I don’t usually write about politics, and I haven’t published much of anything lately because I’ve been working on my book. But I was struck by a gap between the American and European understanding of the Charlie Hebdo murders. I’m reposting this from my private Facebook page.

Is Charlie Hebdo racist?* Why has the European reaction been so strong? Here’s the thing: until the ‘60s, the church, Catholic and Protestant, had a strong repressive influence in Europe—much more so than in the US. The leftists of the May ’68 generation saw themselves as opposing church censorship. The European left still regards the right to question—and mock—religious authority as hard-fought and central to its identity.

At the same time the French in particular, and the Dutch, too, are deeply attached to the right to offend. As one writer put it, Charlie Hebdo represents “an anarchic populist form of obscenity that aims to cut down anything that would erect itself as venerable, sacred or powerful.” This tradition, as you might expect, regularly gives rise to conflict.

Islam especially divides the left. Either you say it’s racist to criticize Islam, so it should be given an exception, or you insist that Islam, like all other religions, is a legitimate target for satire. In general leftist Europeans, Muslim and non-Muslim, are much more involved than Americans with the whole question of free religious critique.

That freedom is one that has been directly threatened by fundamentalist violence ever since the fatwa on Salman Rushdie. In my view the ‪Je Suis Charlie demonstrations are a response to the threat of violence and also a rejection of attempts by the right to hijack the debate and use free religious critique to justify intolerance.

So while Americans might see Charlie Hebdo as a weird, marginal, probably racist by-product of freedom of speech, Europeans are more likely to see Charlie Hebdo, whether they approve of it or not, as being at the heart of an embattled territory.

*I was using the wrong term here. “Prejudiced” or “Islamophobic” would have been better.