Charlie Hebdo, cultural violence and media

ONE of the earliest articles I did in this series was one in October of 2007, titled ‘Cultural Education and Tolerance’, a theme I’ve referred to from time to time since then. As I recently wrote, the UN has to retool itself to combat two new main security threats in this age: climate change and cultural conflict.

Mr. Keith Burrowes
Mr. Keith Burrowes

The latter came to prominence once again with the brutal attack on French satirical magazine by three Muslim men, in response to what Muslims have said to be provocative cartoons. This tragedy is completely sickening, and has rightfully been condemned around the world for what it was – a cold-blooded act of terror.
While, other commentators have dealt with different aspects of this issue, I want to look at it from what I believe to be an under-examined perspective, Western media representation and its role in the core conflict. When it comes to the clash of cultures between Islam and the West, the Western media has a gradient of representation, one in which the value of life as defined by coverage depends both on who is being killed and who is doing the killing.

At the first level, if America (or Israel) is involved in the killing of Islamic people, extremist or not, it is virtually glossed over and treated as collateral damage in the ‘War on Terror,’ probably understandable in the context of innocent people dying as they tend to do in open conflict. For example, in mid-2002, 30 members of an Afghan family were killed by the US bombing the wedding party they were gathered at. Eleven years later, over a dozen people were killed at another wedding party in Yemen. And this is not that these are isolated incidents – there have been about an average of one wedding party bombing a year since then, with an average death toll higher than that of the Charlie Hebdo shootings. Yet this isn’t something that has received extensive coverage in Western media, and when it does, there is a great deal of biased editorial speculation and misdirection. US network ABC’s initial report on the Yemen bombing went:

“And some breaking news overseas right now. A US missile has struck a convoy headed to a wedding party in Yemen, killing at least 13 people. That Region is a well-known Al-Qaeda stronghold.”

Yemen is a country of 23 million people, and two and a half times the size of Guyana, yet Western news coverage automatically tried to link those in the wedding party to the tiny al Qaeda presence in the country.

At the second level, if Muslims are killing Muslims, the deaths are reported on but with the primary focus being on the fact that the killers are Muslims who pose an eventual threat to safety of the West and its allies. That is why Boko Haram and ISIS receive only passing coverage in Western media, and the latter more than the former arguably because they pose more of a danger to the West’s energy interests in the Middle East. Boko Haram’s killed over 2,000 people in an attack recently and it has received far less coverage in even the ‘global’ broadcasts of Western outlets than the Paris shootings.

The third level of course has to do with Muslims killing Westerners, either in the Middle East or in the West itself. Though the death tolls are far less, the coverage is far more extensive, with commentating panels like the one I watched on Hannity, in-depth analysis like is routine on MSNBC, and other forms of what I would like consider to be pile-on journalism.

As this article is being written, I am watching a CNN report on the woman, said to be the accomplice of the three shooters, who escaped France following the attacks and is said to be currently in Syria. For half an hour straight at least, images of her in a hijab and aiming a crossbow were on screen, playing in a loop, the message being clear – the Islamic tendency towards violence. One Fox News commentator, fury barely contained, described the attack as an Islamic assault on the West.

Perhaps it is, but by no means is this is a one-sided battle in which Western countries are without culpability. As in any battle, there are rhetorical volleys as well as actual gunfire, and a strong argument can be made that Charlie Hebdo’s satire was part of the West’s rhetorical battle against Islam, not incidental to but an extension of the military effort. As one blogger, Asghar Bukhari, put it:

“These images then, can be played down as just a ‘bit of fun’ as no doubt the least perceptive of you will try to argue, or it can be seen through the prism of the war on terror-just another front on the war against Islam that has claimed so many lives—and the demonology behind it.”

Another, Richard Hoskins, even as he condemned the violence, wrote that:

“…the cartoons published in Charlie Hebdo were neither funny nor clever. In fact they were gratuitously offensive. They were lampooning. They didn’t make any points other than to be offensive.”

While the West is trying to sell Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists as heroes against the threat of Islamic suppression, the magazine itself showed that it was willing to censor one of its own, Maurice Sinet, for what it termed anti-Semitism for a column that was tame by comparison to any of the magazine’s depictions of Islamic people or the Prophet Muhammad.

I have to make it clear that I do not for a second support killing persons for drawing cartoons: the attacks on Charlie Hebdo were inhumane, and sickening, and the killers in reality had little regard for the sanctity of life, Muslim or otherwise, particularly considering that the policeman they executed was a married Muslim father.

But I also do not support the bombing of wedding parties simply because the people who are part of it live in the same country with terrorists, nor do I support provocative, inflammatory and outright racist ‘satire’ done ostensibly in the name of free speech. All these things are mutually reinforcing components of an escalating global cultural conflict, one that can only result in more senseless loss of life. Islam needs to alienate and root out the religious extremists within its midst, while the West needs to alienate and root out the vested interests (from the oil lobby to the complementary corporate media) that drive its own anti-Islamic agenda. And of course, there needs to be a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which has its own separate factors.

As I did in 2007, I would like to state emphatically that people have to co-exist. You cannot fundamentally change anyone’s culture and you should not seek to. Too often when we engage in cultural discussions, it is within a framework where each side thinks that the other has to accept their view as prerequisite to further engagement. Tolerance is less about accepting, than it is about understanding.

In the near future, I will continue to examine the critical issues of cultural conflict and climate change – there is repeated proof that these constitute the primary global security threats of today.

(By Keith Burrowes)

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