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takyon writes:

Six writers have withdrawn from the PEN American Center's annual gala in protest over the organization's decision to give its Freedom of Expression Courage Award to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was attacked on January 7th:

The writers who have withdrawn from the event are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, The New York Times reports. [...] Kushner, in an email to The Times, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with Charlie Hebdo's "cultural intolerance" and promotion of "a kind of forced secular view." Those views, The Times added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event. Carey told The Times that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression." A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?" he said in an email to the newspaper. Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel The Satanic Verses, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are "horribly wrong."

Glenn Greenwald has written about the controversy over at The Intercept, which is hosting letters and comments written by Deborah Eisenberg and Teju Cole. Greenwald notes:

Though the core documents are lengthy, this argument is really worth following because it highlights how ideals of free speech, and the Charlie Hebdo attack itself, were crassly exploited by governments around the world to promote all sorts of agendas having nothing to do with free expression. Indeed, some of the most repressive regimes on the planet sent officials to participate in the Paris “Free Speech” rally, and France itself began almost immediately arresting and prosecuting people for expressing unpopular, verboten political viewpoints and then undertaking a series of official censorship acts, including the blocking of websites disliked by its government. The French government perpetrated these acts of censorship, and continues to do so, with almost no objections from those who flamboyantly paraded around as free speech fanatics during Charlie Hebdo Week.

From Deborah Eisenberg's letter to PEN's Executive Director Suzanne Nossel, March 26, 2015:

I can hardly be alone in considering Charlie Hebdo's cartoons that satirize Islam to be not merely tasteless and brainless but brainlessly reckless as well. To a Muslim population in France that is already embattled, marginalized, impoverished, and victimized, in large part a devout population that clings to its religion for support, Charlie Hebdo's cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as intended to cause further humiliation and suffering.

Was it the primary purpose of the magazine to mortify and inflame a marginalized demographic? It would seem not. And yet the staff apparently considered the context of their satire and its wide-ranging potential consequences to be insignificant, or even an inducement to redouble their efforts – as if it were of paramount importance to demonstrate the right to smoke a cigarette by dropping your lit match into a dry forest.

It is difficult and painful to support the protection of offensive expression, but it is necessary; freedom of expression must be indivisible. The point of protecting all kinds of expression is that neither you nor I get to determine what attitudes are acceptable – to ensure that expression cannot be subordinated to powerful interests. But does that mean that courage in expression is to be measured by its offensiveness?