Don't Take Offence

Dominic Lawson made a valid point in The Sunday Times that the UK media has even now ducked out of publishing some of the the cartoons and 'covers' from the Charlie Ebdo magazine.

Which is a pity if you ask me, because as Dominic Lawson correctly points out the Charlie cartoonists were equal-opportunities insulters because the 'great and good' from around the world fell victim to their scorn.  

Please don’t take offence — but, non, je ne suis pas Charlie

By Dominic Lawson - The Sunday Times

NOUS sommes tous Charlie? Tu me fais rire! Of course it’s not a laughing matter when a roomful of French cartoonists is murdered for mocking the prophet Muhammad. But permit me a mirthless cackle at the sight of all those newspapers that printed leader columns with the defiant headline “Nous sommes tous Charlie” — “We are all Charlie” — but decided not to show the cartoons that brought about the slaughter of the staff of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

This rallying cry is presumably meant to evoke the scene in Spartacus when the Romans demand the eponymous slave leader is handed over for execution. They ask the captured slaves which among them is Spartacus. First one and then all of them shout: “I’m Spartacus!”— offering their own lives rather than see their leader executed.

The point about the Muhammad cartoons, however, is that almost none of those expressing solidarity with Charlie Hebdo are willing to put their own lives (or those of their colleagues) on the line in the cause of religious satire. Not that I blame them. As an editor I once overruled the decision of a page designer to illustrate a review of a book on Islam with a picture of the prophet. I told my colleague I had no doubt about its appropriateness on journalistic or historical grounds, but “if we publish that, we’ll have nutters with hooks for hands storming the building”.

The public explanation of such a decision would have been that the paper did not want to cause offence. That is mere cant: newspapers are always offending people — it’s one of the joys of journalism. I gave my colleague the real reason, one she readily understood.

When in 2005 the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten set off riots by publishing some (not very funny) cartoons of Muhammad, none of this country’s newspapers or broadcasters would show any of the material — thus failing in their fundamental duty to give their readers and viewers the full story. Various Labour politicians (such as Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson) commended the British press for its self-censorship. If that were not enough to make us ashamed, there was the spectacle of the Metropolitan police taking no action against demonstrators holding banners declaring “Massacre those who insult Islam”, while arresting counter-demonstrators wearing T-shirts displaying the offending cartoons.

Now those who insulted Islam have been duly massacred. Actually, the Charlie cartoonists were equal-opportunities insulters. Their scabrous secular pens were perpetually employed in ridiculing Christianity — one recent cartoon of an ecstatic Mary giving birth to a somewhat porcine infant Jesus was notable for its gynaecological crudity.

As a notional majority in Europe, Christians tend to have less of the insecurity that can produce violently irrational overreactions to a perceived slight. But it is one of the more depressing features of modern Britain that a nation that prides itself on being tolerant is ever more insistent on a sterile uniformity of opinion, with intimidation increasingly meted out to dissenters — or even prosecution, if they dare to “offend”.

So, for example, a new year message on the Twitter site of Police Scotland was: “Please be aware that we will continue to monitor comments on social media & any offensive comments will be investigated.” I found that tweet offensive. Should I report it and ask Police Scotland to investigate itself?

Oddly, although police forces never cease to tell us how hard pressed they are to deal with crimes while their budgets are being cut, freedom of information requests have revealed that over the past three years those forces have investigated about 20,000 people in Britain for “offensive” online comments. They insist they have no choice but to look into complaints; and, to be fair to the coppers, they have a problem in a country where more and more see themselves as victims. Offended Islamists are far from unusual for wallowing in self-pity.

This phenomenon should not come as a surprise to anyone who has studied human psychology. Self-righteousness and resentment are the two emotions that never let us down. While this combination attained a toxic force and power among those low-lifers in the banlieues — making the now familiar leap from banal drug-fuelled common criminal to the supposedly heroic status of jihadist — it is also the overindulged mindset of far too many more, even if it seldom reaches murderousness.

The truth is that those who howl that they are offended generally want to be offended and search out ways to be insulted. Charlie Hebdo is a magazine with a very small circulation, hitherto quite marginal to debate in France, a redoubt of the ultra-secularist Marxist 1968ers — a fact reflected in the late middle age of most of those slaughtered by the Kouachi brothers.

How much more obscure, though, are the remarks on social media that have occasioned hyperactivity on the part of our police forces responding to complaints of online “persecution” — unfortunately only indulged further by the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, who recently declared his intention to introduce legislation quadrupling the maximum prison term for “online abuse”.

More dispiriting still, the intellectually insecure culture of complaint and censorship seems strongest in — of all places — our leading universities. The editor of the magazine Spiked, Brendan O’Neill, recently wrote how a debate about abortion at Christ Church, Oxford, had been blocked by the college because of “potential security and welfare issues” after what he described as “a mob of furious feminist Oxford students, all robotically uttering the same stuff about feeling offended” threatened to disrupt the debate with “instruments” (whatever that might have meant). In fact O’Neill was to have been the speaker in favour of abortion rights, but the students objected to the fact that both the proposed debaters, invited by Oxford Students for Life, were men.

Or maybe they just couldn’t tolerate anything called Oxford Students for Life, which dared to criticise the current law on abortion. After all, the Students’ Association at Dundee had banned the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children from the freshers’ fair on the grounds that its campaign material was “highly offensive”.

As O’Neill concluded, Britain will be an even less tolerant society — albeit proclaiming itself ever more “inclusive” — if a generation of students immensely distrustful of free speech ends up running the country.

In this context I was not surprised to see an Oxford University online discussion page on the Charlie Hebdo massacre contain posts dismissing the magazine as “racist” because of its satirical attacks on Islam. In their obsessive need to identify with oppressed minorities, it never occurred to these students that it was the cartoonists who were the real underdogs — working for a pittance, taking risks that established media groups would shun as business suicide (there were no corporate advertisers in Charlie Hebdo).

As I say, I make no claims to higher moral standards: as an editor I would not have dared stand out from the crowd of those pretending they did not want to offend while actually acting out of self-preservation. But I hope I would not have simultaneously claimed to be acting in solidarity with the dead.

dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk