WarSclerotic

Last January, in the first days following the massacre committed by Muslim terrorists at the Paris office of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the Jewish supermarket Hyper Cacher, many people across the globe took to the streets to protest against the atrocities and to champion freedom of expression, carrying signs that said they, too, were Charlie Hebdo.

A few short months later, however, the tables began to turn, and in a perfect Orwellian twist the murderers are now being described by segments of the “enlightened” masses as victims, while the people they murdered are being portrayed as responsible for the fate which befell them.

In New York, the annual PEN World Voices festival for international literature commenced this week, and organizers decided to grant this year’s Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo — a worthy and logical decision in my view. The magazine’s editor and one of his employees, who were lucky not to be in the office on the day of the massacre, were invited to New York to receive the award. Five American and British authors, however, announced they would boycott the event, and over 100 Western intellectuals expressed their displeasure over the choice.

While many of the objectors labored to camouflage their true views with allegedly liberal explanations, such as discomfort over the magazine’s “cultural intolerance” (author Rachel Kushner), their carefully chosen words weren’t enough to conceal an inclination toward intellectually identifying with the killers’ motivations.

Others expressed their criticism more bluntly. Take for example novelist Peter Carey, who accused PEN of “blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population [in other words, the Muslim minority].”

In an article that appeared in The New Yorker after the attack last January, author Teju Cole accused the magazine of reinforcing pre-existing anti-Islamic and anti-Arab sentiments in Western society. Another writer, Francine Prose, has equated Charlie Hebdo to neo-Nazis.

In the eyes of these authors and those in agreement with them, the Muslims in France are oppressed and discriminated against, and therefore it is possible to justify, in their opinion, violent acts against a magazine that has aimed “specifically for racist and Islamophobic provocations” (Cole).

Standing to challenge the aforementioned group of peace-loving writers, incidentally, was British-Indian author Salman Rushdie, himself a Muslim, who has been persecuted by Muslim radicals ever since his book “The Satanic Verses” was published in 1988. On April 27, after the authors announced their withdrawal from the PEN gala, Rushdie posted the following message on his Twitter account: “The award will be given. PEN is holding firm. Just 6 pussies. Six Authors in Search of a bit of Character.”

Meanwhile, in an article appearing in the Financial Times on April 30, senior British editor Robert Shrimsely pointed to the hypocrisy and dishonesty of the authors spearheading the campaign against Charlie Hebdo and the PEN awards committee.

It appears, however, that neither cowardice nor hypocrisy lie at the heart of objecting to granting Charlie Hebdo the award. It is rather a tendency shared by a considerable portion of the global Left to ideologically identify with those who plot to destroy the Western and democratic value system of which they are a part. This distortion of the radical Islamist threat is also fostered by Western leaders, among them U.S. President Barack Obama, who refuse to call this monstrous child by name and shy away from acknowledging the one true reason behind the acts perpetrated by Islamist terrorist groups — which is the fundamentalist Islamist ideology they all share.

We must not, of course, blame these authors for the shooting attack in Texas on Monday, in which two terrorists opened fire outside a contest for cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. But the aforementioned authors’ lack of solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims undoubtedly could encourage other terrorist attacks.