When last we checked in on Garry Trudeau—the court jester of the rapidly aging, and, thankfully, soon to exeunt Boomer cohort—we found he was parroting lies about the University of Virginia promulgated in Rolling Stone magazine's then-discredited, now-debunked treatise "A Rape on Campus."
More recently, he set his sights on the murdered cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, who he excoriated for daring to believe that a satirist shouldn't be murdered by medieval brigands for committing the crime of mocking their backward beliefs. He slammed these writers and cartoonists—writers and cartoonists who were murdered for their writing and cartooning—while accepting a prestigious journalism award. No, really! Here's Trudeau:
By punching downward, by attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority with crude, vulgar drawings closer to graffiti than cartoons, Charliewandered into the realm of hate speech, which in France is only illegal if it directly incites violence. Well, voila—the 7 million copies that were published following the killings did exactly that, triggering violent protests across the Muslim world, including one in Niger, in which ten people died. Meanwhile, the French government kept busy rounding up and arresting over 100 Muslims who had foolishly used their freedom of speech to express their support of the attacks.
In an excellent post, Ken White over at Popehat asks who, exactly, is punching down when we highlight and ridicule the evils of radical Islam:
Attacks on Western journalists are the exception. More typically, blasphemy norms involve things like author Zainub Priya Dala being beaten by a mob in South Africa because she spoke approvingly about Salman Rushdie at a writer's conference. It's about Farkhunda, a mentally ill woman beaten to death by a mob of Afghan men upon a rumor that she had burned a Koran. It's about Aasiya Noreen, a member of Pakistan's Christian minority sentenced to death for blasphemy on the word of her fellow field hands after a dispute. It's about 68 lawyers charged with blasphemy for protesting police abuse,on the grounds that they had criticized a police inspector by name and that name was shared by one of Muhammad's companions. It's about a mother and father, members of a Christian minority, burned to death before their family by a mob made up of the Muslim majority. It's about Raif Badawi, a Saudi blogger and rights activist sentenced to flogging and still facing potential beheading. It's about Washiqur Rahman, a secular activist and blogger hacked to death with machetes in Bangladesh.
White is right: Trudeau is a useful idiot for barbarism, the sort of weak-kneed, self-styled intellectual who worries about hurting someone's feelings and thinks that meeting mockery with murder is the fault of the mocker rather than the murderer. What a despicable individual.