Jihadists Can’t Kill the Joke Because They ARE the Joke

[babylonsister]

http://reverbpress.com/features/jihadists-cant-kill-joke/

Jihadists Can’t Kill the Joke Because They ARE the Joke

January 7, 2015
Marc Belisle

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Cartoonists are like society’s class clowns. The teacher at the front of the class could be lying politicians, abusive clergy, greedy rich, etc. But when the teacher at the board of the class is humorless, abusive, bumbling or shouting, that teacher deserves to become the butt of a wisecracking student’s jokes. I say this as a teacher myself. The class clown knows how the rest of the students are feeling. He has the skills and courage to express the frustration of being in an uncomfortably awkward class in a way that helps people relieve tension through laughter. If the teacher is so rigid that he cannot take the joke and kicks the clown out of class, that teacher does not stop being awkward. The classroom becomes, if anything, more tense. The teacher continues to be the butt of the joke, even though the joke is not being vocally expressed.

In exactly the same way, these murderers calling themselves al Qaeda in Yemen are making everyone in a free society uncomfortable. Charlie Hebdo knew how France, and much of the West, felt. They had the courage and the artistic skill to express it and provide some relief. By murdering them in cold blood, the jihadists don’t silence the joke. The jihadists were the butt of the joke, and they still are. Now, instead of being the object of comedic relief, Islamic extremists will be the object of unified, seething rage.

Jihadists seem to believe that they are the only ones willing to give up life for a cause greater than themselves. But the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo knew the risks and forged ahead undeterred by threats. In a 2012 interview, the editor, Stephane Charbonnier said,

“We are provocative today. We will be provocative tomorrow. I do this because it’s our job to draw about actuality. Our job is not to defend freedom of speech, but without freedom of speech we are dead. We can’t live in a country without freedom of speech. I prefer to die than live like a rat. I haven’t the time to be afraid. I have a paper to do.“

This glorious bastard refused to be intimidated, extorted or silenced. He died with his pen ablaze, not unlike the torch alight in the hand of Lady Liberty, a gift from France to America. The jihadists believe that life is meaningless compared with the eternal, yet somehow infinitely sensitive, honor of the characters in their dogma. The Parisian cartoonists understand that life is short but discourse is long. We all live a few decades and leave little behind.

But the discussion in Western civilization of what is a good and just society is at least as old as Socrates. The cartoonists chose to drink the hemlock of knowing they risked their lives rather than submit to the illegitimacy of self-censorship. They are martyrs. The jihadists are not. Because even though they ended the lives of the cartoonists, the terrorists cannot end the discourse. By resorting to violence, they forfeit their podium at the eternal debate of what is a good life and a good society. They lose the debate by default, because they attacked the debate. And by seeking to kill a joke about how rigid they are, they become an even greater joke about how stupid they are that they can’t see how the world sees them. They become a cartoon of themselves.

[Adam051188]

1. but what if i was a cartoon within a cartoon of myself?

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