Dear Face to Faith community,

Many of you have been sharing your opinions and thoughts on the recent attacks on the Charlie Hedbo magazine offices in Paris. Freedom of speech, faith, and the relationship between the two is at the heart and soul of what we do at Face to Faith. For this reason, we have decided to share with you our thoughts on the issue, hoping they will help you reflect on it in more depth. 

We would like to start by condemning the attack and expressing our deepest and most heartfelt grievances to its victims, and to their friends, families and colleagues. Nobody should be killed for something they have said (or drawn, in this case). Violence is never an appropriate response. It seems so obvious and redundant to say this, yet so frequently in this debate sentences such as “yes but they asked for it” or “yes but they should have seen it coming” have been heard. There are no excuses for what has happened, and grief shouldn’t be followed by a “but”.

We would like to explain how we stand on this issue by going back to the values we stand for. 

I am not sure how many of you are aware of this, but the Face to Faith online community is moderated. This means that when you click “save” on a blog you write, it doesn’t always get published straight away. Sometimes it goes into a moderation queue. A moderator will read your blog and make a decision about whether or not it can be published. Some blogs can be published and some blogs can’t. The decision is not always easy, but we all agree on one thing: we want to make sure that every single one of you on this online community feels it can be a safe place for you to express yourself, and to learn from others when they express themselves. We want you to engage in dialogue with one another on issues that are usually difficult to talk about: your identity, your beliefs, your culture, your values, and your faith as well, if you have one. We don’t want you to shy away from difficult conversations; we want you to learn how to have them in a respectful and constructive way. This is what helps the moderation team decide what can and can’t be published. Each and every one of you has the right to express and explore who you are; but you must do so in a way that respects who others are as well. If something you write doesn’t do this and poses a threat to another student feeling safe online, we simply cannot publish your blog. You are all equally important to us, and we want you all to be equally important to each other as well. You all show this importance by behaving with respect, courage and sensitivity, especially towards those you disagree with. These three things will help you learn how to embrace conflict in a constructive way, and learn something from it. Bias, hate and lack of will to engage will not help you do this. They have no room on the Face to Faith online community and will therefore not be published. This is what we stand for when we moderate content at Face to Faith.

Something else we stand for is that the skills you learn at Face to Faith aren’t useful to you exclusively in your time at school. We believe they will be useful to you for the rest of your life. You live in a globalised and multicultural world that will inevitably confront you with people who might be very different to you, might hold values you won’t understand and can’t relate to. What will you do then? We hope that in those moments you will remember how to dialogue with the respect, courage and sensitivity that you learnt at Face to Faith, contributing to a more stable and open society and setting an example to others who react to difference with fear and prejudice. And we hope that with your help, one day the world will be more like the Face to Faith online community. A place where difference is respected, not feared. 

You might wonder what this has to do with the Charlie Hedbo attacks. We believe it has everything to do with them. Imagine you are reading somebody’s blog on the online community, or you are taking part in a videoconference. The student whose blog you are reading, or whose life you are learning about in a videoconference, is telling you about their faith. They are telling you a story of an important person in their faith, for example a prophet. They are sharing this with you as a way expressing their identity and letting you know what is important to them. Imagine that when they have finished, you respond by making a joke about that prophet. Do you think that this will make the student feel respected? Will it make them want to tell you more about themselves? And will it make them want to to learn more about you? 

Ridicule can easily cause offence, and offence shuts down dialogue. If a student in a videoconference were to ridicule someone else’s beliefs, it would not pass unnoticed by the facilitator, who would refer back to the ground rule of respect. If a comment ridiculing someone appeared on the online community, it would be removed. If the cartoon of prophet Mohammad (SAW), or of any other important religious figure, were to appear on the online community, it would not be published.

And in this sense, we do not stand in solidarity with Charlie Hedbo. With the victims and their tragic loss, yes. With the type of satire the magazine embraces, no. We grieve for Charlie, but we are not Charlie. Standing in solidarity with the victims has too often in this debate been confused with having to identity with them. Not saying JeSuisCharlie does not in any way mean “I do not condemn the terrorist attack”. The world is not divided in Charlies and Terrorists, because the world is not black and white, this and that, us and them. There are many different shades of grey, and this is one of them. You can stand against the acts of terrorism, but also not identify with the magazine, and this does not in any way make you a coward, or mean you are against freedom of speech, as some are implying.

So if you choose to say JeSuisCharlie, please keep all these things in mind. We will defend your right to identify with Charlie if you do identify with it, but in all blogs in which we read JeSuisCharlie we will copy this response, because we want you to reflect more carefully on what it means to say this. And most importantly, what it means to be part of the Face to Faith community. We stand for respect, courage and sensitivity and we hope that you do too.

Thank you for reading

The Face to Faith team