Community Standards

jacobinmag.com /2015/01/community-standards/
Seth Ackerman
Last year, Steven Salaita was fired or, rather, de-hired from a tenured job hed been offered at the
University of Illinois. Some bloggers and Jewish groups had publicized a series of angry tweets that
Salaita, a Palestinian American, had written about Israel and Zionism in a moment of passion over the
latest round of violence.
You may be too refined to say it, but Im not: I wish all the fucking West Bank settlers would go missing,
one of them said. Zionists: transforming anti-Semitism from something horrible into something honorable
since 1948, said another. Pro-Israel activists cried anti-Semitism and the board of trustees concluded that
Salaita was beyond the pale. After all, Jewish students taking his classes might feel like they were in a
hostile environment.
When Corey Robin launched a campaign to defend Salaita, I offered to help. To me, it was an obvious
case. Those particular tweets seemed distasteful to me though much less so, it turns out, when placed
in context and Im generally allergic to intemperate rants. If Id been Salaitas department chair, I might
have sent him an email urging him to tone it down. But firing him? A professor has the right to say what he
wants.
Moreover, having written about Palestine myself for many years, I knew all too well what kinds of scurrilous
accusations youre liable to suffer when you question Zionist orthodoxies. I was skeptical that Salaita was
any kind of anti-Semite, and as it turned out hed frequently gone out of his way to condemn hatred of
Jews. Some people will always call you an anti-Semite, no matter what you really say, and the goal is
always the same: shutting down debate.
But oh, the tears they will shed. Theyll say youre stigmatizing all Jews, not simply contesting those who
defend the dispossession of Palestinians. The Anti-Defamation League, a group once positioned on the
left of the political spectrum, is the champion of this kind of pseudo-tolerant rhetoric. (Its slogan: Imagine a
World Without Hate.)
The ADL will call a Washington Post cartoon condemning Israels slaughter in Gaza hideously antiSemitic and warn of a new and insidious political anti-Semitism on the rise in the US. And there is a
certain logic to this argument. After all, American Jews overwhelmingly say that caring about Israel is an
important part of being Jewish. A plurality even believe that God gave Israel to Jewish people. And Jews
really are killed or persecuted in certain places in the world. If you say that Israel is stealing Palestinian
land, isnt that a painful denigration of the Jewish community? Can such a statement really be condoned?
As a Jewish dissident from Zionism, the fallacy of that logic has always been apparent to me. But since the
Charlie Hebdo massacre, its become clear that it has also found a home on the Left.
To be fair, a lot of questionable reactions to the shootings in Paris stemmed at first from something entirely
different: American ignorance of France and the French language, and therefore a massive degree of
confusion about what Charlie Hebdo was and what its cartoons actually meant.
A drawing depicting Frances black justice minister as a monkey, widely condemned online as racist
affront, was actually an explicit attack on the Front National accompanied by an indignant editorial for
having made that comparison.

A cartoon that included a colonial-style caricature of an African native which one left-wing writer
thought was some kind of racist attack on a French-Arab politician was actually part of a joint campaign
with SOS Racisme against a proposed anti-immigration law.
The widely circulated image of pregnant Boko Haram sex slaves screaming hands off our welfare! was
actually a satire of the Catholic rights outcry against a proposed cut to child benefits for high-income
families.
Allergic as I am to intemperate rants, I am equally allergic to insult humor, and that is why I dont
particularly enjoy or approve of cartoons of this genre. But many of the first reactions on the US left
seeing Charlie as a kind of French Der Strmer were based on a serious misreading of a paper whose
now-dead editor was a passionate supporter of the Palestinian cause and a longtime illustrator for the antiracist group MRAP. (Its slogan: Everyone is not alike, Everyone is equal.) A number of people ended up
looking very foolish on the internet.
However: there was no mistaking Charlies attitude toward religion, and this is where the real issue lies. By
now its well-known that Charlie was part of a long French satirical tradition of deliberately offensive
blasphemy. Christianity and Judaism were venomously skewered in its pages. But Islam was obviously a
prime and in recent years, some might say compulsive target.
This, I believe, was precisely a function of Charlies growing cultural irrelevance. An aging monument to a
certain soixante-huitard libertarian left, the paper had been on its last legs, and on the edge of bankruptcy,
for some time. In an era when blasphemy and vulgarity rarely shock anymore cartoons like this one
could pass almost without comment it was only by provoking Islamic fundamentalists, who have no
tolerance for blasphemy, that Charlie could maintain its insurgent edge.
That was the reason it focused so ostentatiously on Islam certainly not, as some Americans seem to
think, out of any sneaking agreement with the far right, which loathed the magazine, took it to court on
dozens of occasions, and was without a doubt its most consistent target. (I am not Charlie, Jean-Marie
Le Pen declared the other day. These were enemies of the FN.) That may be a puerile and self-serving
reason on Charlies part, but this was, after all, a paper whose official slogan proudly proclaimed itself a
Journal Irresponable.
Its here that we arrive at the nub of the issue, and its here that I find myself disheartened by the reasoning
of some of my comrades. Whatever ones view of criticizing religion in general, they say, the case of
Islamic religion is fundamentally different in the French context, because it represents a community, and
one that is under attack. The satirists contempt amuses when directed at the potent and impervious
Pope, Scott Long argued in a thoughtful essay that made the rounds, but it turns dark and sour when
defaming a weak and despised community.
Muslims in France certainly are under attack, and never more so than at this supremely dangerous
moment. The problem with this reasoning lies in the word community. Exactly which community do such
writers have in mind?
At the time of the original controversy over the Mohammed caricatures in 2006, a French survey asked
respondents whether they understood the outrage among some Muslims. Not even half of French
Muslims (48%) said they completely understood the outrage. 24% said they didnt understand at all
not that much different from French Catholics (35%). (By a lopsided margin, the French said they
disapproved of mocking religion, and called the cartoons useless provocation rather than a blow for free
speech.)
When the so-called headscarf law was proposed in 2004 (in reality, it prohibits all conspicuous religious

symbols in public schools, including yarmulkes and large crosses), 20% of French Muslims were
completely in favor again, not all that different from the French as a whole (32%). Only 31% of
Muslims were completely opposed.
When demonstrations against the law were organized notably, by activists who later formed the Parti
des Indignes de la Rpublique French Muslims views on the protests were all over the map: 23% said
they opposed them; 28% said they were indifferent; 23% said they were sympathetic; and only 22%
said they support[ed] them.
This should not be surprising, because most French of Muslim background are not all that religious. 75%
generally do not go to mosque on Friday and 84% of Muslim women never wear a headscarf. Only 41%
call themselves practicing Muslims, and 26% decline to call themselves believers at all once again,
about the same as for French Catholics.
That does not mean French Muslims are indistinguishable from the general population; two-thirds abstain
from alcohol and non-halal food, for example. But it does mean that being Muslim in France does not
automatically mean one agrees with the strident fundamentalists who tearfully insist that a bunch of
obnoxious cartoons in an anti-religious magazine are an unbearable insult to every Muslim. Just as not all
Jews accept Abe Foxmans right to determine what is and is not permissible, not all French Muslims line up
behind their self-appointed spokespeople.
The greatest danger now as the alarming spate of violent anti-Muslim attacks shows is that French
Muslims will be further essentialized by their enemies on the Right, who would like nothing more than to
equate Arab with Muslim, Muslim with fundamentalist, and fundamentalist with terrorist.
But it is equally important that Muslims not be essentialized by their friends either. As Olivier Roy, perhaps
the leading sociologist of French Islam, wrote in the wake of the attacks:

We talk continually about this famous Muslim community, on both the right and the left,
either to denounce its refusal to truly integrate or to make it into a victim of Islamophobia.
Both rhetorics are in fact based on the same fantasy of an imaginary Muslim community.
There is no Muslim community, but rather a Muslim population. Accepting this simple
observation would already be a good antidote to the hysteria of today, and that to come.

If you doubt that is the case, I would urge you to read a provocative essay by one member of the French
Muslim community in particular: the religion editor of Charlie Hebdo. In this 2013 response to a widely
circulated critique of Charlie by a former editor who had accused the paper of Islamophobia, Zineb elRhazoui takes aim at what she calls the most sophisticated variety of racism that exists in France.
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