“After Charlie Hebdo”: The Left’s Apology Tour for Jihad

 

In After Charlie Hebdo: Terror, Racism and Free Speech, editor Eric Heinze assembles a parade of academics who collectively try to prove that the real threat to free speech isn’t jihadist terror, but those who dare to speak freely against it. The book is framed as a reflection on the January 2015 massacre of the cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, an act of Islamist barbarism that ought to have united every Western liberal behind the principle of unqualified free expression. Instead, After Charlie Hebdo becomes a masterclass in moral inversion, where the killers are understood, the victims are problematised, and the reader is gaslit. Rather than defend the foundational Western principle of free speech, especially the right to offend, to satirize, to blaspheme, the contributors intellectualise their cowardice. We are treated to essay after essay warning us that defending satire too loudly might embolden “racism,” “Islamophobia,” or “the far right.” The message is clear: speech is violence, but violence is context. You don’t have to admire Charlie Hebdo's crude cartoons to defend their right to publish them. That’s called liberalism. But for these academics, liberalism itself is a dirty word. They deconstruct free speech, weigh it against imagined harms, and arrive, surprise, at the conclusion that censorship is just another form of care. And so the core thesis of this book boils down to this: the West had it coming. It’s the self-flagellating instinct of a decadent intelligentsia, terrified of asserting its own values in the face of genuine theocratic violence. Every time the contributors mention “Islamophobia,” they betray their priorities. Their enemy isn’t the Kalashnikov, but the cartoon. What emerges is not scholarship, it’s surrender. The authors bend over backwards to accommodate Islamist grievance while refusing to stand upright for Enlightenment principles. In doing so, they betray the very civilization that allows them to write such nonsense in safety. After Charlie Hebdo, we needed courage. What we got instead was this: a book-length apology for cowardice, dressed up in the robes of critical theory.