Now We Know They Were not all Charlie Hebdo Look at the PEN Writers and Weep By Giulio Meotti
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/16884#.VUnPrZPIhyI
The wave of Charlie Hebdo reached the US, where the French weekly’s survivors issue had not sold more than three hundred copies and all the US newspapers had refused to republish the drawings.
While in Texas an Islamist commando tried to hit a cartoon competition, at the PEN Club of New York it was the thing to boycott a prize to Charlie.
A high school teacher from the French town of Poitiers, Jean-François Chazerans, is under disciplinary proceedings for speaking in class and saying: “These rascals of Charlie Hebdo have got what they deserved”. It goes without saying that most of the high school teachers went out on strike when Chazerans was suspended and not when another colleague, “the Islamophobic” Robert Redeker went into hiding. Libération, the French leftist daily, defended the professor’s opinion.
The number of PEN writers who consider the staff at Charlie Hebdo scoundrels has climbed to 204. There are stars of literature such as Joyce Carol Oates and the author of “Madness” Patrick McGrath, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Hours” Michael Cunningham, Geoff Dyer, David Leavitt and Junot Diaz, whom the New Yorker has called “one of the biggest writers of the XXI century”.
Oates compared the satirical magazine to Mein Kampf, without generating any scandal in the same self-righteous demeanor that raised a few eyebrows when it was Geert Wilders who compared the holy book of Islam to that of Hitler.
The hardest attack on these writers came from a great film-maker, David Cronenberg. who declared: “There is a weird, serpentine political correctness here. I salute the PEN and applaud their prize to Charlie Hebdo”. Cronenberg is not new to defending freedom of expression on Islam. In 1995 he attacked the “irritable British media who seems to be angry with Salman Rushdie”. At that time there were many detractors of Rushdie: the Labour politician Jack Straw, the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, the writer for children Road Dahl, the critic George Steiner, Kingsley Amis and John Le Carré. Then, like he has done on the topic of Charlie Hebdo, Cronenberg had the courage to distance himself from the literary saloons.
Meanwhile, Western universities are carrying on with their work and adapting to the conditions imposed by the fanatics. Two universities in Ireland, Queen’s University of Belfast and of Dublin, have deprogrammed two academic conferences on the massacre of Charlie Hebdo. And in America, the University of Minnesota ordered students to tear down the posters which displayed the cover of Charlie Hebdo with the Prophet.
It is not the first time that writers at PEN opt for dictatorship. Born in 1921, the PEN has been involved, since the Nazi era, in the struggle for freedom of expression. And the leaders of that time had to dissolve the German PEN, who had taken a stand for Hitler instead of Thomas Mann. In 1988 the American charter association refused Giovanni Paul II as an honorary member. And when the PEN invited Secretary of State George Shultz, many writers boycotted the gala.
But it was in 1966 that the hypocrisy of PEN in the face of totalitarianism was revealed . There was a debate on Communism between the Italian anti-Soviet writer Ignazio Silone and Don Pablo Neruda, the Chilean communist writer who praised Stalin. It was the red poet who was targeted by flashing cameras like a star and thus able to gather more support. Silone protested the Soviet persecution of Boris Pasternak, the author of “Doctor Zhivago”, while Neruda said: “I do not agree when writers are persecuted for their work. But I also think it is my duty not contribute to the Cold War”.
With Charlie Hebdo we are still at the “but” stage of these intellectuals and a monstrous ideological campaign was launched yesterday against the anti-communist heretics, and today against “Islamophobic” heretics.
The only good news, in this climate of derision and resentment, is the decision of the great Jewish cartoonist Art Spiegelman and five other members of the PEN to attend the award ceremony for the French colleagues instead of the boycotters.
We have finally discovered that they were certainly not “all Charlie Hebdo”. But perhaps they are not all cowards either.
Comments are closed.
