Hello and happy new year, if it's not too late to say that. It's Jemimah here. Welcome to our redesigned newsletter. We've pared it back, to bring you the most important stories of the week in the simplest and most digestible way.
While a lot of the English-speaking world has been distracted by Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of changes at Meta this week, which he claims are motivated by "free speech" (more from us on that below), I wanted to direct you towards a different censorship story.
Tuesday marked the 10-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, in which 12 people were killed at its office in Paris, eight of them members of the satirical magazine's staff. The magazine is still going, though it now operates from a secure, secret location, and its editor lives under police protection. It's still courting controversy (it marked the 10th anniversary with a special edition lampooning God). But are we still Charlie?
Support for that iconic phrase – "Je suis Charlie" – which both expressed solidarity for those murdered and for free speech – has waned. In a survey carried out in 2023 in France, only 58% of respondents agreed with it, down from 71% in 2016. More worrying still, a 2020 poll revealed that 31% of people in France believed that those at Charlie Hebdo brought the attacks on themselves through "useless provocation".
The ambivalence towards the Charlie Hebdo massacre is a sobering gear-shift. Sadly, as I wrote on Tuesday, it’s also not just a French story. In the UK, a teacher from Batley Grammar in Yorkshire is in hiding, four years on from showing his students a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammed – and outrage here is hard to find. The teacher's case sits within a broader landscape of film screenings being cancelled and adverts being pulled, all because religious sensibilities have been given greater weight than free speech.
At least though in the UK, and in France, we do have legal provisions, albeit imperfect, to protect people who criticise religion. Not so for many other countries in the world. Please spare a thought for prominent Nigerian atheist Mubarak Bala, who left prison this week only to go straight into a safe house out of fear for his life. Blasphemy is an offence under Nigeria's criminal law and in 2020 Bala was sentenced to 24 years in prison for a post he shared on Facebook, which was later reduced at appeal on the grounds that it was "excessive". So he's out of jail, but in this deeply religious country he’s not really free.
In 2015 we at Index were unequivocal in our support for the victims at Charlie Hebdo. Our position remains unchanged. Today we are still Charlie. And not just Charlie. We are the Batley teacher. We are Bala. We are anyone who wants to question, criticise or satirise religion.
Jemimah Steinfeld
CEO, Index on Censorship
