Demonstration in Place de la Republique, Paris, the evening after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Photograph: Nigel Dickinson/Polaris/Eyevine
The standard mantra begins: Of course Im in favour of press freedom, BUT And you always mind the but. You watch for the qualifications and thus for some separate, limiting agenda. Yet the fascinating thing, this Charlie Hebdo time around, is that there are no buts, no caveats, no excuses, no ritual citing of codes and reservations. It is deemed absolutely right to hold the prophet (or anyone else) up for ridicule. It is absolutely wrong to threaten journalists with violence in return. As for killing a dozen cartoonists, writers, visitors and police at their editorial offices, who can possibly excuse such berserk vileness? Press freedom is under manifest threat. Crowds around the world demonstrate their grief and resolve. Politicians, priests and editors march together down Charlies freedom road.
Count the absence of buts, then, as affirmation, as a question of principle. And if theres principle here, theres also the clear Gallic logic of right and wrong. It is wrong to kill journalists because of what they write or draw. It was therefore wrong for a local group that calls itself al-Qaida to kill Khalid Mohammed al Washali, a Yemeni TV reporter, on a road outside Sanaa just one week ago. It was wrong to see cameraman Zubair Hatami assassinated by bomb blast in Kabul a few days before.
It was wrong, wrong, wrong a hundred times over through a hundred murders in 2014. At least 38 journalists died in the Middle East last year: 18 of them in Syria. Six Palestinians perished in Gaza. Range further east to six dead Pakistani correspondents, six dead Afghans, four dead Bangladeshis and something else is absolutely evident. This is not some inchoate war of Muslims against those who clutch the pen of truth. Here are Muslims dying, in chilling numbers, to hold that pen, to expose brutality, crime, corruption and the rest.
Press freedom knows no bounds and has no religion. Press freedom is your right to be informed, educated, entertained, stirred to laughter or action. Press freedom is every societys safety valve. The context of the Charlie Hebdo massacre makes that point in the most desolate way possible.
This does not mean, naturally, that journalism in every society is the same, rattling identical cages. Take the most obvious difference. France is an insistently secular state. If we say to religion You are untouchable then were fucked, according to Grard Briard, Charlies surviving editor-in-chief. Cartoons of the prophet naked or the pope holding a condom and proclaiming This is my body are prime targets for Charlie artists week after week. It is serious, acrid stuff images that do far more than spit in the whimsical, Oxbridge British tradition (which mostly wouldnt bother with religion much anyway, because C of E-ness doesnt shift many copies on newsstands).
Theres even a specific French name for it gouaille. Arthur Goldhammer, the brilliant Harvard-based translator explained to al-Jazeera and Vox: Its an anarchic, populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect itself as venerable, sacred or powerful.
So does this, on examination, represent the absolutism of press freedom the crowds muster to defend? Yes, as a concept and a creed. Freedom in a defined cultural context; freedom that makes sense within traditional borders and traditional terms of reference. It doesnt travel naturally to bookstalls in Manchester or Miami, but thats not the point.
Charlie Hebdo and a whole tradition of scabrous satire are part of France, part of the French definition of freedom and part of the bill of goods foreigners who settle there sign up for. In short, it isnt the cartoons themselves, taken one by one, that count; nor is it their differing capacity to shock as you travel from nation to nation. It is what they mean for France; and for what this whole desperate episode means for press freedom every time a politician hastens to hymn it.
There is no absolute conformity here, but there is the sudden appearance of absolute solidarity, positioning free media at the heart of a free society. Thats why journalists across the globe have been so moved and so shaken by the tragedy in Rue Nicolas-Appert. Its scale seems to stun all of us. And the message we register and pass on in turn has the force of momentum at last.
The rest is here:
Press freedom can also deliver horror, which makes it all the more precious