Members of the French police special forces evacuate hostages including a child after launching the assault at a kosher grocery store in Porte de Vincennes, eastern Paris. Photo: (THOMAS SAMSON/AFP/Getty Images It’s curious, isn’t it, how for some people, when push comes to shove, it’s always about the Jews?
Does anyone believe for a minute that when Amedy Coulibaly, in presumed solidarity with his alleged associates the Charlie Hebdo killers chose to make a grand gesture, he randomly picked a Hyper Cacher supermarket on the eastern edge of Paris?
Hyper Cacher translates to Super Kosher; hours before the Sabbath, it would have been a guaranteed big fat target, packed with those awful criminals, civilian Jews (and perhaps some Muslims too, looking for halal products) engaged in shopping.
As one Jeffrey Goldberg (a correspondent with The Atlantic) tweeted Friday, “Selling kosher food is a provocative and vulgar act, sure to arouse the hostility of aggrieved extremists.”
Anti-Jew and anti-Israel sentiment is the thrumming subtext to so much of this. Many more Jews than usual have left France in recent years, for Israel, in the wake of rising anti-Semitism and attacks throughout Europe but notably at a Jewish school in Toulouse three years ago, when three children and a teacher were murdered by a young Muslim man.
I saw Israel once from a helicopter. My late father, an agnostic who had never been there, was nonetheless a devout Zionist. He knew just how the place would look from the air — an oasis of flourishing green surrounded by the brown dirt of its neighbours — and he saw that as a metaphor for Israel’s fundamental loneliness as the only liberal democracy, and a raucous one at that, in the Middle East. Right on both counts, Dad.
I thought of him this week; I think of him often of course, but at times like this, he was so clear-minded and plain-spoken. There wouldn’t have been an equivocating bone in his body; there hardly was, anyway.
He would have howled with rage (and amusement) at the CBC, which distinguished itself this week — thank you to the independent media critic Jesse Brown for this — with two memos from its “journalistic standards and practices director” David Studer.
- Three hostage takers killed in France, including Charlie Hebdo massacre suspects
- An imam explains why Muslims hate seeing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad
“As we cover the shootings at Charlie Hebdo in Paris, there are obviously calls to make,” Studer wrote. “NN (the CBC News Network) has been doing a great job of handling this on the fly.
“Please bear in mind:
“We aren’t showing the video of the shooting of a police officer lying on the ground. It’s just too graphic and horrifying. NN is using a still of the moment and that’s a good solution.
“We aren’t showing cartoons making fun of the Prophet Muhammad. Other elements of Charlie Hebdo’s content and style are fine, but this area should be avoided as, quite simply, it’s offensive to Muslims as a group.”
French emergency doctors evacuate injured hostages.
Later, Studer said in another note: “Many people are arguing that the violent actions in Paris today invite — some would say almost require — others to show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo by reprinting the offending cartoons. Some individuals, including politicians, are tweeting these images.
“I understand the impulse but don’t buy the logic.
“We wouldn’t have published these images before today — not out of fear, but out of respect for the beliefs and sensibilities of the mass of Muslim believers. Why would the actions of a gang of violent thugs force us to change that position?
“This isn’t the time for emotional responses or bravado. There are better ways to honour and stand beside our fellow journalists.”
Members of the French police special forces launch the assault at a kosher grocery store in Porte de Vincennes, eastern Paris.
What he meant, of course, was that there are safer ways to honour their dead fellows.
Studer is a graduate of Carleton University’s journalism program, now home to professor Karim H. Karim, who this week said in an interview that it’s not “helpful” to use words like “barbaric,” as Prime Minister Stephen Harper did about the Paris killers.
“When leaders do this a lot of people are listening,” Karim said. “When ‘barbaric’ gets attached to them, these are the kind of stereotypes and images that are being built up. What is achieved by using rhetoric like that?”
He and Studer appear to share the worrying view that the journalist’s role is to protect delicate readers and viewers from offence (I say this after reading some of Karim’s writing on journalism).
I think they’re both wrong: CBC should have shown the murder of police officer Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim, as he lay outside the Charlie Hebdo offices (because what better reveals a killer than that he shoots an already wounded man?) and the offending cartoons which provoked the 2011 firebombing of the magazine and apparently marked it as an acceptable target, and the prime minister was merely speaking accurately about what happened.
It’s not a time for rhetoric; Karim and I agree about that, just not what constitutes it.
If France, as a secular democracy where anti-Semitism and Charlie Hebdo’s irreverent cartoonists both could thrive, is an irritant to radicalized or discontented Muslims, Israel must drive them out of their minds. No wonder denying that the country even has a right to exist is a core belief in so much of the Middle East.
And apparently, it’s not so different in France.
As Damian Penny, a proud Newfoundlander and my new god, tweeted Friday: “Jews control the media. Jews control the government. Jews are all-powerful rulers of the world. SO WHY THE F— DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING?”
cblatchford@postmedia.com
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