The lead article in the first edition of Charlie Hebdo after the massacre at its Paris offices by Islamists claiming to avenge cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad — the edition distributed as an astonishing five million copies — raised a thorny, sensitive question. After thanking all those who had shown solidarity with the magazine, its editor in chief, Gérard Biard, asked a question that, he said, “torments us”:
“Are we finally going to rid our political and intellectual vocabulary of the dirty term ‘laïcard intégriste’?”
Loosely translated, those words mean “die-hard secularist.” What Mr. Biard was challenging was the argument that committed secularists like himself and the staff of Charlie Hebdo had essentially brought this tragedy upon themselves, and that there is, by implication, a sort of moral equivalence between deeply held secularist views and the “religious totalitarianism” — his words — that he and his staff loved to skewer.
Over the years, he went on, Charlie Hebdo and other champions of la laïcité — the secularism enshrined in French politics — had been assailed as “Islamophobes, Christianophobes, provocateurs, irresponsible, throwers of oil on the fire, racists” and the like.
Even as people lamented the massacre, he wrote, some of them offered a maddening qualifier: “Yes, we condemn terrorism, but.......” “Yes, burning down a newspaper is bad, but..... We have heard it all, and our friends as well....”
Obviously there can be no “but” in condemning the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo, or the ideology that encourages murder in the name of religion.
Irreverent magazines like Charlie Hebdo have been a fixture in Western societies for many years, and France has a strong tradition of such journalism.
The Internet, moreover, has opened the door to almost every level and form of expression.
Yet there are legitimate questions raised about freedom of expression in this tragedy.
In the wake of the terror attack, French authorities began aggressive enforcements of a law against supporting or justifying terrorism, including arrests of people who spoke admiringly about the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. Not surprisingly, their actions have raised questions of a double standard — one for cartoonists who deliberately insult religion, when their cartoons are certain to antagonize Muslims at a time when anti-Muslim feelings are already at high levels in France and across much of Europe, and another for those who react by applauding terrorists.
The difference, according to French authorities, is between the right to attack an idea and the right to attack people or incite hatred.
The distinction is recognized in the various laws against hate speech or inciting violence that exist in most Western states.
As a consequence of World War II, France and several other European countries have laws against denying the Holocaust, and with a rise in anti-Semitism in France, authorities have actively sought to curb hate speech, like the anti-Semitic routines of a comedian, Dieudonné M’bala M’bala.
Freedom of expression is broader in the United States, but there, too, there are legal limitations on speech that involves incitement, libel, obscenity or child pornography.
But drawing the line between speech that is disgusting and speech that is dangerous is inherently difficult and risky.
In Israel, mocking Muhammad can bring a prison term, as it did for Tatiana Susskind, a Russian immigrant who posted drawings of the Prophet as a pig in Hebron in 1997.
She was accused, among other things, of committing a racist act and harming religious sensitivities, and sentenced to two years in prison. Laws like those in France against “words or acts of hatred” are based on what is often a subjective judgment. And any constraints on freedom of expression invite government abuse.
Tastes, standards and situations change, and in the end it is best for editors and societies at large to judge what is fit — or safe — to print.
That the tragedy in Paris has served to raise these questions is in no way an insult to the members of the Charlie Hebdo staff who perished.
Shocking people into confronting reality was, after all, what their journal — which they proudly called a “journal irresponsable” — was all about.
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