In May 2015, some 200 members of PEN America, a respected literary organisation to which many writers belong, decided not to present the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris with a newly established Freedom of Expression Courage Award. While not everyone admired the satirical French magazine’s crude cartoons and mockery of aspects of Judaism, Catholicism and Islam, only Islamist terrorists and “progressive” liberals were apparently offended by it.
A group of super-“woke” writers (among them Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje and Teju Cole) went so far as to boycott PEN’s fundraising gala in New York on the grounds that Charlie Hebdo had exposed France’s “vulnerable Muslim community” to “racist and Islamophobic provocations”. The writers’ readiness to second-guess offence on behalf of a group to which none of them (as far as I know) belong might strike one as illiberal – as if to say: the Charlie Hebdo staff had it coming. Or to put it another way, when two offended Islamist gunmen burst into the newspaper offices that January and shot dead 12 staff members while shouting “God is great!” and “The Prophet is avenged!” we should not have been so surprised.
