Paris, Freedom and Hate Speech

The cold-blooded terrorist attacks in France have resulted in so many tales of courage that it is impossible to give appropriate weight to them all. At the Hyper Cacher supermarket, where four Jews were brutally murdered, one of them was killed trying to save the others. He grabbed a Kalashnikov rifle which had been left on the counter by the assassin, Amedy Coulibaly. Tragically, Coulibaly had abandoned it because it had not been working and so, when the hostage tried to turn it on him, it jammed again. Coulibaly turned around and shot him dead.

Courage comes in many forms. One of the victims, Phillipe Braham, habitually wore a kippah, the skullcap often used by observant Jews to cover the head. It might seem strange to consider wearing a kippah to be brave but it is. In 2013, long before the shootings, 40% of French Jews reported being afraid to do so in public. Marine Le Pen has called for the kippah to be banned, along with the Muslim headscarf. But Braham was willing to defy both threats of violence and political opposition in asserting the right to his freedom of religious expression.

These were not secular Jews. They were all assimilated into French society but not completely. Yoav Hattab was the son of a Tunisian rabbi who had moved to Paris to study. His heartbreaking final text message urged a friend to “observe the Sabbath“. Coulibaly targeted the Hyper Cacher because of its specialism in the sale of kosher goods. All four, including Yohan Cohen and Francois-Michel Saada, were killed while exercising their right to comply with Jewish dietary law.

Two days after these racist murders, Spiked Online declared its opposition to the laws which criminalise incitement to racial hatred. Ordinarily, this would not have been the obvious conclusion to draw but this is an example of the logical disconnect which can sometimes occur when complex events are reduced to simple hashtags. Alongside the crude narratives of free speech v religion and Muslims v Jews, there are more nuanced ways of trying to make sense of it all.

Blasphemy is not the same as hate. Some Muslims might be offended if I show them a picture of Muhammad, and some Orthodox Jews might be offended if I show them a picture of Angela Merkel. But neither picture would make people want to kill members of the religion being blasphemed. In the last two weeks, I have seen lots of Charlie Hebdo cartoons and I am confident that, while I am not comfortable with all of them, none of them comes close to crossing the line into hate. But you can’t have it both ways. Given that Charlie Hebdo does not incite hate, it is unfair to suggest that it would be threatened by hate speech laws. There would be complaints, as there have been in France, but the fact that legislation can lead to unsuccessful complaints is rarely a sensible reason to oppose it, especially when there are compelling reasons why it is necessary.

Muslims have nothing to fear from Charlie Hebdo but they do have a great deal to fear from hate, often from people who also target Jews. In July 2014, a Saudi Arabian student was stabbed to death in Essex, with no plausible motive except that she had been wearing a headscarf. I hope that Muslims will forgive me if I do not dwell on these examples. In the aftermath of an atrocity where Jews, the police and cartoonists have been the victims of hate, it feels wrong to divert the gaze too quickly to similar crimes against Muslims, at other times and places. It is sufficient to say that violence censors the religious expression of Muslims, as well as censoring the religious expression of Jews, and censoring free speech.

Our hate speech laws do not only benefit racial and religious minorities. Three Muslim men were jailed in 2007 for inciting murder, over cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. It might seem ironic to restrict speech in order to protect the lives of cartoonists, but this paradox falls away with the realisation that free speech is a difficult balancing act, rather than a moral absolute. The decision to prosecute these men was criticised by Index on Censorship, on the dubious grounds that “incitement law is being used to shut down protest.” It has become trite to say that recent events have taught us an important lesson about free speech but we could equally conclude the opposite, that Index on Censorship has got it wrong and that we need our hate crime legislation more than ever.

Because free speech is not an absolute, any decision we make about it should be evidence-based. It makes no sense to show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo without first having seen the cartoons and confirmed that they are innocuous, although of course we do not need to know anything at all about the cartoons in order to mourn the dead and condemn their vile assassins. When deciding whether to restrict speech, we must look at the evidence of how radicalisation works, to ground our policy pronouncements in reality, not the world of ideas.

One of the Charlie Hebdo killers, Cherif Kouachi, was interviewed in 2004 for a French documentary. Kouachi was radicalised by a self-proclaimed preacher named Farid Benyettou. Before he met Benyettou, his main activities had been rap music, smoking pot and chasing girls but, under his guidance, his interests shifted to martyrdom, jihad and anti-Semitism. This was a lengthy process of indoctrination, which took place over several months and consisted largely of hate speech. No single one of the speech acts created a clear and present danger but the risk increased the longer they were allowed to go unchecked.

Everybody has a view as to what causes terrorism. Many are self-serving and boil down to the argument that “the things I disapproved of before this attack are surely to blame for it”. The most widely cited theories are that it is caused by the theological content of Islam and that it is caused by resentment at US foreign policy. A close examination of the techniques of radicalisation shows that neither explanation is useful. Benyettou persuaded Kouachi that suicide attacks are justified by scripture and urged him to act over the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Benyettou implanted both these motivations in Kouachi’s mind.

For the record, I do disapprove of much of the theological content of Islam and much of recent US foreign policy. I also disapprove of terrorist apologists on Newsnight, overzealous secularisation and economic inequality, but I doubt that any of these significantly contributes to terrorism. Hate spreads destructively from person to person, like the Ebola virus. The primary cause of hate is hate.

Cherif Kouachi was further radicalised by the jihadist, Djamel Beghal. Amedy Coulibaly was also radicalised by Beghal and almost certainly met the Kouachi brothers through him. Begahl in turn was the disciple of somebody who is very familiar to people in the UK, a certain Abu Hamza. By coincidence, in the same week as the horrific events in Paris, Abu Hamza was sentenced to life for terror offences by a court in New York, having already served time in this country for inciting hate. But while Abu Hamza has been contained, his message of hate has not. It is continuing to wreak murderous havoc and it may well do so again.

Despite the many false accusations of hypocrisy, free speech fundamentalists are usually painfully consistent in their woolly thinking. Kenan Malik and Johann Hari would have allowed Abu Hamza to go on preaching, making more converts and spreading more hate. Hari’s alternative, that we engage hate preachers in a reasoned debate, is absurd. Islamist extremism is founded on a conspiracy theory that the world, and in particular the media, is controlled by Jews. The idea that it could be dislodged by rational argument is, well, irrational. Nothing at all would have been gained by inviting Abu Hamza round for tea and scones.

Nor would criticising Islam help. For radical fundamentalists, the fact that they are Muslims is far less important than the fact that they hate Jews. Having a go at Islam is far too imprecise a tool for combating such a specific threat. In order to tackle hate, we ought to stop caring so much about the characteristics of the haters, and start caring much more about protecting the people who they hate. The relationship between Benyettou and Kouachi was like that of a sect leader and a follower, caught in the thrall of a charismatic spell. Influence was entirely top-down. Its effects cannot be undone by opposition “bubbling up from below“.

I was delighted that Charlie Hebdo has been able to publish this week and that its print run of five million copies sold out in hours. Its publication did nothing to encourage terrorism and did nothing to discourage it either. I was simply glad that it had survived the unprovoked slaughter of so many of its staff. On the other hand, despite it all, I still cannot quite bring myself to say #JeSuisCharlie. The way that I think about it is this. I often read the Guardian and I am happy to admit that I like the Guardian. But the idea of saying #IAmTheGuardian would alarm me. For me, it is a worryingly reductive way of looking at myself and the world. Perhaps it is the muesli which puts me off. Or perhaps it is the sandals.

The Guardian is one of a select group of media providers in the UK, in that its coverage included a image of the new Charlie Hebdo cover, which features the prophet Muhammad. It gave its readers a warning at the top of the article, so that anybody who would be offended had the option to avoid it. Although there was not a legal duty to offer this choice, I felt that its decision to do so was the correct one. Its approach struck me as simultaneously brave, compassionate and wise. On this occasion, I agreed with its stance but #IAmNotTheGuardian so, if you don’t mind, I shall now cease the effusive praise that I am giving to it.

“I am not a martyr, and I do not wish to be harmed for any reason,” wrote a US- based blogger a few days ago, “yet if we start giving into fear, even just a little, we have lost something precious.” It comes as no surprise that he was referring to the attacks in Paris, but what might be more unexpected is that he was not reflecting upon the publication of cartoons. This was a non-Orthodox Jewish blogger, fiercely determined that he would continue to wear a kippah in public.

Last Sunday was the day of famous rally in Paris in response to the tragedy. The day before, thousands of French Jews had gathered outside the Hyper Cacher supermarket for their own vigil for the victims. There were no foreign leaders present and was hardly any media interest. This was a more personal and intimate occasion. Many of the mourners chose to put on a kippah. They did not all feel a religious obligation to wear a kippah – some of them did not usually do so – but they wanted to wear one as a gesture in memory of their murdered co-religionists. When the Guardian published the cover of Charlie Hebdo, it made an important statement about freedom, but this statement by a group of Parisian Jews was just as important. It deserves not to be forgotten.