Cartoon by Terry Anderson
“Laws exist, rightly, to protect vulnerable people and minority groups from abuse. Comedy exists, essentially, as a means to be transgressive in a way that does not damage anyone. These are the waters cartoonists must navigate, and that’s tricky enough in a ‘liberal’ country. We’ll talk today about cartoonists who aren’t so lucky”. — Terry Anderson
On three successive weekends in April and May I had the opportunity to speak about CRNI and our work at some very different events around the UK.
- Shrewsbury International Cartoon Festival, marking its 13th year in the historic market town in Shropshire, close to the English/Welsh border. The Shrewsbury festival is supported in no small measure by the Professional Cartoonists’ Organisation of which I’m a member.
- The Chirnside Friends of David Hume’s annual dinner. The charity promotes the writings and preserves the home of the philosopher Hume in the small village of Chirnside in the Scottish Borders area.
- Granite City Comic Con in Aberdeen on Scotland’s north east coast. A relatively new event on the calendar but growing in popularity and scale.
The presentation changed a little upon each delivery. As you might expect, in Shrewsbury the audience included several cartoonists including America’s Hilary Price and some local Amnesty International volunteers as well as regular festival attendees. It was a truly public event in a church hall and had the feeling of a lecture, with a thoughtful Q&A afterwards.
In Chirnside the setting was more intimate, a drawing room inside a hunting lodge, with a group generally unfamiliar with the subject. The organiser had asked to explain in a bit more detail the background to the Charlie Hebdo attack and thereafter select a few cases of cartoonists CRNI has assisted from parts of the world where she knew certain guests at the dinner had lived or worked. Finally in Aberdeen the audience was markedly younger and included several “cosplayers”. Consequently the session ended up being far more chatty and breezy.
There were a few things I wanted to foreground every time, most importantly the plight of Atena Farghadani. As the weeks passed Atena was inching closer to freedom and had these talks been delivered a month later I would have been able to provide a happier ending to the tale.
Another was the notable hardening in the attitude of Charlie Hebdo’s editor, Laurent Sourisseau, who following March’s atrocity in Belgium suggested that a supposed politically correct anxiety over criticism of Islam in French society offers a toehold for extremism. Riss lost friends and colleagues in the January 2015 attack and is himself a survivor of a murder attempt. It is probably too much to expect a dispassionate view from him on the topic. However it is difficult to differentiate his point from those made by France’s Front National, the far right party that is usually Charlie Hebdo’s chief bugbear.
“. . . those who contend that some or all of society’s ills stem from a creeping political correctness often couch their flatly prejudiced views in freedom of speech arguments — that’s a dangerous marriage”.
Moreover it was a gift to those forces peddling the idea that Muslims cannot and will never be fully accepted in “the West”. We see this prejudice here in the UK within the “Brexit” campaign and their frequent emphasis on Turkey’s ascension to EU member status, an event that under President Erdoğan’s regime is as remote a possibility as the colonisation of Mars. We see it in Austria where the far right came within a whisker of winning the presidency in May’s election. And we see it in the USA following the mass shooting in Orlando and the renewed calls from presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump for a nebulous “ban on Muslims”.
At the end of these talks I showed a selection of images drawn by respected and widely published British political cartoonists portraying various public figures in violent, bloody scenarios. This is their right of course and one that CRNI exists to defend rigorously. However I posed a question about similar cartoons but with Arabic rather than Anglophonic names in the byline. How long would it be before a British Muslim cartoonist, doing the same job, would be accused of giving succour to terrorists? As the UN Human Rights Council stated in February, the rights of Muslim citizens around the world are being curtailed under measure to prevent extremism. Abusing and denying people’s human rights sounds to me like a solid plan for the encouragement of extremists.
