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(A good article by Jeet Heer who used to be on Doug Henwood's mailing list. Now he is a senior editor at New Republic. This should give you an idea of why the old gang there was so pissed off at the new owner.)
Some might argue that the racist tinge of some Hebdo cartoons is a side issue. It’s not like the Hebdo killers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi were anti-racist activists. They were well-trained members of Al Qaeda who targeted Charlie Hebdo on the pretext of piety with the intent to polarize French society along religious lines. But this issue of polarization speaks to exactly why the racism is important. To the extent that Al Qaeda’s goal is to make French Muslims feel that they have no future in secular Europe, it’s worth asking whether Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons don’t, in their own way, further the alienation of the Muslim community.
The strategy of using racism to fight racism itself can be questioned. Juice that gave energy to Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor has turned sour after more than four decades. Charlie Hebdo is the French counterpart of Robert Crumb, but the magazine is a Crumb that has never changed or evolved, that keeps using in 2015 an artistic strategy from the 1960s. The real sin of Charlie Hebdo is not so much racism but arrested development, a grave aesthetic failure because political cartoonists have to keep up with times and be mindful of the impact their images have. The free speech rights of Charlie Hebdo deserve protection and the cartoonists who work at the magazine have more than earned an award for courage. It’s entirely possible to support Charlie Hebdo being honored even if you are uncomfortable with the magazine’s content. But we do artists no favor by refraining from merited criticism of their work. Charlie Hebdo cartoonists deserve to be taken seriously as artists, which means that the aesthetic failure of their anti-racist racism has to be acknowledged.
full: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/121748/arrested-development-and-aesthetic-failure-charlie-hebdo
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