Charlie Hebdo — The Gift That Keeps Giving
The Charlie Hebdo affair is the gift that keeps on giving if you want to understand the contours of power in the West today. There are many past incidents which, although trifling at the time, now take on a whole new importance when seen through the lens of Charlie Hebdo — this solid gold BBC radio debate is one of them.
On Holocaust Memorial Day 2013 the Sunday Times ran a Gerald Scarfe cartoon which showed a bloodthirsty Binyamin Netanyaju cementing up a wall with the bodies of dead Palestinians. It was a gory, tasteless work which was par for the course for the artist and which would seem to fall well within the lampoonists terms of engagement as claimed by the post-modern supporters of #JeSuisCharlie — i.e. nothing is sacred and no-one is beyond satire.
Except, as Gerald Scarfe was to discover, it turned out that some things are very much untouchable and unsayable. For the organised Jewish community reacted with predictable well-orchestrated incandescent rage and, equally predictably, the fearless News International caved in, withdrew the cartoon and responded with a fulsome apology from Rupert Murdoch himself. Read more





