Charlie and Mauritians

If you don’t read the facebook comments on L’express' page, this article may not make much sense to you. I have included screenshots of those comments for those who haven't. If you want a translation, I can provide it.

If you want to view the screen shots first, go to this link.

I wasn’t going to write an article on this because I think that L’express has done an admirable job of covering the attack on Charlie Hebdo but it has become increasingly clear that a lot of people in Mauritius have no idea what freedom of speech truly means. Even worse, a lot of them even view this as something that the cartoonists deserved. This article specifically addresses the comments seen on the L'express facebook page.

There were two main misconceptions that kept showing up. First, people claim that “you should respect all religions” and second, people conflate race, religion and individuals.

When people state that you should have respect for all religions, what a lot of them actually mean is that you should respect people of all religions. Religion is a set of beliefs a person chooses to obey, not a group of people. It is possible for someone to respect the right religious people have to choose their beliefs, without having any respect for the ideology they decide to follow.

Just because someone believes in something doesn’t mean that it automatically deserves respect. Communism is a belief, as is white supremacy or astrology. Some of those beliefs may even be extremely important to the people who hold them, but that doesn’t make them above reproach.

It is dishonest to put religious beliefs in a different arena just so others cannot question them. A multi-cultural society doesn’t need people to respect each and every one of their neighbor’s beliefs to exist peacefully, you just need people to respect people’s right to have those beliefs, whatever they may be. What if a devout Catholic were offended by the sale of contraception in supermarkets? Would you "respect" their beliefs by not using it?

You cannot force others to follow your beliefs simply because they are sacred to you, whether it’s preventing McDonalds from selling beef burgers or drawing a picture of Mohammed. If your religion places a prohibition on eating beef or pork, don’t eat it. If your religion places a prohibition on pictures of your prophet, then don’t draw any. You do not have the right to demand that other people follow the restrictions your faith imposes on you.

There are radical Hindus in India who rioted to prevent the release of the movie PK because the movie offended their beliefs. Salman Rushdie’s book, “The Satanic Verses”  is still banned in Mauritius because it might offend some people. If your beliefs are so fragile that they can be challenged by other people reading a book, watching a movie or drawing a cartoon, then perhaps you should reconsider them.

While someone’s beliefs may well be an important part of their lives, people are not their beliefs. It is entirely possible for me to think that someone’s beliefs are stupid and still think that that person is good and intelligent. I have seen so many people wrongly make the claim that Charlie-Hebdo has insulted a billion Muslims.

They haven’t.

They may have offended your beliefs but they certainly didn’t insult you. It’s not their fault if you are incapable of separating yourself from the religion you chose to follow and realizing that you are not your beliefs. Muslims and Islam are not the same thing, neither are Hindus and Hinduism. One is a group of people, the other is a set of beliefs.

Some people even accused L’express (And Charlie Hebdo) of “inciting religious hatred” or “hate speech.”

Blasphemy isn’t hate speech. Blasphemy mocks your beliefs, not you. Saying “Jews should be killed” is hate speech. Saying “Judaism is bad” isn’t.

Inciting hate doesn’t mean provoking a fanatic who holds his beliefs above all else, including the laws of the country and human rights. Inciting hate means saying “Members of X religion deserve to be wiped out” or saying “X people are criminals.”

It may be true that by drawing a picture of Mohammed that the cartoonists insulted Islam but they certainly have not insulted Muslims. Islam is not a race, it’s a set of beliefs followed by people who could be white, black, Arab or Asian.

A lot of the people currently claiming that the newspapers are "inciting hate" don’t seem to realize when they themselves do that. I remember that around 3 years ago, Radio Plus held a debate on gay prides and I was shocked when people called and openly said that they believed gay people should be killed. Calling for the murder of people because of their sexual orientation IS hate speech and far worse than drawing a picture mocking a religious figure.

In a lot of comments, there was an underlying assumption that criticizing or mocking religion is inherently bad.

You may say or think that religion is only about "peace and love" but there have been a lot of bad things done in the name of religion, there are a lot of things still being done in the name of religion, right now, as you read this. To make blasphemy illegal is to deny people the ability to address those issues. We need the ability to mock, satirize, and yes, sometimes insult your beliefs, because those beliefs have caused a lot of pain around the world and disowning the people causing it as "not true believers" doesn't really solve the problem.

Would a world where blasphemy was taken seriously by everyone really be such a good one? 

A blogger in Saudi Arabia was given the first 50 of 1000 lashes for “insulting Islam” last week. Does that sound like a good thing to you? In Pakistan, 14 people are on death row and 19 are serving life sentences for “insulting Islam”. Do you really think that offending someone’s beliefs is worth that? Is that a tolerant society, where people respect “beliefs” instead of people and whip, jail and kill those who do not?

I, for one, would much rather live in a world where people are more important that the things they believe in.

Another common reaction was “Why don’t you care this much much about Palestine?”, implying that you can only care about one issue at once. Well, using that logic, I could ask, well why do you care about Palestine so much when the number of people Israel killed in 14 years is less than what ISIS killed in one year or Boko Haram killed in a few months? 

People have the capacity to care about more than one thing at a time. The reason people are expressing their solidarity with the cartoonists and not the 2000 Nigerians killed in Boko Haram’s raid isn’t because they don’t care about them. It’s because Boko Haram isn’t a controversial topic. No sane person would claim that Boko Haram is justified but I have seen too many people claim that the attack on Charlie Hebdo was. Freedom of expression is a subject that affects all of us and it’s something that we can stand up for and maybe make a difference in the way it is practised in our own countries.

The irony is that Charlie Hebdo often drew cartoons in support of the Palestinians. They didn't just make fun of radical Islam.They mocked orthodox Judaism, called out the Catholic Church's pedophilia scandal and published anti racism cartoons.

Side Note:

I'm going to end by addressing this image that I've seen on Facebook, that some people have pointed out as an example of the western world's "hypocrisy."

The reason this post was removed isn't because of his opinions but because he used the word, "Niggers" which that is considered hate speech by a lot of people in the U.S because it targets individuals of a specific race. Facebook automatically flags and removes posts which have the word "nigger', it is dishonest of the poster to imply that his beliefs are being censored.

This is what facebook says about their community standards: "Facebook does not permit hate speech, but distinguishes between serious and humorous speech. While we encourage you to challenge ideas, institutions, events, and practices, we do not permit individuals or groups to attack others based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition."