I was reading the international news on the terror attacks in France and it came to me that maybe we can all learn something from the the legal principle of Severability that has been described by Judge Amy Coney Barrett recently as kinda like Jenga game. The idea is that in making legal decisions (or other crucial decisions involving society at large), we should take the potential or expected consequences into account.
In the case of France extremists attacks, the short history has been that (quoting the above article) “Five years ago, the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, which many Muslims find offensive. In January 2015, two brothers murdered 12 people at their office in Paris, shouting that they had “avenged the prophet.” Then “in the latest assault, a gruesome knife attack at a church in the southern French city of Nice on Oct. 29 that killed three people — or the attack two weeks earlier when a middle school teacher in a northern Paris suburb was beheaded by a Chechen man after he had shown his students Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons as part of discussion about secularism, freedom of speech and religious identity.”
Enough facts, what about the lessons?
France president Macron “staunchly defended Charlie Hebdo’s right to publish the caricatures” which has non-surprisingly offended some Muslim country leaders like Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
As an individual I can safely say that the Muslim is not my favorite religion and the behavior of beheading someone is — to say the least — the least civilized and brutally barbarian. Furthermore, extremists can easily lose sympathy of others and place themselves in the opposite of the majority of the society.
Personal opinions aside, there is something for public or social governance. My opinion is that while freedom of express is a noble cause, it is not the only one at play. Other equally important or even more consequential causes a smart leader should take into account. It is here that Mr. Macron, and potentially other leaders, have erred.
One easy criticism is cultural insensitivity. Even though in Christianity societies you can draw cartoons of Jesus Christ and to be protected by the law, in Muslim societies my impression is that similar behaviors are much less tolerated. In other words, drawing a cartoon of the religious leader will be taken as one of the biggest offenses. This used to be no big deal for a native French to do that within his/her own country, but less so today, given the immigrants inside the country now, as we have witnessed in the series of tragedies.
The lesson for leaders however is something extra: Leaders must anticipate consequences of their own decision similar to the severability principle in the law. Simply put, if a move is expected to bring miserable result, think again.
In the French case, a smart leader will simply accuse the terrorists but will not mention the cartoon from years ago. If reporters asked it, the right thing to do is to play it down, acknowledging the sensitivity of Mohammad in other countries without apologizing for the French publication.
Why do smart leaders want to do that? Because we want to play the Jenga game safely. “If you picture severability being like a Jenga game, it’s kind of like, if you pull one out, can you pull it out while it all stands? If you pull two out, will it all stand?” To quote ACB here. Compared with getting citizens killed, freedom of express — in terms of not depicting the Prophet — is suddenly a small price to pay, especially when it just mean to refrain from publishing a particular form of arts.
The Macron’s statement also paled in comparison with reality. From the above report it was clear that Charlie Hebdo now is published in a secret place, not exactly enjoying complete freedom of express.