It's been 10 years since the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, since journalists in the western world proclaimed "I am Charlie" after Islamist brothers stormed the magazine's office and killed 12 people over a cartoon depiction of the Prophet Muhammad, the revered founder of the Muslim religion. Has the west learned anything or have we further capitulated to extremism in the name of religious tolerance? I think it's surely the latter. 10 years after the brutality of the two brothers who gunned down cartoonists to protect the honor of their religion, Islamist terror attacks are still being carried out and western governments are still downplaying them and protecting those who take offense, where most people would just look the other way. The latest Islamic attack in the US was just about a week ago, on New Year's Day.
"We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad. We have killed Charlie Hebdo!" The brothers shouted this in a gunfight with French police in which they lost their lives. As proponents of free speech shouted their own "I am Charlie" missive in the aftermath, news outlets in the western world did not en masse publish the images that had cost the French cartoonists their lives. Images sending-up and satirizing the Judeo-Christian tradition, images of Jews with large noses and exaggerated peyot, images of Jesus Christ or the Pope, are never censored or bleeped. They are never the cause of terror attacks or murder. Being the "turn the other cheek" lot that we are, Christians leave it be.
The Washington Post, on the same day as the massacre, published an article titled "New organizations wrestle with whether to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons after attack." It ran in the style section and asked the Shakespearean question "to publish or not to publish?" Buzzfeed and Huffington Post published them in the US, the New York Times and Washington Post did not. The AP even cropped the image of slain editor Stéphane Charbonnier holding up a newspaper with the image printed on it. "We've taken the view that we don't want to publish hate speech or spectacles that offend, provoke or intimidate, or anything that desecrates religious symbols or angers people along religious or ethnic lines," said AP VP Santiago Lyon at the time, as noted by Wapo. "We don't feel that's useful."
In December 2024, 8 people in France were convicted for the beheading of school teacher Samuel Paty, whose life was stolen by an Islamic extremist angered that Paty had shown his class cartoons of Muhammad during a literal debate on free expression. Hearing about this afterwards, an 18-year-old extremist from Chechnya beheaded the teacher, an unequivocal statement that open debate in French academic institutions will not be tolerated in regard to Islam. Paty's 9-year-old son heard the verdict read out in court. He was only 5-years-old when his father was taken from him.
In the UK, a teacher who showed his class the same cartoon of Muhammad that had been published first in Denmark, then in Charlie Hebdo, was suspended and then went into hiding. He is still in hiding three years later and his family say he is unlikely ever to return home. After he showed the cartoon, for the purpose of free and open debate in an academic setting, protesters swarmed the school and police actually stood before protesters and read out an "unequivocal apology" from the head of school for what he said was a "totally inappropriate image."
In the years before the Charlie Hebdo massacre, cartoons criticizing Muhammad and Islam were published in Denmark and Sweden. Both of these resulted in mass protests across the Middle East. Libya closed its Copenhagen embassy. Saudi Arabia withdrew its ambassador from Denmark. Threats of retaliation abounded. In Berlin, Mozart's opera "Idomeneo" was cancelled because there's a scene in which the titular king "presents the severed heads not only of the Greek god of the sea, Poseidon, but also of Muhammad, Jesus and Buddha." The Metropolitan Museum of Art removed three paintings that portrayed Muhammad they feared would result in backlash. Perhaps most egregiously, Comedy Central censored a South Park episode amid threats from Islamic extremists. They bleeped out references to Muhammad. A satirical "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" from Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris ended with her being put on an execution list by then-Al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki. And there was the infamous YouTube video "Innocence of Muslims" in 2012 that showed an unflattering portrayal of the Prophet and was blamed by then-President Barack Obama for attacks on the US Embassy in Benghazi. Obama said the message of the film "must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity." It was later revealed that the administration had forewarning of the attack.
And where are we now? Has anything changed? Have the Islamic extremists been quieted or have they been emboldened? Just two years ago in the UK, a 14-year-old autistic boy "scuffed" a copy of the Koran when he accidentally dropped it. He was forced to go into hiding. His mother was made to apologize and beg for forgiveness for her son after the local mosque actually threatened the boy's life. She was made to make this apology at the mosque before the congregation even after her home was threatened with arson. The boy was suspended from school and police investigated it as a "non-crime hate incident." Local Labor councillor Usman Ali claimed the book had been "desecrated" and called for "serious provocative action." Toby Young's Free Speech Union was able, years later, to get the "non-crime hate incident" removed from the boy's record."
But none of this should ever have happened. There should have been no mass protests over cartoons in Scandinavian papers. No terror attacks against Charlie Hebdo—there were three, 2011, 2015 and 2020. No beheadings, no teachers in hiding. 14 people should never have been murdered on New Year's Day so that a terrorist could show the difference between believers and disbelievers, as he openly said on Facebook. Not to mention that 1,200 who should not have been murdered in Israel on October 7, 2023. Instead of taking a stand against religious extremism, western governments have capitulated to it and have opted, Neville Chamberlain style, for some kind of appeasement. In the UK, a definition of Islamophobia is on the verge of being adopted by the government that would make it nearly impossible to critique the religious extremism that comes from that sector. In the US, the formerly-free speech left has become a mouthpiece for Islamic extremism, justifying atrocities in the name of an oppressor/victim worldview.
There hasn’t been a publishing Prophet Muhammad cartoon controversy in a while, as though anyone who might have done has learned the lesson not to. In the US, satirical outlet The Babylon Bee was censored and suppressed by social media companies for making fun of USA Today giving a Woman of the Year award to a high-ranking male Biden administration official who claims to be a woman.
The New Orleans attacker had openly said on social media that he'd "joined" ISIS, yet he was wandering around without any interference from law enforcement. Even as the FBI created profiles for "extremist Christians" who go to Latin mass, Shamsun-Din Jabbar was roaming free to plan his massacre in peace. Parents who spoke up at school board meetings were being investigated by the FBI, under the direction of the Department of Justice, with the same tools used to investigate domestic extremists. In the UK, citizens have been questioned for complaining about the overabundance of Palestinian flags on their main streets. A "grooming gang" of mostly Pakistani men who engaged in the rape of hundreds of British girls was essentially overlooked for years over fears that an investigation would be seen as racist.
If an American magazine were to publish those original cartoons from Charlie Hebdo, or the ones from Sweden, Denmark, or from Molly Norris, would they be defended by academia and free press people or would they be condemned for some kind of incitement? Would threats against them be justified under the notion that the outlets were asking for it? Would any of them receive accolades for standing up for free speech, for a free press?
In 2015, the New York Times said the paper doesn’t publish material “deliberately intended to offend religious sensibilities.” Instead, per the Washington Post at the time, "editors decided that describing the cartoons rather than showing them 'would give readers sufficient information to understand today’s story.'"
The Washington Post said at the time that the outlet "avoids publication of material 'that is pointedly, deliberately, or needlessly offensive to members of religious groups' and would continue to apply those principles in the wake of the Paris atrocity."
Just before Christmas this year, the Times ran a column by long-standing writer Nicholas Kristoff called "A Conversation About the Virgin Birth That Maybe Wasn’t." The paper's offices remain totally fine and unthreatened. No one has stormed in freaking out, guns blazing, though there was robust debate on social media—in keeping with American free speech traditions. The Washington Post has run missives about how Christianity is now the purview of white supremacists. That columnist is unharmed, as are the Grey Lady's prominent Manhattan offices. It looks like 10 years on, the papers that criticized the Charlie Hebdo attacks continue to apply a double standard and that the western institutions have learned to keep mum on Islamic extremism and keep attacking the safe, easy targets of Judaism and Christianity.
