Garry Trudeau's Shame

I loved Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury.

As a teenager I couldn't wait to read his comic strips and bought all his books.

I thought he was brilliant. Speaking truth to power.

Now, in a disturbing - and very sad - turn of events, this once admirable satirist has shamed himself and his profession.

In a speech delivered on the occasion of an award for lifetime achievement, Trudeau blamed the victims in the Charlie Hebdo attack, ignored the very real risk of death that satirists - as well as many other people - face from Islamists today, and advocated self-censorship to avoid offending people.

And that is not all.

Trudeau called on satirists not to punch "downward", which presumably means he thinks it's wrong to criticize the immensely wealthy and powerful leaders of Islamic nations that enforce blasphemy laws, killing, jailing and censoring writers, secularists, "apostates", or to mock killers who gun down, knife, explode and decapitate in the name of a religion and post their exploits on youtube.

Trudeau willfully ignores the vast and ever growing list of victims who are murdered in the name of Islam (if the writings, recordings, videos and statements of the killers themselves have any weight) - and who did not even draw a cartoon, offensive or otherwise.

A small sample of the recently murdered include (in addition to French cartoonists):

Bloggers in Bangladesh because they rejected Islam.
Small children with their teachers in Toulouse because they exist and are Jewish.
Students in Kenya, because they are Christian and students and Kenyan.
Grocery shoppers in Vincennes because they exist and are Jewish.
A filmmaker in Copenhagen because he attended a talk on free speech in which a targeted cartoonist was present.
Little girls kidnapped by Boko Haram because - because I don't even know why the Islamists are doing this to little girls...They must have offended someone, but how?...

"What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism." - Garry Trudeau

"Absolutists". "Absolutism." "Fanaticism" - These are the words Trudeau uses, not for the Islamist killers, but for their unarmed victims. "Responsibility"? What is this but Newspeak for self-censorship?

Thus does Trudeau display contempt, not only for the notion of free speech, but for all the writers, bloggers, journalists who work under constant threat of death. He ignores the immense courage required to speak frankly to power - when that power is Islamic.

Fatwas? Social media calls for murder? Bounties? These things Trudeau ignores as if they don't exist, but of course they do.

Even more unsettling, Trudeau says "I, and most of my colleagues, have spent a lot of time discussing red lines since the tragedy in Paris."

Thus we learn that Trudeau and his colleagues (and he is well-connected in Washington DC) responded to a deliberate assault on free speech by discussing - not how to support satirists under attack - but what to censor.

And then, in a passage so disgusting I can't bring myself to believe he really said it, he blames rioting deaths - not on the rioters, or the religious authorities inciting violence - but on a cartoon, printed in French a world away which the rioters probably never even read.

On one account Trudeau is correct.

"Satire punches up, against authority of all kinds, the little guy against the powerful."

This is true.

But the essential he gets wrong. For in this case the "little guy standing against power" is the satirist. (The ex-Muslim secularist. The Jewish grocery shopper. The little girl going to school despite Taliban threats. The university student attempting to learn. The blogger.)

And the Power?

It is, as usual, in the hands of dictators, religious rulers or warlords. In the hand of vicious old and vicious young men.

Trudeau's assumption that because they are, in this case, Muslim they cannot be the "Power" is as shocking for its arrogance and as for its cluelessness.

Is this really how our progressive intellectual elites think today?

I'm glad Trudeau gave his speech. It clarifies things.

We have a long hard road ahead to restore sanity.