something which is, in itself, a motive for them to take the bait provided by those who produced those images. I am sure they are just waiting, wringing their hands with glee for the next round of stupid, pointless provocations to provide them with further material for their recruitment.

I am sorry that people got killed at Charlie Hebdo but I am no more sorry than if it had been people killed in a Muslim city by rioting in protest of the cartoons they produced.  They could have chosen not to issue pointless provocations,  they are the ones who could have prevented murders incited by the insults they issued. I hope someone, somewhere reads this and decides not to issue pointless insults that will get people killed.  There are thousands of things that need to be said, what those cartoons said weren't among them.

Update:  Juan Cole talks about how Islamist groups use grievance as an organizing and recruiting tool.

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

He ended the piece by noting that the French fascists will also take advantage of this and that they, in fact, pose a far greater danger than any fantasy of an Islamist takeover of France.

Most of France will also remain committed to French values of the Rights of Man, which they invented. But an insular and hateful minority will take advantage of this deliberately polarizing atrocity to push their own agenda. Europe’s future depends on whether the Marine LePens are allowed to become mainstream. Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.

He doesn't take the step of pointing out that the Charlie Hebdo cartoons would serve the purposes of both groups, inciting resentment due to the insulting and bigoted nature of them, intended to offend and predictably generating violence. And also, the support of the hateful content by LePen's side as well as the idiotic defense of them as some kind of flower of enlightened freedom, so generating offense and polarization.

Cole is too polite to point out the role that Charlie Hebdo played in this scenario (though not so polite as to not include a somewhat false and dishonest jab at Christians in his piece) but I think a decade of this kind of incitement of violence though crappy, unfunny, intentionally racist, bigoted and, let it not be fogotten, unfunny cartoons is at least nine years too many of their clear intent to incite going unmentioned.  Politeness of that kind even on the day after an incident like this one can go to hell as far as I'm concerned.  Politeness that enables the generation of this kind of cyclical violence is the role that liberals, real as well as the phony ones, play in it.

I will have a post about the topic of the idiotic pseudo-left championing hate speech of this kind, even as it plays to the benefit of the fascists and fundamentalists later today.