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Joram Nyathi Group Political Editor
AT one point current South African president Jacob Zuma’s once most passionate supporter now turned nemesis Julius Malema shocked the world when he openly declared that the ANC youth league was “prepared to kill for Zuma”. He was called names and described as a reckless rabble rouser. He had gone to the extremes.

The two Muslim brothers who killed at least 10 journalists in the Paris newsroom of Charlie Hebdo magazine and two other people outside have been condemned globally and described as religious fundamentalists who have no place in a rational world. No doubt they and many of similar religious faith must have vowed at some point that they would kill for Prophet Mohammed.

(It’s ironic how we all suddenly turn extremist. They have since been shot dead for their dastardly deed.)

First casualty

The truth is that human beings are creatures of emotion, and our reaction in situations where we feel we have been provoked often has unintended consequences far beyond the offence. Then there is the danger that, we in our reactions, fall victim to bigger forces which have motives far darker than merely balancing the scales of justice on our behalf, thus leaving us at a bigger loss. European ordinary citizens should be chary of re-enactments of September 11 scenarios. It is a reality fast creeping into being since those killings as the French establishment tries to be seen to be taking a firm stand, and liberty is the first casualty.

The two Muslim bothers Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi who carried out the Paris massacre on January 7 may have played into the hands of a growing groundswell of anti-Islamic sentiment and their action can only give the war on terror a fresh alibi, new momentum and greater support by ordinary Europeans who were getting weary and wary of America’s pretexts for its endless wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Moral blackmail

We are creatures of emotion. In the heat of the current outrage, the instinctive reaction to a person resembling a Muslim is to want to shoot rather than exercise the tolerance, the supposed purpose of the cartoons mocking Prophet Mohammed, which has given the world this catastrophe. We have all been driven into a laager of moral blackmail in which it is the duty of every rational person to express self-righteous anger and shock at the callous Muslims and their religious faith. But wait a minute.

Recently the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) reported that 118 journalists were last year killed in the course of duty. It didn’t specify who killed them although we have seen a few beheaded by Isis extremists. EFJ president Mogens Blicher Bjerregaard said the total number of journalists killed in the past decade was now over 700.

In November the United Nations indicated that most of the killings of journalists “were deliberate murders committed in connection with journalists’ denunciation of crime and corruption”, according to IPS news agency.

Enemy of media

Those are not “crimes” Muslims are most notorious for, and they are not known to target journalists per se. Instead it is American journalists who have criticised their president Barack Obama as the biggest enemy of the profession and media freedom in US history, ostensibly to fight terrorism. The risk we all face today is that it is experiences like what happened to Charlie Hebdo that could help spread that dark curtain over Europe in the name of fighting religious extremism. It is individual liberties which are under extreme threat, not from the isolated acts of extremists seeking martyrdom in the name of Prophet Mohammed but from officialdom in the name of pursuing the spoor of those fundamentalists. That is how it all began in America post-9/11. We are being subliminally prepared for an apocalypse so that we accept the loss of those individual liberties in the name of more of free expression and democracy.

Back to the source

The point has been repeated ad infinitum that Charlie Hebdo “is a satirical magazine”. One of the recent targets chosen for lampooning through cartoons is Mohammed, a revered prophet for the Muslims. This was justified on the claims of media freedom and fighting religious intolerance.

It might appear appropriate to fight extremism and hypocrisy by getting people inured to their differences through shocking and emotive devices such as cartoons. But such a strategy cannot always succeed when there is a perception that the target of attack or victims are only a certain section of society, especially where religious and cultural prejudices run high and those who deploy this strategy themselves belong to the privileged majority of that society.

There was a failure to draw the line in journalistic ethics between deliberate provocation of other people’s religious sensibilities and freedom of expression.

But the repetition that this is a “satirical magazine” is supposed to make all people see the perpetrators of this act of vengeance as subnormal and the act as preposterous. Because it is a “satirical magazine”, we must take the cartoons to be completely harmless and inoffensive, all the more to magnify the guilt of the killers as heartless fundamentalists who killed kids who were wielding a toy-gun (Charlie Hebdo)!

It’s a load of perfidy meant to drug the world with emotional outrage, suspend all independent thinking and evaluation of this whole tragedy in the context of the West’s disdain and contempt for other cultures and their religious practices or preferences. Shouldn’t those preferences be tolerated and their right to choose respected?

Sadly, the cartoons of Mohammed by Charlie Hebdo have not only led to the loss of human life; they may have pushed the world to the obverse of what they intended, that is greater freedom of expression and tolerance. The Paris killings led to a protest by more than four million people in France and hundreds of world leaders on Sunday in solidarity with the magazine and victims of the attack.

For its part, France was said to be deploying about 10,000 soldiers to “sensitive areas” to boost security. There were 5,000 other “security officers” as part of reinforcements.

France’s defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian noted; “This is the first time that our troops have been mobilised to such an extent on our own soil.”

Paranoia unchained

That means less freedom of movement or association for all in those areas. Instead there will be more suspicion and paranoia everywhere across Europe as the states get more justifications to curtail individual liberties. That is how it began in America, these are the unintended consequences of the pursuit of freedom of expression which disregards the sensibilities of those who have a different worldview from our own. And the decision to publish more such cartoons on Wednesday shows not only arrogant insensitivity and a sinister agenda which can only inflame passions. It’s certainly nothing to do with refusing to be intimidated and standing up to the “terrorists”. When the revenge attacks come they don’t select those who display fear. They hit where there are security lapses, hence demanding even more security officers everywhere.

There are already calls for France’s security agencies to be granted wider “powers to combat home-grown terrorism”.

By yesterday Germany’s Bundestag was already debating more stringent security measures, including better systems of tapping phones, withdrawal of passports and IDs from citizens suspected of having links or intending to join ISIS jihadists in Syria.

Thanks to Charlie Hebdo, it is liberty that is in retreat, not from Mohammed. Liberty is in retreat not from direct attacks by Muslim fundamentalists but from direct encroachment by the state to protect journalists from the acts of their unrestrained freedom.

The lessons abound for the media in Zimbabwe where self-regulation is woefully inadequate. More than that, whether the constitution has a First Amendment or not, when necessary in the interest of national security, health and public decency, the state will always intervene in the media when journalists refuse to act responsibly in the name of freedom of expression.

After Charlie Hebdo, Europe can never be free again.