Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Charlie Hebdo: Murdoch’s Sky News bows to the demands of murderers

Caroline Fourest is a French journalist and feminist. Unlike so many of her Anglo-Saxon sisters she does not think freedom is only for white women, and is ready to condemn the oppression of women wherever it occurs.

For instance, she exposed Tariq Ramadan, who on the one hand appeared the ideal moderate Muslim, while at the same time refusing to take a stand against clerics ordering the death of women by stoning.

‘Double speak’ she called it. He says he is a ‘Muslim feminist’ to Western intellectuals, who admire him and offer him posts at Oxford colleges. Only when you ask what he means by that – and hardly anyone does – do you learn that he believes that in Muslim feminism the man should have power over the woman.

Perhaps Sky News’s broadcasters did not realise who were they dealing with when they invited her on air to discuss why Sky had banned not only irreligious and satirical images of Mohammed – and let’s face it, virtually every British editor has done that – but to submit so totally to the demands of gunmen that it had banned the anodyne cover from this week’s Charlie Hebdo too.

Fourest first denounced Sky’s lack of solidarity:

‘I am very sad, very sad that journalists in UK do not support us. That journalists in the UK betray what journalism is about. By thinking that people cannot be grown {up] enough to decide if a drawing is offensive.’

She was making an argument that is not heard often enough. By bowing to demands for censorship, the West is infantilising European Muslims. Everyone else can take robust and irreverent arguments about their politics and religious beliefs. But Muslims must be treated with kid gloves and told white lies because they are prickly and dangerous.

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