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Debate
Je ne suis pas Charlie (I am not Charlie)
José Antonio Gutiérrez Dantón / Friday 9 January 2015
 

I’ll start by clarifying that, first of all, I consider the attack to the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris an atrocity and that I do not believe that, under any circumstance, is justifiable to turn a journalist, no matter how much we doubt on his professional quality, into a military target. The same is valid in France, as it is in Colombia or Palestine. Also, I do not identify myself either with any fundamentalism, neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim nor with the Frenchified clown-secularism either, that raises the sacred “République” as a goddess. I give these necessary explanations since, no matter how hard the high politics gurus insist on the idea that in Europe we live under an “exemplary democracy” with “great liberties,” we all know that the Big Brother is watching us and that any speech out of the script is hardly punished. But I believe that to censure the attack against Charlie Hebdo is not a synonym for celebrating a magazine that is, fundamentally, a monument to the intolerance, the racism and the colonial arrogance.

Thousands of people, comprehensibly affected by this attack, have make circulate French messages saying “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie), as if this message was the ultimate expression in defense of freedom. Well then, I am not Charlie. I do not identify myself with the degrading and “caricaturesque” representation that is done about the Islamic world, in the middle of the “War against the Terrorism” era, with all the racist and colonialist load that this entails. I cannot see with a good face the constant symbolic aggression that has as a counterpart a physical and real aggression, by means of the bombings and military occupations of countries pertaining to this cultural horizon. I cannot either see with good eyes these cartoons and their offensive texts, when the Arabs are one of the most marginalized, impoverished and exploited sectors of the French society, that have received historically a brutal treatment: I do not forget that in the Paris metro, in the early 60’s, the police massacred 200 Algerians, hitting them with sticks, just because they were demanding the end of the French occupation of their country, which already had left an estimated balance of a million “uncivilized” dead Arabs. It is not about not innocent cartoons done by free thinkers, in turn, it is about messages produced from mass media (Yes, though under an alternative pose, Charlie Hebdo belongs to mass media), loaded with hatred and stereotypes that reinforce a speech that considers the Arabs as Barbarians who are to be contained, uprooted, controlled, repressed, oppressed and exterminated. Messages whose implicit purpose is to justify the invasions to the Middle East countries as well as the multiple interventions and bombings that are orchestrated in the West in defense of the new imperial distribution. The Spanish actor Willy Toledo said, in an controversial declaration - only to point out the obvious-, that “the West kills every day. Without noise”. And that is what Charlie and his black humor hide under the form of a satire.

I do not forget the cover of the Charlie Hebdo N°1099, in which it was ttrivialized the massacre of more than a thousand of Egyptians by a brutal military dictatorship that hasthe U.S.A and France’s approval, by means of a cover saying something like “Slaughter in Egypt. The Koran is shit: it doesnt stop bullets.” The cartoon showed a riddled Muslim man trying to protect himself with the Koran. Perhaps this is funny for some. Also, at their time, the English colonists in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, thought that it was funny to show photos of them with the natives they had hunted, showing themselves with wide smiles, carbine in hand, and steeping on the still hot bleeding corpse. Instead of funny, to me, that cartoon seems to be violent and colonial, an abuse of the fictitious and manipulated western freedom of press. What would happen if I now made a magazine whose cover had the following phrase: “Slaughter in Paris. Charlie Hebdo is shit: it doesn’t stop bullets” and made a cartoon of the deceased gunned Jean Cabut holding a copy of the magazine in his hands? Clearly that would be a scandal: the life of a French man is sacred. The life of an Egyptian (or Palestinian, Iraqi, a Syrian, etc.) is “humoristic” material. For that reason I am not Charlie, because for me, the life of each one of those Egyptians pestered is as sacred as it is for any of those caricaturists today assassinated.

We already know what comes from now on: there will be speeches defending the freedom of press coming from countries that in 1999 gave the blessing to the NATO bombing of Belgrade, of the Serbian public TV station for considering it “the ministry of lies”; countries that shut up when Israel bombed in Beirut the Al-Manar TV station 2006; those that respond with silence to the murders of Colombian and Palestinian critical journalists. After the beautiful pro-freedom rhetoric, the liberticide action will come: more McCarthyism, disguised “colonial anti-terrorism”, more colonial interventions, more restrictions to those “democratic guarantees” threatened with extinction and, of course, more racism. Europe is consumed in a spiral of xenophobic hatred, islamophobia, anti-semitism (in fact, the Palestinians are Semitic) and this atmosphere has reached unbearable levels. The Muslims are already the Jews of the 21st century Europe, and the neo-Nazis parties are being respectable again, 80 years later, thanks to this repugnant feeling. Because all of these, in spite of the repulsion that the attacks of Paris cause to me, Je ne suis pas Charlie.

Translatet: Evelin Cotella

Versión en español: Je ne suis pas Charlie (Yo no soy Charlie)