The writers who are protesting about Charlie Hebdo have picked the wrong target

Where the priorities of the PEN gala in New York should lie

The writing on the facade of the French embassy reads 'Je suis Charlie!' (I am Charlie!) to commemorate the victims of the terrorist attack on French satire magazine 'Charlie Hebdo', during a vigil at the French embassy in Berlin

How quickly the “Je suis Charlie” moment passed. For a week or two after the jihadi massacres of journalists and hostages in Paris, every trend-hopping celebrity piped up in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. Inevitably, the wheels soon fell off that bandwagon. Always brash, sometimes crass, never politely liberal, the scurrilous French weekly turned out to have quite as many enemies as friends.

Those enemies may bear illustrious names and defend high ideals. Yesterday, we learned that several leading authors - among them, Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje - have refused to co-host a gala in honour of Charlie Hebdo during American PEN’s “World Voices” festival in May. The objectors signalled their distaste for the satirical magazine’s alleged attacks on Muslims and “the disenfranchised”, and threw in some reproaches against French state inequality.

There was, and is, quite a lot to dislike about Charlie Hebdo. In this case, however, the grandstanding literati picked the wrong target. The magazine represents not some outstation of bullying Western power on the Seine but a singular strand of hard-core French Enlightenment - vehemently anti-faith and anti-state. Editor Stephane Charbonnier, and his slain co-workers, would have wished the New York event to honour their principle of liberty, in all its cross-grained vulgarity, not merely to mourn the victims of a dreadful crime.

American PEN will do exactly that. Salman Rushdie is correct to upbraid his colleagues for their “horribly wrong” proclamation. Meanwhile, the “Muslims” they purport to defend exist as a billion human souls and not as an abstract platform for moral exhibitionism. They include, for instance, Lassana Bathily, the Malian immigrant who risked his life to save his Jewish customers during the kosher supermarket killings of that dark week in Paris. Let’s hope that guests at the PEN gala stand up for him as well.