The cartoonist Garry Trudeau recently gave a speech in which he condemned the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and by implication four shoppers in a Parisian kosher supermarket, for getting themselves murdered. Key to his argument was the principle that it is permissible for satire to be offensive when it attacks the powerful and the privileged, but not when it attacks weak and defenseless victims—the latter category including, in the current instance, people who might kill those with whom they disagree. David Frum investigates this theory of morality:
To fix the blame for the killing on the murdered journalists, rather than the gunmen, Trudeau invoked the underdog status of the latter. . . . Had the gunmen been “privileged,” then presumably the cartoons would have been commendable satire. The cartoonists would then have been martyrs to free speech. But since the gunmen were “non-privileged,” the responsibility for their actions shifts to the people they targeted, robbing them of agency. It’s almost as if he thinks of underdogs as literal dogs. If a dog bites a person who touches its dinner, we don’t blame the dog. The dog can’t help itself. The person should have known better. . . .
But here’s the trouble: There are many dogs in any fight, and the task of identifying which one is the underdog is not so easy. . . .
[I]t’s hard to ignore that many whom Trudeau regards as European victims are simultaneously engaged in large-scale violence against people they regard as their enemies. . . . About 40 percent of all hate crimes recorded in France in 2013 were committed against Jews, and 95 percent of those crimes were committed by people of Middle Eastern or North African origin.
Garry Trudeau is not the first person to insinuate that France and Europe are guilty of over-concern for the sensibilities of Jews at the expense of the sensibilities of Muslims. . . . But Trudeau is the first prominent person identified with the mainstream of American liberalism to advance the point, and that represents a milestone of sorts. But a milestone toward what?
Read more on Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/04/why-garry-trudeau-is-wrong-about-charlie-hebdo/390336/