I made these Je Suis Charlie pencils and have them out for free at the It’s Only Fashion office.

The first paragraph I drafted for this post called what happened yesterday at Charlie Hebdo unthinkable. Of course, I had to delete that and start again because it obviously was not just thinkable, but doable. Three of our fellow human beings went into an office and killed twelve other fellow human beings because they were offended by their cartoons. It all sounds so ludicrous, doesn’t it?

Of course, to say the murders were about cartoons is to miss the point. The killers are bit players in an existential struggle between modernity and traditionalism and modernity is winning. When you are winning, you do not resort to tactics like terrorism. Terrorism is for losers.

You see, if they were not losing the argument already, they had many other options to object to and oppose the satiric cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. They could protest outside the office. They could have billboards saying  “Chalie Hebdo is a poopy head.” They could write letters to the editor or to the advertisers asking them to stop running ads in the magazine. They could call for a boycott of products advertised in Charlie Hebdo. But their side is losing and they know it. So they decided to smash things and kill people. 

Here in the United States, some anti-abortion activists frustrated by their inability to stop access to safe and legal abortions bombed clinics and murdered nurses and doctors. That form of domestic terrorism is waning only because their side has racked up hundreds of legislative victories that make them optimistic they will prevail. However, they have the same traditionalist worldview that society must be structured around  faith, not reason. When the tide turns and they realize they are still losing in the long term, I have no doubt that we will see an increase in clinic violence again. Terrorism is the tactic of the losers.

Yesterday, the NAACP office in Colorado Springs was fire-bombed and a  balding, middle-aged white male is the suspect. Although racism remains ubiquitous at many levels in our society, open racism is losing and the conscious racists know it. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was the act of losers angry that segregation was coming to an end. So they decided to blow things up and killed four children.  Terrorism is the tactic of the losers.

However, terrorists can win small victories if they succeed in making us change what we do. Many in the press are succumbing to terrorist threats by refusing to print the cartoons. I understand the fear, but I think it would be smarter and safer if every newspaper, magazine and television new program published them. Ten thousand targets would be the same as none. It was only because Charlie Hebdo was so singular in its publishing that it was a target.

And yes, that will be offensive to Muslims around the world. Probably as offensive as the Piss Christ by Andres Serrano was to many Christians. And you know what, people organized campaigns, writing letters, speaking on television, protesting and making their objections to the Piss Christ clear. That is the modernist response to things that offend us. We will all be offended from time to time. That is part of life and we just have to deal with it. We have every right to object, to speak up, to voice our opinion. But we don’t get to kill people because they offend us. That is modernity.

And for the record, Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons are offensive, xenophobic, racist, sexist and homophobic; they ran the gamut of top-down offensiveness. Many of their cartoons will offend people of all religions, not just Islam. But being offensive is not a capital offense. They deserved criticism of their xenophobia, their racism, their sexism. Criticism! They deserved boycotts and protests. But freedom of expression means that offensive people get to express their offensive views. Then they can be criticized for it, ostracized, even boycotted. They don’t get killed for it.

I hope our governments and our people can remember that this was an act done by individuals, not a religion. It was supported by an organization that is hoping we react with anger. It was done by people who hold a traditionalist worldview that places faith in charge of all aspects of life, government, the arts, family and social structures and yes, even the press. We often conflate this view with Islam because we recognize and object to the Islamic worldview influencing our government and our society. Meanwhile, we fail to see how some Christians seek the same influence on our laws, our families, our media and our society. It is hard to see the forest when you are a tree.

But why aren’t Christians doing terrorist acts, then? In the United States and in Europe, Christians are comfortably in the majority. But as we have seen with abortion clinic bombings, a small minority of Christians will resort to terrorism when they perceive they are losing, just as a small minority of Muslims have. Moreover, the United States is not the whole world and you can find terrorists of every religious stripe if you look worldwide. The Bosnian war was Christians ethnically cleansing Muslims in Europe. In the Central African Republic, militias are trying to eliminate all Muslims – an underreported genocide. Christian terrorists in India have carried out many attacks in the north east of India. This is not a conflict between religions, it is a conflict between the modern world and the traditional one.

Love is stronger than hate from Charlie Hebdo

The proper response to terrorist acts designed to change our behavior is to do that behavior more often and more loudly. So, publish those offensive cartoons on the front page of every paper from the neighborhood monthly to the big national papers. We can make clear you don’t endorse the racism, the xenophobia, the sexism, the homophobia, the hate-mongering that motivates them, but we can make clear that we support their right to expression and they won’t be silenced by murder.

Make the offenders so commonplace they cannot be stopped by three men or three thousand.

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