Instead of defending an idea that I wish didn’t need defending—the right of people to speak their minds without fear of murder—I wanted to focus on a number of myths surrounding Charlie Hebdo, and the terrorists who would silence it and silence anyone else who criticizes the beliefs and practices of Islam.

The first myth is that Charlie Hebdo is anti-Muslim. It is not. It is critical of Islam, as it is critical of all religions. Islam is a set of ideas, just as Christianity and Judaism are sets of ideas. In the putatively enlightened age in which we live, all ideas should be subject to testing, criticism, even excoriation.

Which brings me to this stomach-churning Charlie Hebdo cartoon:

Charlie Hebdo

Atop the cartoon are these words: "Circumcise all males on the eighth day after their birth." The man on the right says, "Why don’t we wait until he’s of age to understand?" The mohel—the ritual circumciser—responds, "We need to take advantage while we have the upper hand."

We can learn three things about Charlie Hebdo from this cartoon. The first is that it is often, at least to people whose sensibilities are shaped by American modes of humor, not funny. The second is that it has been an equal-opportunity offender. Judaism was a target of its cartoonists. And Christianity was actually targeted more frequently than Islam. (A recent study by Le Monde found that religion as a whole was a fairly rare subject of Charlie Hebdo covers.)

The third is the most important: Charlie Hebdo specializes in attacking ideas, not people. I happen to be partial to circumcision—it’s a practice of baseline importance in my faith—but I understand that many people consider it to be barbaric, or at the very least distasteful. People who are repulsed by circumcision are not necessarily anti-Semitic (or anti-Muslim), but merely pro-foreskin. (In honor of Charlie Hebdo, I may devote a separate post to foreskin and mohel jokes.) Circumcision is an idea, and ideas should be tested. I don’t consider this drawing to be anti-Semitic as I understand the term—not only because it is critical of a doctrine that should be subject to analysis and criticism, but because circumcision is a practice that actually happens, as opposed to other practices falsely attributed to Jews (I'm thinking of accusations concerning matzah, deicide, and currency manipulation, among other things).

A subsidiary myth has grown up around Charlie Hebdo: that anti-Jewish hostility in its pages was forbidden. This false belief is offered as proof of the magazine’s "Islamophobic" tendencies (about the term "Islamophobia," please read my interview with the prime minister of France, Manuel Valls).

This myth arose in part because of a controversy concerning the cartoonist known as Siné, who was fired from the magazine in 2008 after implying that the son of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy would "go a long way in life" after converting to Judaism. Critics of Charlie Hebdo point to this incident as proof that Charlie Hebdo maintained a double standard when it came to Muslims: "Even Charlie Hebdo once fired a writer for not retracting an anti-Semitic column," Garry Trudeau stated in his now-infamous anti-free-speech speech at the George Polk Awards ceremony in April. "Apparently he crossed some red line that was in place for one minority but not another."