{"id":52780,"date":"2015-01-26T12:00:03","date_gmt":"2015-01-26T12:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=52780"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:26:12","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:26:12","slug":"norman-finkelstein-charlie-hebdo-is-sadism-not-satire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/01\/norman-finkelstein-charlie-hebdo-is-sadism-not-satire\/","title":{"rendered":"Norman Finkelstein: Charlie Hebdo Is Sadism, Not Satire"},"content":{"rendered":"

World renowned political science professor says he has ‘no sympathy’ for staff at Charlie Hebdo.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Norman<\/a><\/h3>\n

In Nazi Germany, there was an anti-Semitic\u00a0weekly\u00a0newspaper called Der St\u00fcrmer.<\/p>\n

Run by\u00a0Julius Streicher, it was notorious for being one of the\u00a0most virulent advocates of the persecution of Jews during the 1930s.<\/p>\n

What everybody remembers about\u00a0Der St\u00fcrmer was its morbid\u00a0caricatures of Jews, the people who were facing widespread\u00a0discrimination and persecution during the era.<\/p>\n

Its depictions endorsed all of the common stereotypes about Jews \u2013 a\u00a0hook nose, lustful, greedy.<\/p>\n

“Let’s say,\u00a0…\u00a0amidst\u00a0all of this\u00a0death and\u00a0destruction,\u00a0two\u00a0young Jews barged into the headquarters of the editorial offices of Der St\u00fcrmer, and they killed the staff for having humiliated them, degraded them, demeaned them, insulted them,” queried\u00a0Norman Finkelstein, a\u00a0professor of political science\u00a0and author of\u00a0numerous books including \u201cThe Holocaust Industry\u201d\u00a0and\u00a0\u201cMethod and Madness.\u201d<\/p>\n

“How would I\u00a0react to that?,”\u00a0said Finkelstein, who is the\u00a0son of Holocaust survivors.<\/p>\n

Finkelstein was drawing an analogy between a hypothetical attack on the German newspaper and the deadly Jan. 7 attack at the Paris headquarters of the satirical magazine\u00a0Charlie Hebdo, that left 12 people dead,\u00a0including its editor and prominent cartoonists. The weekly is known for printing controversial material, including derogatory cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad in 2006 and 2012.<\/p>\n

The attack sparked\u00a0a global massive outcry, with millions in France and across the world\u00a0taking\u00a0to the streets to support freedom of the press\u00a0behind the rallying cry of “Je suis Charlie,\u201d or \u201cI am Charlie.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the Charlie Hebdo<\/a> caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad\u00a0achieved was “not satire,” and what they provoked was not “ideas,” Finkelstein said.<\/p>\n

Satire is when one directs it either at oneself, causes his or her people to think twice about what they are doing and saying, or directs\u00a0it at people who have power and privilege, he said.<\/p>\n

“But when somebody is down and out, desperate, destitute, when you mock them, when you mock a homeless person, that is not satire,” Finkelstein said.<\/p>\n

“That is,\u00a0I give you the word,\u00a0sadism. There\u2019s a very big difference between satire and sadism. Charlie Hebdo<\/a> is sadism. It\u2019s not satire”<\/p>\n

The “desperate and despised\u00a0people” of today are Muslims, he said, considering the number of Muslim countries racked by\u00a0death and\u00a0destruction\u00a0as in the case of Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.<\/p>\n

“So,\u00a0two despairing and desperate young men act out their despair and desperation against this political pornography no different than Der St\u00fcrmer, who in the midst of all of this death and destruction decide\u00a0its somehow noble to degrade, demean, humiliate and insult the people. I\u2019m sorry, maybe it is very politically incorrect. I have no sympathy for [the staff of Charlie Hebdo]. Should they have been killed? Of course not. But of course, Streicher shouldn\u2019t have been hung.\u00a0I don\u2019t hear that from many people,” said Finkelstein.<\/p>\n

Streicher was among those who\u00a0stood trial on charges at\u00a0N\u00fcrnberg, following World War II.\u00a0He was hung\u00a0for those cartoons.<\/p>\n

Finkelstein said\u00a0some might argue that\u00a0they have the right to mock even desperate and destitute people, and they probably have\u00a0this right, he said, “But you also have the right to say ‘I don\u2019t want to put it in my magazine …\u00a0When you put it in, you are taking responsibility for it.”<\/p>\n

Finkelstein compared the controversial\u00a0Charlie Hebdo<\/a> caricatures to the “fighting words,” doctrine, a category of speech penalized under\u00a0American jurisprudence.<\/p>\n

The doctrine refers to certain words\u00a0that would likely cause the person to whom they are directed, to commit an act of violence. They are a category of speech unprotected by the\u00a0First Amendment.<\/p>\n

“You are not allowed to utter fighting words, because they are equivalent of a smack to the face and it is asking for trouble,” Finkelstein said.<\/p>\n

“So, are the Charlie Hebdo<\/a> caricatures the equivalent of fighting words? They call it satire.\u00a0That is not satire. It is just epithets, there is nothing funny about it. If you find it funny, depicting Jews in big lips and (a) hook nose is\u00a0also funny.”<\/p>\n

Finkelstein pointed to the contradictions in the Western world’s perception of the freedom of the press by giving the example of the pornographic magazine Hustler, whose publisher,\u00a0Larry Flynt, was shot and left paralyzed in 1978 by a white supremacist\u00a0serial killer for printing a cartoon\u00a0depicting interracial sex.<\/p>\n

“I don\u2019t remember everyone celebrating ‘We are Larry Flynt’ or ‘We are Hustler,'” he said.\u00a0“Should he have been attacked?\u00a0Of course not. But nobody suddenly turned this into a political principle of one side or the other.”<\/p>\n

The West’s embrace of the Charlie Hebdo<\/a> caricatures was because the drawings were directed at and ridiculed Muslims, he said.<\/p>\n

The characterization by the French of Muslims as being barbaric is hypocritical considering the killings of thousands of people\u00a0during France\u2019s colonial occupation of Algeria, and the French public’s reaction to the Algerian war from 1954 to 1962, according to Finkelstein.<\/p>\n

The first mass demonstration in Paris against the war “did not\u00a0come until 1960, two years before the war was over,” he said. “Everybody supported the French\u00a0annihilatory\u00a0war in Algeria.”<\/p>\n

He said French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s apartment was\u00a0bombed twice\u00a0in 1961 and 1962, as was the office of his magazine,\u00a0Les Temps Modernes, after he\u00a0came out in full force against the war.<\/p>\n

Finkelstein, who has been described as an “American radical,”\u00a0said the pretensions of the West about\u00a0Muslim attire exposed a dramatic contradiction in the face of the West\u2019s attitude toward natives in lands they occupied during colonialism.<\/p>\n

“When\u00a0Europeans came to North America, the thing they said about the native Americans was that they were so barbaric, because they walked around naked. The European women were wearing three layers of clothes. Then they came to North America, and decided that the native Americans were backward because they all walked around naked. And now, we walk around naked, and we say that the Muslims are backward because they wear so much clothes,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Can you imagine anything more barbaric? Banning women wearing headscarves?” he asked,\u00a0referring to\u00a0the 2004 ban on headscarves in\u00a0French\u00a0public service jobs.<\/p>\n

Finkelstein\u2019s work, accusing Jews of exploiting the memory of Holocaust for political gain and criticizing Israel for oppressing the Palestinians, has made him\u00a0a controversial figure even within the Jewish community.<\/p>\n

He was denied a tenure as a professor at\u00a0DePaul University in 2007\u00a0after a\u00a0highly publicized feud\u00a0with fellow academic\u00a0Alan Dershowitz,\u00a0an ardent supporter\u00a0of Israel.\u00a0Dershowitz reportedly lobbied\u00a0the administration of DePaul, a Roman Catholic university in Chicago, to deny him tenure.<\/p>\n

Finkelstein, who currently teaches at\u00a0Sakarya University in Turkey,\u00a0said the decision was based on “transparently political grounds.”<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aa.com.tr<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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