No, we are NOT all Charlie (and that’s a problem)

It is comforting and politically expedient to claim that “we” are attacked because “they” cannot deal with “our” freedoms, particularly freedom of speech.

CAS MUDDE

7 January 2015

The tragic terrorist attack at the French satirist magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, killing ten journalists and two policemen, is frightening at many levels. Although the three terrorists are still at large, and the official motivation hasn’t been established yet, all indications point to Jihadists, probably French-born Muslims who returned from the war in Syria (note the similarities with the terrorist attack at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last year).

The general response has been one that we have seen too often before, for example after the killing of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh in 2004 or the terrorist attacks in the US of 2011. Politicians use the attacks to boast about the perfect democratic and free society that they preside over and stress that this has nothing to do with Islam, but with some pathological individuals who use a religion as an excuse for extremist ideas. Citizens respond in the one medium in which they are still active, social media, and make grand statements of solidarity, before being distracted by a video of a waterskiing squirrel or a piano-playing kitten. Both will declare that we are all whomever the victim of the day is.

Today Facebook and Twitter are full of statements like “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) and “we are all Charlie”. Unfortunately, we are not. Or, more precisely, with very few exceptions, we are not Charlie, and that is a major problem for liberal democracies around the world. Let me give you three reasons why most of us are not Charlie and why this is problematic for our democracies.

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Continua qui: https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/cas-mudde/no-we-are-not-all-charlie-and-that%E2%80%99s-problem