Moses, Mohammed, “Charlie Hebdo”—and Glenn Greenwald

Blogger Glenn Greenwald vicariously shares Edward Snowden’s immortality for publishing the NSA leaks that ultimately led the ideologically-confused Snowden to become an intelligence asset of Vlad Putin. Not satisfied with this second-hand claim to fame, Greenwald then took it upon himself to repackage Snowden’s embarrassing revelations about the U.S. intelligence services into a bizarre expose of Israel’s alleged new role—for which there is no credible evidence—as the Elders of Zion of Cyberspying.

Now, those of us who hoped that Greenwald’s affliction of Israel-on-the-brain might enter on a remission are sadly disappointed by his lunatic reaction to the Charlie Hebdo murders. Strangely unmoved by the assassination of ten cartoonists by jihadists, Greenwald directs his ire at American liberals who don’t stop at defending the right to free speech, but go further—like Slate’s editor Jacob Weisberg—to call for the media to “to escalate blasphemous satire.”

Yet for Greenwald, the real problem with cartoons depicting Mohammed is that they are not equaled or exceeded by broadsides against Judaism and Israel including images inciting murder of Jews and extermination of the Jewish state. How do we know that this is what Greenwald has in mind? Because he himself publishes a full page of such vile cartoons which, according to Greenwald, cartoonists are too hypocritical and cowardly to disseminate because of their fear of “jobs being lost or careers destroyed for expressing criticism of Israel or (much more dangerously and rarely) Judaism.” (See here.)

Greenwald lacks the honesty or intellectual capacity to understand the difference between ‘blasphemy”—or criticism (including satiric cartoons) directed at religious figures and institutions—and genocidal incitement during an age in which we still live in the shadow of the gas ovens. “Charlie Hebdo” was an equal opportunity mocker of religious traditions—including Moses and Jesus as well as Mohammed. In 2009, it fired a satiric writer, not because he mocked Judaism, but because he libeled Nicholas Sarkozy’s son whom he falsely accused of planning to convert to marry a Jewish heiress.

Greenwald’s claim that Israel in particular is a sacred cow immune to vile caricatures is news to the Simon Wiesenthal Center which, since its inception, has consistently exposes cartoons, not only in the Middle East and Europe, but on American college campuses using the whole repertoire of “Der Sturmer”-style libels—including well poisoning and ritual child sacrifice—to defame the Jewish state and its leaders.

Perhaps saddest of all, Greenwald—a self-styled champion of radicalism—is totally oblivious to that tradition’s intellectual and political roots. As the celebrated historian Jonathan I. Israel has shown, the eighteenth-century “Radical Enlightenment”—dedicated to destroying what it saw as the link between religious dogmatism and political despotism—got its start in significant measure with an underground best-seller—the “Traité des Trois Imposteurs” which, as the title suggests, lampooned Moses and Jesus together with Mohammed.

One may not like Charlie Hebdo’s “blasphemous” satires of religion. But the magazine was (and is) much more than the French equivalent of Monty Python or “National Lampoon.” It was (and is) a true heir of the French Enlightenment.

For people on the left to cut themselves off from this tradition in the name of “not offending” Muslims could prove a self-imposed death sentence. This may be the point of Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, “Soumission”—is it a satire or a prediction?—that depicts a French future in which Shariah is imposed by a coalition of Muslims and their anti-Enlightenment non-Muslim allies.