He stood up to radical Islam. Now he targets the lefts forgiveness – Haaretz

Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose centers on the lost second part of Aristotles Poetics. The surviving part of the philosophical treatise deals with tragedy, while the part dedicated to laughter mysteriously disappeared. In Ecos novel, the manuscript about laughter is hidden in a monastery in 14th-century northern Italy. The imaginative novel stresses that laughter symbolizes liberty and doubt and protects against all forms of extremism which poses a danger to the church. Therefore, it must be hidden from the eyes of believers.

French attorney Richard Malka fights for the right to laughter, doubt and freedom from all dictates of faith or religion. He represented the prosecution in the December 2020 trial of the conspirators in attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket in Paris.

Seventeen people were murdered in the two attacks that took place on January 7, 2015, including eight Charlie Hebdo employees. Malka has represented the satirical weekly since its founding in 1992.

Good luck, Malka says, after I tell him about my difficulties in translating the name of his new book, Le Droit Demmerder Dieu, which takes its verb from a modification of the French word for shit. After some deliberation, I settled on The Right to Annoy God.

Youre not the only one, he says by way of consolation. I just got back from a weekend in Naples, where I lectured about the book. The Italian publisher also said they were uncertain about how to translate it.

The word annoy is a somewhat softer version of Malkas angry yell against giving in to political correctness and manufactured Anglo-Saxon good taste. In January, the book won the prestigious National Assembly Political Book Prize an impressive honor from an organization whose members do not all identify with Malkas absolute secularism.

The book is the full version of the final argument he delivered at the trial against the conspirators on December 4, 2020. The French press compared his remarks to 19th century French novelist Emile Zolas famed J'Accuse! open letter. The right to criticize religious opinions and beliefs is the lock on the cage that keeps totalitarian monsters confined, Malka writes. What is this war that pits satirists armed with pencils, or teachers at the classroom blackboard, against radicals armed with Kalachnikovs and cleavers?

Common language

Malka, a 53-year-old childless bachelor, is considered one of Frances top lawyers. Among others, he has successfully represented authors Marek Halter and Christine Angot, philosopher Pascal Bruckner, politicians like former Prime Minister Manuel Valls, former chairman of the International Monetary Fund Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Carla Bruni.

Malka was born in Paris to Jewish parents who immigrated from the city of Meknes in Morocco. Last November, when the Secular Republican Committee awarded him a Secularism Prize, he said that his parents were modest people who came from Morocco, from a different culture and religion. And still, every year, on July 14, they made sure to watch the military parade on the Champs Elysee on television.

They were part of a long tradition of Jews who, before the war, chose to live in France the country of Victor Hugo, a country of equal rights, and the country that acquitted Alfred Dreyfus of treason and awarded him the Legion of Honor. Receiving this prize moves me because it has been granted by the French republic, out of respect for the values of the public and strengthening secularism. Afterall, I have been fighting for that principle for over 30 years.

Youre a long-time collaborator of Charlie Hebdo.

I was a young lawyer, just starting out, and I was working for the well-known Georges Kiejman law firm, when three men from Charlie walked in: The legendary founder Francois Cavanna, Philippe Val, who would be the editor at the time of the attacks, and the cartoonist Cabu, who was killed in the massacre. The weekly had already been shuttered for a decade, after the rise of the left in 1981. They had come to consult on a legal matter on behalf of the newspaper. We immediately found that we shared a common language. We became good friends, went on vacations together. I wrote scripts and texts with them for comics. I shared their way of thinking, their liberated sense of humor. I belong to the generation of Charb, Riss and Luz, he says, referring to the abbreviated names adopted by Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.

Charlie Hebdo has its roots in the satirical weekly Hara-Kiri the foolish and wicked newspaper. Hara-Kiri was established in 1960, during the tenure of President Charles de Gaulle. Its tagline was If you cant buy it, steal it. Its editorial board was composed of a band of sharp journalists and cartoonists headed by Francois Cavanna.

Hara-Kiri was shut down in 1970. Shortly before, a fire had broken out at a club outside Paris, killing 146 people. A week later, President De Gaulle died in his hometown of Colombey. That week, Hara-Kiri ran the headline A Tragic Party in Colombey, One Person Died. As a result, the paper was shuttered by government order.

The editors eventually decided to start Charlie Hebdo (named after Charles de Gaulle), a satirical weekly offering black humor, which became the most widely-sold weekly in France.

As the left came to power in 1981, the papers sales declined and it closed down. In 1992, Cavanna reopened it with journalist Philippe Val and several famous cartoonists. The editorial board agreed to refrain from attacking religion, but that it was acceptable to criticize leading personalities no matter their religious affiliation.

The 2004 murder of ultranationalist film director and pundit Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam sparked protest throughout northern Europe. Danish author Kre Bluitgen, who had written an illustrated biography of Mohammed, couldnt find an illustrator who was willing to take the risk of drawing the prophets image. The editor of the Danish weekly Jyllands-Posten posted an open call through the Danish Association of Illustrators for illustrations of the prophet.

Some of the submissions were published in Danish newspapers and Charlie Hebdo in 2006.

The Grand Mosque of Paris sued Charlie Hebdo over the cartoons publication. Meanwhile, members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Denmark assembled a file of crude and provocative cartoons, and disseminated them among Muslim believers, arousing a wave of protests in Islamic circles and eventually leading to the 2015 massacre.

Burning revenge

Additional cartoons began cropping up. The crude and insulting illustrations were forged and publicized by extremist imams from Denmark, seeking to stoke the rage against the heretics. Demonstrations took place throughout Europe. French Islamic leader Sheikh Sheikh Al-Qaradawi, called for a Day of Rage.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, French President Jacques Chirac and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the journalists abuse of their freedom of expression. Already then, Malka writes in his book, Al-Qaradawis deputy called for the murder of those who slander the prophet, to satisfy the vengence burning in our souls. During the trial held in 2006, philospher Elisabeth Badinter, an expert on the Age of Enlightenment whom Malka describes as his spiritual mother, testified in defense of freedom of expression. She voiced concern that if Islamist demands were met, it would endanger the entire free press.

Youve paid a high price for your principles, you live under tight security.

Ive been under guard for seven years, since January 8, 2015, the day after the massacre. When they called and told me about the attack, I jumped in a taxi and went straight to the site. I didnt want to go see the horror in the editorial room. We were friends for 30 years, the tragedy was personal for me. Afterwards I did my best to keep the newspaper going, although the boardroom is still in a bunker, because the employees are still under threat. 2015 was the hardest year of my life, along with the November terror attacks in Paris."

You write in your book that these were not simple acts of murder: They had political, philosophical, metaphysical significance. In what way?

They wanted to murder an idea, a democratic society, and that goes beyond the murder of human beings. Already in the 18th century the authors of the Encyclopedie of the Enlightenment Diderot, Rousseau and dAlembert wisely identified the essence of man and a central tool for liberation from prejudice and belligerent egoism. They promoted universal scientific and critical principles, and in doing so they sanctified tolerance and progress. The Church proclaimed them heretics.

In 1789, the architects of the French Revolution, the heirs to the Enlightenment, published the Declaration of Human Rights and of the Citizen, and for the first time in the history of mankind they sanctified freedom of expression. Freedom of expression is one of the most precious rights of man, declared the revolutionary Honore Mirabeau.

In 1881 the Freedom of the Press Law was passed, and its one of the pillars of the French republic. Insulting religion is still a sore spot, and in that regard, statesman Georges Clemenceau answered it in the National Assembly with his immortal statement: God can defend himself, he doesnt need the National Assembly for that. To refrain from criticizing religion, to give up the cartoons of Mohammed, means giving up our history.

To whom are you referring when you criticize the academics who adopted Anglo Saxon communitarianism and describe them as heirs of the supporters of tyrants such as Stalin and Pol Pot?

Im referring to the academics in France, the Maoists and the Trotskyites of the 1960s. They didnt engage in de-Stalinization, instead they have adopted theories such as woke culture and cancel culture, an inheritance of the American Protestant circles that sanctify an ideology of victimized communities. In their opinion, Islamists are the weak ones, victims of the liberal society, and they should not be criticized even when they are extremists. Professors, politicians and recently people on the left as well who have adopted this ideology, are shocked at any criticism against the violence of extremist Islam, claiming that this is a weakened and oppressed community.

According to French-Moroccan author Rachid Benzine the Koran is not a book that encourages violence: In both the Koran and the Torah there is violence, execution, and stoning of adulterous women. The truth is that only in the New Testament is there no violence, only giving though that failed to prevent the Inquisition and the Crusades from killing millions of people in the name of Christianity. But in Judaism there is the Talmud that interprets the laws, updates them and in effect constitutes criticism of sanctified laws. In Sunni Islam as well, there is a direct connection between God and man that leaves room for interpretation. But now any criticism of Islam is seen as an insult or as racism, and that gives rise to violence, he says.

Thats also the case of the Mila affair a 16-year-old French teenager who dared to criticize the machismo of Islam after she refused to accept an indecent proposal that she received on Instagram from a Muslim follower. Since January 2020 she has received hundreds of thousands of threats of rape and murder for being an Islamophobe, a racist and whatever. Her picture was published and even a former presidential candidate from the socialist camp identified with those who threatened her. Such a girl deserves a slap in the face, she firmly declared. Mila was forced to drop out of school, she is shut up in her home and is under legal protection.

As a total secularist who identifies with freedom of expression, what would you tell a secular Israeli who travels to the beach on Yom Kippur, risking injury by stone throwers?

Those who observe the tradition of Yom Kippur, and in my family home they respected the Jewish holidays and ate kosher food, have to know how to respect the secularists who choose a different path.

What is your opinion of the debate in France on the subject of Muslim women who are covered with a hijab in the public space?

Its a complicated problem. On the one hand, we have to respect their freedom of choice to dress as they wish. But theres a French law that forbids clothing that emphasizes religious affiliation in the public system. But according to the principle of victimization, any insult to those women becomes an insult to Islam and reopens the debate.

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He stood up to radical Islam. Now he targets the lefts forgiveness - Haaretz