The Paris cartoonist and political caricaturist Maurice Sinet, known by his pen name Siné, has worked for various French media, notably Charlie Hebdo, which he joined in 1981 and again in 1992 in the satirical weekly’s new version.
Siné, who will turn 80 on 31 December, has had a committed career. As early as the 1950s, in the middle of the Algerian war, he made no secret of his anti-colonial positions. Four years ago, he supported the Euro-Palestine list in the European elections of June 2004.
Although he is involved in the French Coordination for the Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence, Siné can be extraordinarily violent in his language when it comes to religion. In a post by the political blogger Luc Mandret, republished on the Marianne website (16 July 2008), Siné is presented as “a provocateur […], a secular extremist, viscerally allergic to religions and the religious, an eater of priests, rabbis and imams.” Wikipedia describes the French cartoonist as a “militant atheist” and quotes one of his statements on the subject:
“Religion gets on my nerves. It is obscurantism; it makes people stupid. Submission takes away free will and imposes taboos. I have never believed in God. It always seemed childish to me. But it is not the fact that people believe that annoys me, it is proselytism, this way of making us share outlandish stuff. Priests, rabbis and ayatollahs teach children false things. Religion should be something personal.”
But recently, in less than a month, just two texts were enough to open Siné’s eyes to the contradictions of the French media system.
In the first, published in Charlie Hebdo on 11 June 2008, he wrote:
“I have never been known for my tolerance, but it is not getting any better and, at the risk of seeming politically incorrect, I confess that Muslims increasingly exasperate me, and the more I come across the veiled women proliferating in my neighbourhood, the more I feel like giving them a violent kick up the backside! I have always loathed the black-clad Catholic church hens, so I don’t see why I should put up any better with these potatoes with their pitiful silhouettes, real scarecrows against seduction! Their bearded, babouche-shod husbands with Qur’anic sarouel under their tunics are no less graceless. They rival the Lubavitch Jews in ridicule! I would also gladly tip the plate of lentils and sausage over the heads of kids who refuse to eat pork in the school canteen. When your parents are as narrow-minded as theirs, the only remedy is to disobey them and send them off to prostrate themselves […] Stupidity has no limits, as everyone knows, but let us stop respecting it and, what is more, fostering it in the name of an indulgence that they themselves never show!”
He did not mince his words. Yet despite this violence, there was no reaction.
However, when, in the 2 July 2008 issue of the same paper, he ventured onto more difficult ground, asserting that:
“Jean Sarkozy, worthy son of his father and already a UMP general councillor, came out of his trial in the criminal court for a hit-and-run on a scooter almost to applause. The prosecution even asked for his acquittal! It must be said that the plaintiff is an Arab! And that is not all: he has just announced that he wants to convert to Judaism before marrying his fiancée, who is Jewish and an heiress of the founders of Darty. He’ll go far in life, that boy!”
That was too much! Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief, Philippe Val, reacted. He fired Siné. The likely reason: an internal conflict between the two men. The reason given: antisemitism.
Philippe Val explained Siné’s departure as follows: “I rarely agree with what Siné says, but at Charlie there is latitude to express opinions different from mine […] That latitude is bounded by a charter which in particular prohibits any racist and antisemitic remarks in the paper.”
In the article mentioned above, Luc Mandret does not fail to point out the contradiction: “If Siné’s first excerpt is antisemitic, is the second not clearly Islamophobic? Why does Claude Askolovitch, a journalist at Le Nouvel Observateur, when he denounces on RTL ‘an antisemitic article in a paper that is not antisemitic’, not also denounce Siné’s other remarks?” And he adds: “In fact, Philippe Val’s position is totally illogical. He who defended freedom of expression during the controversy over the publication in Charlie Hebdo of cartoons of Muhammad, does he no longer defend the freedom of expression of Siné’s pen?”
Abbas Aroua, 18 July 2008
