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Don’t let the Paris murderers win

26 February 2015

Professor Laborde warns against the reactivist response to the Paris murders: they misunderstand the role played by free speech and by laïcité. Further, they allow criminals to set the term of the debate on how to better facilitate Muslim integration if France.

Professor Cécile Laborde

Imagine that, on 7 January, two British Jihadists had attacked the headquarters of the French far right newspaper Minute. One can easily guess the response in France: utter shock at the brutal assassination of journalists, condemnation of international jihadism, and determination to ignore the provocation. The only way not to give the terrorists an easy victory, we would have been urged, is to stay calm, and keep going (to coin a phrase). This, roughly, would also have been an appropriate response to the actual events of 7 January. Unfortunately, the fact that the attack was perpetrated against a satirical, left-leaning, anti-religious newspaper by jihadists of French nationality scrambled all our ethico-political compasses. Our reaction has made us more, rather than less, exposed to the Islamist threat.

Charlie Hebdo is a newspaper with a proud history of radical anti-establishment polemic, a historically minuscule readership and a string of recent provocative cartoons targeting Islam and Islamism. The emotional, spontaneous ‘Je suis Charlie’ movement quickly set the scene for a vibrant campaign for free speech. Yet it is to give too much credit to the Paris assassins to claim that they ‘attacked the value of free speech’. What they did was brutally to murder journalists, as well as Jewish shoppers, and policemen and women, in a senseless, barbaric criminal act.

The state of free speech in France is exactly the same after and before the attack. Before the attack, Charlie Hebdo had a right to publish what it wished; and others had a right to criticize Charlie Hebdo. After 7 January, it is crucial that Charlie Hebdo be helped to live on, so as not to give terrorists the terrifying privilege of deciding who among us is entitled to exercise free speech rights. But after 7 January, just like before, no one should be forced to approve of this or that position or view. What free speech demands is precisely this paradoxical and difficult attitude of forbearing the expression of ideas that we find repulsive. Free speech does not demand that we stop disliking the ideas of others.

For French authorities to demand that Muslims now publicly proclaim that they ‘are’ Charlie – that they effectively endorse the content of the cartoons - is not to defend free speech. It is to enforce compulsory, official speech – the very opposite of free speech. All those who have invoked Voltaire in recent weeks would do well to test their intuitions against the counter-factual scenario of the attacks against Minute. Presumably, they would have mourned the death of Minute journalists, but they would not have asked the people targeted by Minute to endorse the speech of the far right. One may be vastly more sympathetic to the ideals of Charlie Hebdo than to those of Minute (I am), but the point is, from the perspective of freedom of speech, they should be treated identically.

Free speech is important in a democracy precisely because it protects the freedom to dissent, the right to say unpleasant and disrespectful things. A society where 8-year-old children are questioned by police because of their defiant (and no doubt stupid and ill-intentioned) refusal to show appropriate respect to the victims of the attack, is not a society that is confident about its proclaimed values. In this sense, the Paris murderers have already won a partial victory. They have exposed the muddle of a society that too quickly applies double standards of freedom of speech. Instead of steadfastly tolerating all disrespectful speech, we sacralize some forms of disrespect (by satirical journalists), and criminalize others (by defiant youth).

The fact that the terrorists were French has also contributed to nationalize the response in an unhealthy way. In the counter-factual scenario of a British jihadist attack against Minute, many French commentators would no doubt have blamed British multiculturalism for Islamist radicalisation – as they did in the aftermath of the London bombings of July 2005. Today, many non-French observers are as swift in their condemnation of ‘French secularism’. Both reactions are equally misguided. The paths to radicalization of French and British jihadists are broadly similar; and the national variants of British multiculturalism and French laïcité only play a minor role in explaining the success of Islamist ideology. Islamist radicalization is a complex phenomenon, with roots in colonial subjection, foreign wars, the explosive political situation of the Middle East, the doctrinal sclerosis of Islamic theology, and the structural disaffection of a fringe of Muslims in Europe and elsewhere.

But if French laïcité is not the chief cause of radicalization, neither can ‘more laïcité’ be the solution to it. This is especially so because, over recent years, laïcité – originally intended as a principle of separation between the political and the religious spheres – has evolved into a nebulous, all-encompassing discourse about national identity. The Paris murderers are widely said to have ‘attacked laïcité’, and thereby to have ‘attacked our values’. But who are ‘we’, and in what sense are these ‘our’ values? During the week of the Paris attacks, Boko Haram Islamists massacred 2000 people in Baga; the previous month, Pakistani Taliban bombed a school in Peshawar, killing 132 children. It is often forgotten that Muslims are the first victims of Islamism worldwide – and that Islamists do not care much about laïcité or multiculturalism or national identity.

If this is correct, the national mobilization around the defence of laïcité gravely misses the point. Worse still, it feeds the very mindset that Islamism thrives on: the idea that there is a clash of civilizations between Islam and the west, or western values (of which the national discourse about laïcité is the French variant). Despite repeated warnings about the dangers of confusing Islam and Islamism, it is troubling that the first policy response to the Paris attacks was to question the right of Muslim mothers wearing hijab to accompany school trips. No wonder many Muslim citizens are confused. If laïcité is used as a way of symbolically expelling them from the national community, then that will be another victory for the Paris murderers.

The politically courageous thing to do would have been to do nothing in response to the attacks: they merit no response, only a scornful and dogged determination to carry on as before, and not be intimidated. This does not mean that there is nothing to be done about the parlous state of French banlieues, and the de facto segregation of French youth of immigrant origin. Hollande’s government has - finally - turned its attention to this festering problem. But to let the Paris murderers set the terms – and poison the spirit - of this vital national debate would be to grant them a disastrous posthumous victory.