Charlie Hebdos refugee cartoon isnt

satirical. Its inflammatory

Jonathan Freedland
The French magazine may have wanted to give prejudice a kicking but ended up giving it a
platform

So far Charlie Hebdos defenders have fallen into two categories. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

Friday 15 January 2016

Ihesitate to criticise Charlie Hebdo. A year and a week ago it felt all wrong. Then, after 11 of the French
magazines staff had been murdered, the only fitting response was sympathy for the families of those slain,
and clear, unambiguous denunciation of the men who had sought to silence them with bullets.
But if the goal was to stay Charlies drawing hand, the killings failed. The magazine continues to publish its
provocative covers and cartoons. This week it ran a drawing that included, first, a depiction of the
photograph that went around the world last summer: the drowned body of the toddler and refugee Alan
Kurdi, face down on the shore. What would little Alan have grown up to be? ran the caption. The answer
came below, illustrated by an image of two men, their faces part-monkey, part-pig, arms outstretched,
pantingly chasing two women: Alan would have become an ass groper in Germany.
The cartoon is certainly shocking, using the single most distressing image of the refugeecrisis a dead child
to crack a joke. Naturally, it has caused outrage and been widely condemned, accused of making the racist

suggestion that all male refugees from Syria are bound to

be sexual predators, that even a child as blameless as
Alan was destined to become as brutish as the men who,
en masse, harassed and assaulted women on the streets
of Cologne on New Years Eve.
So far Charlie Hebdos defenders have fallen into two
categories. Some feel able only to make the basic case
that freedom of speech is an absolute and indivisible
right, which includes the right to produce crude, crass
images that are horribly offensive. Martin Rowson, who is
chair of the British Cartoonists Association, believes the
best way to understand Charlie Hebdo is to see it as less
Punch and more Viz, delighting in its puerility and
determined to breach the line that conventionally
separates public from private by cracking out loud the kind of sick jokes that are usually whispered in
playgrounds or pubs. And dont forget, Rowson adds, theyre French. They think Jerry Lewis is funny.
There is another way to defend the cartoon. It says that Charlie Hebdos target was not little Alan or
refugees in general, but the fickleness of the great European public and press, overflowing with tears for a
child in August, baring its teeth in anger at the criminals of Cologne in January. In this view, the French
magazine is not mocking refugees but mocking us for our wildly oscillating generalisations, casting those
fleeing Syria as all saints one minute, all sinners the next. That may be a heroic defence, one that
gives Charlie Hebdo too much credit. But lets say thats what the artist intended. Even then the cartoon was
wrong. For it made a mistake that countless satirists have made before: in seeking to expose a problem, it
only made it worse.

In 2008, the New Yorker

depicted Barack Obama in
Muslim garb and Michelle with
an Afro, an AK-47 over her
shoulder
Perhaps the cartoonist wanted to take a stand against the current
hardening in attitudes to those seeking refuge. In fact, he simply
provided another example of that very shift. His image takes its
place alongside the Danish decision this week, apparently echoed
by the Swiss, to confiscate valuables from new arrivals
everything except their wedding or engagement rings and
Turkeys illegal policy ofsending refugees back to the Syrian hell
they fled. It doesnt challenge the current mood of fear
and loathing, it just adds to it.

Call it Alf Garnett syndrome. The television writer Johnny Speightalways insisted his comic creation was
designed to send up the ignorant bigots of Powellite Britain. The trouble was, the ignorant bigots embraced
Alf as their spokesman. They memorised his racist rants and parroted them back. Speight may have
wanted Till Death Us Do Part to give prejudice a kicking. In fact it gave it a platform.
This kind of misstep can happen at the posh end of the market too. During the 2008 presidential campaign,
the New Yorker depicted Barack Obama in Muslim garb and Michelle Obama with an Afro, an AK-47 slung
over her shoulder. The couple were doing a fist-bump in the Oval Office, while a portrait of Osama bin
Laden looked on and the US flag burned in the fireplace.
The magazine insisted it was clearly a joke, sending up all the scare stories about Obama. But despite that
noble intention, the cartoon served to hone more elegantly than any of the candidates enemies had done
the rightwing caricature of Obama into a single, memorable image. Up to that point, no opponent had
explicitly said Obama was a terrorist-loving Muslim but now they didnt have to. Now there was an image
lodged in the consciousness that did the job for them.
The Guardian itself is not immune. The conceptual artist Gillian Wearing was once handed control of the
cover of the G2 section. She could fill the space with whatever image she liked. She chose to leave it blank,
save for three words scrawled, graffiti-like, as if on a wall: Fuck Cilla Black. She wanted to point up the
coarsening of public discourse. What she achieved was to coarsen it a little more.
In this way the satirist becomes the unwitting ally, rather than scourge, of his or her target. Sometimes that
can happen directly. Bruce Springsteen wrote Born in the USA as a stinging attack on the hollow jingoism
that wages foreign wars and abandons the usually poor men who fight them: Ronald Reagan liked the
chorus so much he tried to adopt it as a campaign theme song. The cartoonist Vicky thought he was
lampooning the absurdity of Harold Macmillans grandiosity with his Supermac creation but Tories
embraced it, thinking it made their man look a hero. The producers of Have I Got News for You invited
Boris Johnson on as a guest host to have a laugh at his expense. Only too late did they realise they had
provided the launchpad for his mayoral career. Perhaps such things are unavoidable. Satire does not come
with an end-user licence, controlling how it will be exploited or misunderstood. And most of the time if
its giving a boost, rather than inflicting a blow, on this or that politician it doesnt matter. But the current
shift in attitude towards refugees is of a different order. The stakes are higher.
Maybe a couple of the satirists own rules might be helpful. The former Spitting Image writer John
OFarrell says he adheres to the time-honoured maxim that the comic should always be punching up, not
down. Laughing at the weak is never funny, and there is nobody weaker than a dead child washed up on a
beach. As for the second rule, OFarrell recalls David Attenboroughs advice to the Monty Python team:
Use shock sparingly.
And perhaps there is a third. If youre aiming a lethal arrow, be sure to shoot straight at the target. Because
if you miss, you might not hurt your enemy: you might just help him instead.