I recently decided to go back in internet time and read some articles criticizing Je Suis Charlie. I did not do this to raise a dead issue, but because the argument always seemed incomprehensible to me, yet somehow important.

Two themes jumped out at me: that Charle Hebdo is a vile publication, and free speech. The arguments run that Charlie Hebdo’s offensive rhetoric neither sanctions the slaughter of its editors, nor justifies the worship-like attention to Charlie Hebdo or Je Suis Charlie as slogans of free speech. Citing free speech as a reason to offend people is not heroic, and championing this activity in the name of free speech skews what the right to free speech actually means.

Whether or not Charlie Hebdo is more worthy of our attention than, say, the slaughter of thousands by Boko Haram is a matter of personal opinion. That being said, it says something about our priorities as human beings that we are willing to protest the deaths of a few people at a European newspaper but when it comes to the slaughter of thousands of people in Africa, we stay home. We may console ourselves saying, “those poor people,” on the way to Starbucks, but we still select what violence matters to us. This does not mean that our outrage at the Charlie Hebdo slaughter is wrong – it is quite right – but that our expression of appropriate anger and dismay is selective. This reality deserves our reflection.

Charlie Hebdo’s significance to free speech as a motivating factor for the carnage also deserves examination. The idea that free speech can be violent, but that in civilized society verbal violence neither justifies nor begets physical violence, is important. It prompts us to examine our relationship with our rights in general and our free speech in particular. “Rights” are not entitlements, but privileges. Rights may be God-given or universal entitlements inherent to human dignity, but we must see that our rights on this earth are not guaranteed by God or any ontological universal status, but rely on enlightened legal instruments and the good intentions of men. We should be very aware that, today, “citizens” of North Korea have no rights. A new slogan to remind of the precariousness of a right, what a right actually is, encouraging this self-awareness, isn’t a bad thing.

The issue for me is this compulsive need to link content to the worthiness of Je Suis Charlie as a slogan for free speech. The question we need to ask ourselves is whether or not content merits inclusion in free speech as a cause. Content must be involved on some level in order for the rationales behind speech-crimes, slander and hate speech, to mean something. But once we realize that Charlie Hebdo is merely a noxious rag of a tabloid, enabled by free speech, aren’t we in the realm of, “I disagree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it?” We may deplore what Charlie Hebdo does, and we are right to question the merits of this kind of publication and its implications in the era of human dignity, its place in a pluralistic society built on trust, but once we fall into the trap of justifying or denying a place in the cause for free speech based on content that is guaranteed by that free speech, however obnoxious, we may relativize free speech and cease it to be a right.

But profoundly more troubling to me is that we don’t understand how Je Suis Charlie’s connection to free speech is secondary. We should be far more concerned with Je Suis Charlie as a slogan for another human right: the right to life. Je Suis Charlie protests murder, plain and simple. Is this wrong?

The real importance of the Je Suis Charlie conversation manifests itself in questions of active engagement with our opinions and principles, taking proactive roles in the formation and expression of values, and assessing our self-improvement and positive impact on the world we make tomorrow. Passive orientations to rights and opinions take these things for granted. This is dangerous. Self-engagement is part of what rights like free speech are all about, empowering our exercise of privileges to self-definition, preventing effacement or forced abstraction before states or collectives, the ability to live our lives. We are Charlie when we stake a claim to who we are, and realize that what happened at Charlie Hebdo, the kosher market, or any scene of violence, could have happened to us for this reason. We are not Charlie when we deny self-definition to others, selectively attending to violence based on mores, enabling violence towards the other on our watch. We are really a mixed bag.