opinion

The Left and "Je suis Charlie!": No you're not

Progressives want to embrace the cause of "standing with" the murdered French journalists, satirists, columnists and artists of Charlie Hebdo.

That's great. Everyone does. The crowds swelling in plazas from Paris to Montreal to New York don't ask for political ID cards. Everyone is outraged. Everyone.

But people of the Left really need to ask themselves: Outraged at... what, exactly?

At the murders? Sure. We all despise mass murder. But, beyond that, what?

The killers were Muslim terrorists. They object to the right of Charlie Hebdo's journalists and cartoonists and columnists to say and draw words and images they find offensive. As we have witnessed, in unified horror, they really object to it. What they did wasn't "senseless." It was well planned and tactical. The terrorists wanted to kill, obviously. But they also wanted to silence -- really, permanently silence -- anyone else who might come after all those dead French satirists.

They want to silence speech. They want "free speech" permanently encased in scare-quote marks. Really scary quote marks.

Are progressives outraged at that? At the central purpose of those murders? Maybe today they are. Maybe, in some generalized, sentimentalized, First Amendment-ish way they are outraged. But in terms of commitment to the kind of free speech that those French journalists died for? The record says otherwise.

You can't stand with Charlie Hebdo if you believe people who oppose, say, same-sex marriage are not just wrong, but blasphemous and hateful. If your first inclination is to use the word "homophobe," you can't utter the phrase, "Je suis Charlie." Not with any honesty, you can't. If your first inclination upon discovering that someone contributed to California's Proposition 8 was to chase them out of their jobs and onto the streets, you have no business in a Paris plaza today.

If you seriously think words like "denier" or "anti-science" are a proper retorts to anyone who questions environmentalism's campaign against carbon, you can't stand with the Parisians, either. All those words mean is, "Shut up. Stop your anti-science, climate-change denials. Shut up." They are incompatible with no-holds-barred free speech as practiced by Charlie Hebdo.

If caring about the integrity of U.S. borders is indistinguishable from racism, xenophobia and nativism, same deal. If "race hatred" is your default response to (in no particular order) objections to the welfare state, the Tucson Unified School District's ethnic studies program, the deconstruction of the Black nuclear family or inner-city crime, then you need to turn in your "Je suis Charlie!" placard. Because you're not Charlie.

If you think driving George Will and Ann Coulter off the American university campus in order to keep their offensive words from singing the ears of students is a righteous act, you really should find something else to do during the next Charlie Hebdo rally. You are a free speech-hater, to coin a phrase.

If your first inclination upon hearing about the slaughter in Paris is to fret about an "Islamophobic" backlash, you probably aren't Charlie material. If that's all you worry about, you really aren't.

Because what ever it is you claim to value, it isn't free speech.