Guest
Column: Nicholas Kristof & the Spirit of Charlie Hebdo
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
January 9, 2015
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 On the day
when journalists were massacred in Paris, while blood still ran wet where
they had fallen, and as eye witnesses described the killers' shouts of
"Allahu Akbar" – "Allah is great" – the New York
Times' Nicholas Kristof asked the world not to judge the killers too
quickly: most urgently, he said, don't jump to the conclusion they are Muslims.
Really? Even when they sounded the Muslim prayer? Even when they called
their deeds, loud and clear in the streets of Paris, "vengeance for
the Prophet"?
Here's what Kristof did not do: condemn the killings. Praise those who
had been slaughtered. Express horror at their execution. And admit that men
who praise Allah after committing mass murder are, religious profiling or
not, probably going to turn out to be Muslim.
It just kind of is that way.
(Interestingly, in listing a number of Islamic terrorist attacks on
Western targets, he also failed to mention that Muslims were involved in
the attacks of 9/11. Ask yourself why.)
Instead, he begged his readers not to judge. He repeated the clichéd
platitudes about the "majority of Muslims" having nothing to do
with Islamic extremism, and praised, not the editors and cartoonists of Charlie
Hebdo, but non-Muslims who rose to the aid of Muslims who feared reprisals after
the recent (Muslim-led) hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia.
What he might have done, but didn't, was take a lesson or two from the New
Yorker's George Packer, a man who actually knows a thing or two about
Islamic extremism, and about the courage of journalists confronting it: he
was one of them. At around the same time Kristof seems to have been penning
his column, Packer wrote:
"[Today's attacks] are only the latest blows delivered by an
ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. It's
the same ideology that sent Salman Rushdie into hiding for a decade under a
death sentence for writing a novel, then killed his Japanese translator and
tried to kill his Italian translator and Norwegian publisher. The ideology
that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. The
one that butchered Theo van Gogh in the streets of Amsterdam, in 2004, for
making a film. The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the
cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and
thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month.
That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly
anyone pays attention.
Because the ideology is the product of a major world religion, a lot of
painstaking pretzel logic goes into trying to explain what the violence
does, or doesn't, have to do with Islam. Some well-meaning people tiptoe
around the Islamic connection, claiming that the carnage has nothing to do
with faith, or that Islam is a religion of peace, or that, at most, the
violence represents a "distortion" of a great religion. (After
suicide bombings in Baghdad, I grew used to hearing Iraqis say, "No
Muslim would do this.") Others want to lay the blame entirely on the
theological content of Islam, as if other religions are more inherently
peaceful—a notion belied by history as well as scripture.
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and
practices of its adherents."
Not, apparently, for Kristof. Saying nothing about the disgusting filth
of the murders, he asked for love and tolerance – an entreaty that
evidently seemed appropriate to him at the time. And yet, I imagine that,
at the time of the Newtown massacre, he would have had few words to offer
about the millions of "nice people" with automatic weapons in
their homes, or the gentle souls who would never dream of turning their
Kalashnikovs on young children.
Instead, unlike the editors of the Hartford Courant, who called the killers "craven monsters" who
"claim to be connected to Al Qaeda," Kristof wrote all about the
nice Muslims he knows, as if believing, somehow, that to condemn the
killers is to malign all Muslims. It is the classic approach of those who
reflexively view any criticism of any Muslim as "Islamophobia."
I have news for these people: the vast majority of reasonable people in
the world do not think every Muslim is a terrorist. And I have news, too,
for Mr. Kristof: the people who actually do think this, don't read your
column anyway. Ever. And they probably never will.
Yet on and on he goes, pointing to the many Muslims on his Twitter feed
who expressed dismay at the attacks, deducing (I don't know how) that therefore
"most" Muslims must be against them. The fact that he does not
subscribe to the Twitter feeds of those likely to praise such an attack did
not seem to occur to him. But there were, in fact, plenty of Western, even
French, Muslims who did so, with remarks like, "Those Charlie
Hebdo sons of bitches deserved 100 deaths. Serves them right," and,
"This makes me so happy, ha ha ha, those sons of bitches, ha, ha, ha,
I'll go visit their graves and laugh."
Were there more of one kind of post or the other? I didn't count; and, I
wager, neither did Nicholas Kristof.
The truth is, whether they are in the minority or not (let's face it –
we don't really know: who has polled the population of Saudi Arabia on
apostasy? Who has polled Somalis on their views about lampooning the
Prophet Mohammed? Or Afghanistan? Or Iran?), there are in fact millions of
Muslims in the world who believe that apostasy should be punishable by death; who believe
that women should be forced to have sex on demand and punished if they
refuse. There are also thousands, if not millions, of people in the world
who think that depicting the Prophet should be punishable by death – just
look at the riots around the world following the first publications
of these cartoons in 2005 and 2006, if you don't believe me.
And all of these people subscribe, as Packer says, to a certain
ideology.
So it doesn't really matter if you call that ideology "Islam"
or not. There are also millions of Muslims who do not subscribe to the same
ideas; and by all means, we should embrace them. Think of the protesters at
Gezi in 2013. Think of Malala Yousafzai. Think of Zuhdi Jasser.
Or just listen to Maajid Nawaz. He used to embrace many of the same
radical Islamic beliefs as terrorists today, dreaming of a global Islamic
society. After a stint in an Egyptian prison, he renounced that ideology
and started a UK-based foundation to combat it. Appearing on the BBC after the
Charlie Hebdo massacre Wednesday, he said Muslims and liberal westerners have failed
"to challenge Islamist extremism, to challenge the way in which we've
been eroding our values. And everything that the Islamists have wanted to
achieve in the way they're dividing communities, they've been getting away
with so far" as a result.
Kristof diminishes this call for introspection with his column.
January 7, forever a day to be remembered along with 9/11 and 3/11 and
7/7 and far too many others, was not a day for that message, any more than
the Holocaust was a time to editorialize about all those nice Germans, or
the killing of four black girls on Birmingham Sunday, or of Eric Garner
last July, days for writing about all those nice white people in America.
Muslim terrorists killed the staff of Charlie Hebdo.
And Muslim extremists in the West are threatening the lives of every
man, woman and child in the West who believes in what Charlie Hebdo
stood for.
Say it.
Because words are the strongest weapon in the world.
And so Charlie Hebdo lives on.
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