Under Threat Because of His Words, a Charlie Hebdo Writer Continues to Speak Out

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/nyregion/criticism-of-pen-award-comes-with-the-territory-for-a-charlie-hebdo-writer.html

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Like the people who stopped for coffee or missed a train connection on Sept. 11, Jean-Baptiste Thoret is alive because he was late getting to work in Paris one day in January. He is the film critic for Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine. That morning, two armed brothers forced their way into its offices. They killed 12 people; five others were killed in a later, coordinated attack. Among the dead were cartoonists thought to have drawn images offensive to some Muslims, a building porter, a man stopping by the office for the first time, police officers and shoppers in a kosher supermarket.

That morning, Mr. Thoret said, as he got ready to board the subway for a 10-minute ride to the office, he received a hail of text messages from friends asking if he was O.K. Mr. Thoret had joined a fraternity of people who were absent from their own slaughter.

“After a week, your mind begins to clear: People are in crashed planes,” Mr. Thoret said. “Look what happened in Nepal a few days ago. Fate.”

Mr. Thoret and an editor of the magazine are in the United States to receive an award for courage in freedom of expression from the PEN American Center at a gala in New York on Tuesday. This week, six prominent novelists announced that they would not take part in the event, disagreeing with the selection of Hebdo for the honor. They were joined in their dissent by at least 145 other writers who have signed an open letter. (Almost none of those others were going to the gala.)

The criticism did not cause any distress to Mr. Thoret, 45. Gallic contentiousness is part of his daily diet.

“When you are in France, you are very used to people choosing this one ground, or another ground,” he said. “I’m not going to say to people, ‘Oh, you are withdrawing from the PEN gala, what a shame.’ The worst thing for me is to say to people, if you’re not acting this way, you’re not for freedom of speech.”

The magazine, whose satire has been the scourge of many organized religions, was firebombed in 2011 after it called itself “Charia Hebdo” for one issue and listed Muhammad as the editor in chief. This was par for the satirical course to which it stayed even after its editor appeared on a “most wanted” list published by some finger of Al Qaeda.

During the January rampage, the killers shouted, “We’ll avenge the Prophet.”

Among those objecting to the recognition of Hebdo was the writer Peter Carey, who said that PEN seemed to have overlooked that France had not recognized “its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”

Others see the magazine as obsessively Islamophobic. That claim would seem to have withered when two French sociologists reviewed 523 covers of Hebdo over 10 years and found that 485 dealt with politics, economics and so forth. A total of 38 involved religion; of those, Christianity was the exclusive subject of 21, and Islam of seven.

For PEN, the question was not subject to quantification. “From our perspective, the courage is central,” Suzanne Nossel, the executive director of PEN America, said. “The diminution of the terrain of free speech cannot happen through the barrel of a gun.”

A website, Understanding Charlie Hebdo Cartoons, analyzes the magazine’s images and explains their intended humor. For his part, Mr. Thoret said he felt no duty to defend every cartoon or article in Charlie Hebdo. “It would be horrible if we all think the same,” he said. “You can consider a cartoon as bad, as offending, as stupid, as silly.

“Of course. Is that a reason to attack and kill people? You can debate the principle of the freedom of speech. You can argue in a very harsh way. That’s wonderful. But arguing is of a different nature than killing people for little guys in a cartoon.”

Perhaps most of us, wittingly or not, miss catastrophes in our lifetimes. Those whose lives are threatened for speech, and yet continue to speak, belong to a more exclusive fraternity.

In an email to The New York Times, Mr. Carey wrote, “A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?”

Mr. Thoret took note of the “but,” a conjunction that works like a clutch in a car, reversing the direction of a thought. “When you’re saying ‘but,’ there is a problem,” he said. “You are for the freedom of speech, or you are not.”