History of Feminism
Related: About this forumWhy I am not Charlie
To abhor what was done to the victims, though, is not the same as to become them. This is true on the simplest level: I cannot occupy someone else’s selfhood, share someone else’s death. This is also true on a moral level: I cannot appropriate the dangers they faced or the suffering they underwent, I cannot colonize their experience, and it is arrogant to make out that I can. It wouldn’t be necessary to say this, except the flood of hashtags and avatars and social-media posturing proclaiming #JeSuisCharlie overwhelms distinctions and elides the point. “We must all try to be Charlie, not just today but every day,” the New Yorker pontificates. What the hell does that mean? In real life, solidarity takes many forms, almost all of them hard. This kind of low-cost, risk-free, E-Z solidarity is only possible in a social-media age, where you can strike a pose and somebody sees it on their timeline for 15 seconds and then they move on and it’s forgotten except for the feeling of accomplishment it gave you. Solidarity is hard because it isn’t about imaginary identifications, it’s about struggling across the canyon of not being someone else: it’s about recognizing, for instance, that somebody died because they were different from you, in what they did or believed or were or wore, not because they were the same. If people who are feeling concrete loss or abstract shock or indignation take comfort in proclaiming a oneness that seems to fill the void, then it serves an emotional end. But these Cartesian credos on Facebook and Twitter — I am Charlie, therefore I am — shouldn’t be
Erasing differences that actually exist seems to be the purpose here: and it’s perhaps appropriate to the Charlie cartoons, which drew their force from a considered contempt for people with the temerity to be different. For the last 36 hours, everybody’s been quoting Voltaire. The same line is all over my several timelines:

“Those 21 words circling the globe speak louder than gunfire and represent every pen being wielded by an outstretched arm,” an Australian news site says. (Never mind that Voltaire never wrote them; one of his biographers did.) But most people who mouth them don’t mean them. Instead, they’re subtly altering the Voltairean clarion cry: the message today is, I have to agree with what you say, in order to defend it. Why else the insistence that condemning the killings isn’t enough? No: we all have to endorse the cartoons, and not just that, but republish them ourselves. Thus Index on Censorship, a journal that used to oppose censorship but now is in the business of telling people what they can and cannot say, called for all newspapers to reprint the drawings: “We believe that only through solidarity – in showing that we truly defend all those who exercise their right to speak freely – can we defeat those who would use violence to silence free speech.” But is repeating you the same as defending you? And is it really “solidarity” when, instead of engaging across our differences, I just mindlessly parrot what you say?
http://paper-bird.net/2015/01/09/why-i-am-not-charlie/

Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)ismnotwasm
(42,624 posts)She brings up Voltaire's--a satirist extroidinaire--who has been quoted so often lately rabid anti-semitism
Of course, Voltaire didn’t realize that his Jewish victims were weak or powerless. Already, in the 18th century, he saw them as tentacles of a financial conspiracy; his propensity for overspending and getting hopelessly in debt to Jewish moneylenders did a great deal to shape his anti-Semitism. In the same way, Charlie Hebdo and its like never treated Muslim immigrants as individuals, but as agents of some larger force. They weren’t strivers doing the best they could in an unfriendly country, but shorthand for mass religious ignorance, or tribal terrorist fanaticism, or obscene oil wealth. Satire subsumes the human person in an inhuman generalization. The Muslim isn’t just a Muslim, but a symbol of Islam.
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Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)The campaign of muslims that do not feel represented by a certain type of islam.
#NotInMyName: ISIS Do Not Represent British Muslims
youtube.com 1:20
ismnotwasm
(42,624 posts)I was talking to a Muslim friend, and he says the same thing. He also thinks immigrating (he's an immigrant) means becoming part of the culture you've chosen-- not giving up your religion of course, but becoming a part of the people-- a citizen. He says that's very challenging to do in a culture of hate.
Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)which is done disrespectfully without regard for the minority peoples.
ismnotwasm
(42,624 posts)JustAnotherGen
(34,629 posts)But I love that image.
ismnotwasm
(42,624 posts)
seabeyond
(110,159 posts)Hateful or ignorance to be disgusted by the violence acted on these people. I have been bothered with the conversation, myself. It does not hold true
brer cat
(26,879 posts)I find it quite amazing how many people have *told* us what we are allowed or not allowed to say about this killing, while they are screeching about upholding free speech. It is free speech only when it is what they want to hear. Makes me think the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists died in vain.
ismnotwasm
(42,624 posts)Found this on FB--satire that emphasizes the horror
Tuesday Afternoon
(56,912 posts)and Yes, Sadness for all of humankind. Just. So. Sad. about it all. All. Of. It.
Make it stop.
How?
Please, everyone. Just stop it.
Now!
mountain grammy
(27,642 posts)I've been trying to say the same thing over the last few days, but anyone I say it to doesn't seem to understand what I'm saying.
A friend told a story about a friend of his who made the Muslim call to prayer, followed by automatic weapon fire his ringtone, and some people in the room applauded and laughed. Some looked confused and I said, so shooting people for praying is funny? I just don't get it. So much hate in the world, it just can't go on forever.
shaayecanaan
(6,068 posts)Didn't think I would ever agree with you this emphatically. Top thread.