Je suis humain: Fight terror with humanity

The brutal massacre of journalists in Paris has brought people together the world over, unified by firm resolve to stand up against barbarous acts of terror. Violent extremism, practiced by private citizens or states, must be denounced. Terrorism, is a global scourge. An irony of contemporary life is that stability and security were supposed to be the payoffs for living in an era of united nations and welfare states. Also disturbing is that the perpetrators were “home grown,” rather than “other” – alien outsiders incapable of appreciating a country from within.

When suspects were connected to Reims, the capital of the bucolic Champagne region, emails from IM Ghaziabad friends who studied in Reims, flooded my inbox. How could this delightful city breed a terrorist? Curiously, the prominent hotel in Reims’ central square is called l’Hotel de la Paix (Hotel of Peace). Attempts to understand perpetrators of atrocities confront a fallacy – that engaging with explanation is tantamount to justifying heinous acts or mitigating agency of the actors. Interrogating conditions surrounding what occurred is neither defending the indefensible, nor is it rescinding moral authority to condemn without condoning. If we’re to combat terrorism meaningfully, we need to recognise its causal roots, wrench them out, and avoid providing pathways for recruitment and radicalisation of those vulnerable to extremism. It’s also wrong conflating Paris with Mumbai, and other terrorist acts, as some have done. The French case shares similarities, but it’s also freighted with a particular colonial history, along with the contemporary reality of dystopic French banlieues, populated with disaffected North African youth where law and order have broken down. Construed as an affront to liberty, the Paris attack strikes at a core value of secular democratic pluralism. Liberty unpacked includes freedom of expression and of the press. But despite consensus about the general concept of liberty, disagreements have always existed around what particular conceptions instantiate the concept. Let’s consider press freedom through the following example, with a caveat: this is not a defence of terrorist religious extremism, nor suggesting we should capitulate to it. A hypothetical rag Down Under, known for irreverent satire and critique, purveys cartoonish portrayals of aborigines — casting them as drunks, on the dole and a drain on public coffers. It’s an opinion I’ve heard people privately express. Yet no reasonable publication, no matter how provocative or puerile, would print anything like this. Simply unacceptable, it transgresses bounds of decent and responsible journalism.

In tandem, the same rag puts out caricatures of aboriginal animistic religious ceremonies, portraying them as primitive, superstitious and at odds with mainstream Aussie values. Both depictions would be deeply offensive to aborigines, a point that takes little imagination to conceive. Were the religious caricatures more acceptable and defensible than the cartoons? And would they be more palatable if aboriginal extremists were specifically singled out? John Stuart Mill argued liberty, and by extension freedom of the press, is an absolute right conditioned only by a harm principle. On this account, any form of censorship takes us down a slippery slope; press freedom is viewed as a sine qua non of a properly functioning democracy. Yet, even in the most liberal regimes, lines of demarcation do exist. Electing to privilege the most extensive liberty possible, liberalism also entertains the notion that certain things are repugnant and should never be endorsed. At issue is how are boundaries drawn, by whom and where. Rightfully, the people are cast as the major arbiters in the marketplace of ideas. A free press is balanced by plurality of opinion from diverse press sources. In addition, principles of journalistic integrity and responsibility hold sway. Liberalism also demands neutrality about religion, religious practice being a personal matter relegated to the private domain within a secular state. As such, there’s an enduring tension for religious people who might seek to have their values spill over into the public arena, particularly when those values cannot be justified on secular grounds. It’s a tradeoff. The religious receive tolerance and respect in return for giving up the will to impose religious convictions on those who do not share their views. This is the basis for a truce which avoids a culture war.

Today we see sophistic politicians stirring up the mob with claims that they’re at war. The idea of polarising the situation as a battle over ideology is hardly something to be invoked as a sensible discourse within the body politic. George W Bush set the stage after 9-11 when he came up with the binary “you’re either for us or against us". Rather than tapping into a global sentiment of solidarity and goodwill, he chose to be divisive, preferring sectarianism over humanism. It was the best thing that ever happened for extremists. People taking to the streets across the world demonstrates a glorious picture of personal engagement spurred by moral outrage. In this context, brute nationalism and wholesale identification with a magazine in a slogan that smacks of a PR campaign, should give us pause. The rallying cries should be repudiating violence and expressing grief at the vicious slayings of other human beings. Freedom of expression in the West is not at risk at all. Extremists of every ilk must face the reality that they’re a small minority and their cause is already lost. Immigration also is here to stay which right wing parties have to accept. Tolerance and respect for persons are principles that trump all others. On occasion, artistic freedom too perhaps must yield to the imperatives of an ethic of responsibility. As the world becomes more porous and permeable, and enclaves of ethnic and value purity erode, the only currency we have is our thread of common humanity and need to get along. “Je suis Charlie” really ought to read: “Je suis anti-violence, Je suis respectueux des autres, Je suis humain!”