Charlie Hebdo: Gun attack on French magazine kills 11

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-30710883

there's a video doing the rounds where you can see the shooters attack. it also shows them killing a cop, so yeah don't watch it

Maybe too soon to consider the consequences but there ain't nothing but ugliness ahead.

fuck! shot that cop point blank

So are the gunmen still on the run at the moment and is it known how many there are?

evidently yes they are on the run, in the north of the city. three I think?

gonna be fun here in the south of the country I'm sure! though paris is a long way from here in many senses

yeah three ppl is what the police has said. they haven't given any specific info about where the search is happening but it is in the norther suburbs (they ditched a car at porte de pantin, which has been recovered by the police)

"The man hunt is currently centred around the Seine Saint-Denis to the north and east of Paris."

wandering around some of the 'burbs in the Seine Saint-Denis (like, near the Stade) feels like you're in Batman or something, so this'll be great.

fucking hell they're fucking executing cartoonists for cartooning. this strikes rather close to home (i'm a cartoonist, so is my wife, 70% of my friends are cartoonists). I feel sick right now.

yeah, as long as atavistic fanatics like this shed blood on occasion, The War on Terror will go on.

at this point, "on occasion" = daily, but not in the west (which i take to be yr point)

well sure, this one's different cuz it's us

noticeable that the Yemen suicide bombing has dropped off the BBC News website main stories listing completely.

sorry morbs i cannot summon the necessary sangfroid at this moment

the first name of one of the cops killed is Ahmed. this is France today: it's not a war of Islam, or the Maghreb, or the Middle East, discretely separated from "the real France". looking forward to this point being missed about a million times in what's coming (i.e. I should not read Le Pen's remarks)

a little freaky watching the rolling news coverage of this from inside Broadcasting House

sorry Jon, i didn't mean to shortchange your anxiety.

kinda surprised it took this long for there to be an Islamic terror attack on French soil tbh (unless I missed something...?)

School shooting last year for starters.

yes and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldenberg_restaurant_attack

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1995_Paris_M%C3%A9tro_and_RER_bombings

stray thoughts...

i really worry that this will hand a few upcoming elections to the front national.

i saw a still image of the gunmen executing the wounded cop and almost vomited.

and yes, sadly there have been many terror attacks--incl. numerous anti-semitic attacks--in france over the past few decades.

Not to mention a previous attack and threats against this pub. The Intercept:

In 2011 its offices were firebombed the day after it named Muhammad the putative “editor-in-chief” of its forthcoming issue. At the time, Stephane Charbonnier, one of the cartoonists reportedly killed today, stated his belief that the attack was not the responsibility of French Muslims but of “idiot extremists”.

... A 2013 edition of Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine had also placed the editors of the publication on a hitlist of media figures and politicians.

One wonders how much of a police/intel presence was kept near the offices after these events, and for how long.

one of the cops killed today was Charbonnier's state-assigned police protector

ho shit, thx, hadn't seen that.

I'm not sure I was aware Al Qaeda had a magazine. (avoid Impact Factor crack here)

Yeah, I heard (from a coworker) this morning that assigned police protection was on-site when this attack took place, is that legit?

i know this is terrible to say, but we still don't know who did it, just who everyone suspects is very likely to have done it

if i'm not mistaken the teenaged american citizen that the US killed in a drone strike in yemen was one of the editors of the al qaeda magazine... or perhaps it was his father. but yes they have a magazine, and have had for quite some time. (insert joke about it being the in-flight mag-- sorry, gallows humor.)

the first name of one of the cops killed is Ahmed. this is France today: it's not a war of Islam, or the Maghreb, or the Middle East, discretely separated from "the real France". looking forward to this point being missed about a million times in what's coming (i.e. I should not read Le Pen's remarks)

― droit au butt (Euler), Wednesday, January 7, 2015 3:56 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
Haven't many Middle East countries been at war with each other for the last 100 years?

I'm not really familiar with French politics/society, so correct me if I'm wrong, but is it surprising that some extreme Islamists'/Muslims' hatred for another maybe less extreme/more progressive Islamist/Muslim is demonstrated regardless of the country they live in or are at? I guess I don't see how extremists' views on how their own people should be or act can simply disappear when they are abroad.

Sorry if I missed your point (genuinely interested).

US Muslims died in the Sept 11 attacks, people took very little note of it.

the point is that the "mainstream" French society on which this was an attack is multicultural to its core, and includes a lot of muslims. so this wasn't an attack by "muslims" (as outsiders) on "the french" (exclusive of muslims) as the front national is likely to frame it.

i doubt the murderers cared much about the ethnicity of the policeman they killed FWIW.

xpost

still sickening to think these three guys are still running around suburban paris... or wherever they are by now.

That makes sense, amateurist. I overlooked the Front National.

"mainstream" French society on which this was an attack is multicultural to its core

that may be how extremist muslims see it but is that how other French people see it? France has always seemed deeply racist/monocultural to me.

you can't generalize about "French people"

there are people -- many of whom vote for the F.N. -- who see islam as a foreign body attacking French society

and there are people who see French society as fundamentally diverse and multicultural

the balance is different -- and likely more xenophobic -- than in the USA. but that doesn't mean there's a range of feeling and opinion.

typo

that doesn't mean there ISN'T a range of feeling and opinion

Max made a MAD comparison on Gawker, that isn't correct. South Park doesn't fit either because the artwork is so important. Moreover, it isn't a megaphone for European fascism. If there's an American comparison, it's Fantagraphics. Charb reminded me of Bagge: terrific cartooning and a Reason worldview.

RIP

yes exactly.

xpost

yeah this hits very close to home, these folks were not infantile provocateurs but real artists.

still feel on the verge of vomiting.

Juan Cole:

"Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim."

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html

They spoke unaccented French,

One of the people quoted by the Guardian, who was in the building, said they were speaking in broken French, fwiw

that part is unnecessarily conspiratorial for the larger point about the intended effect of attacks like this, of genuine terrorism in general, i think

I am personally close to both the Paris' world of journalism and illustration, it has been a dark day for me. My uncle called my mother here in Canada to tell me to get 'the muslims out of Montreal while we still can!', things are about to get real ugly in France I fear.

White House suits telling us they were "highly trained and organised professionals, not lone angry men"

Yet they didn't have code to get in building, or even a getaway car?

Yeah, someone asked me about Muslims in Canada and I had to explain how Quebec has taken a hard line with Muslims compared to the rest of the country.

[off-topic]
Actually, yesterday an Asian guy told me he experienced racism in Toronto and asked if that was widespread in Canada and why it was so, as he was being courteous. I just remembered yesterday an Iranian guy also told me "you hear about Canada more now than 20 years ago" and how it was all bad press. Thanks, Harpo!
[/off-topic]

the first name of one of the cops killed is Ahmed. this is France today: it's not a war of Islam, or the Maghreb, or the Middle East, discretely separated from "the real France". looking forward to this point being missed about a million times in what's coming (i.e. I should not read Le Pen's remarks)

― droit au butt (Euler), Wednesday, January 7, 2015 10:56 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

So far all major french media outlets (of all political spectrums) have took notice of the death of Ahmed, who just recently got french citizenship.

"Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.

Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram).

Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.

what's the english word for verlan?

This is a silly debate, but verlan words are anagrams in a sense?

yeah this hits very close to home, these folks were not infantile provocateurs but real artists.

Absolutely, though there at least was some degree of trolling/provocation. Didn't the magazine recently/briefly make Mohammad its EIC? Admittedly, provocation is one aspect of satire.

Seems like a lot of European countries/cities are torn between their well-meaning, progressive, open-society instincts and a sort of reactionary nationalism. Like, wasn't it France that banned, or tried to ban, headscarves? Iirc, they did it, or at least couched it, in the name of equality, but the result seemed reactionary and certainly sparked some outrage.

what's the english word for verlan?

spoonerism maybe?

I am walking on eggs now and I don't really know where I stand on Charli Hebdo, I never did know actually, but right now I'm certain I can say that the endless provocation wasn't worth it.

what happened is not the magazine's fault

Has this been linked to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXf1CaU6aWo

Seems like a lot of European countries/cities are torn between their well-meaning, progressive, open-society instincts and a sort of reactionary nationalism. Like, wasn't it France that banned, or tried to ban, headscarves? Iirc, they did it, or at least couched it, in the name of equality, but the result seemed reactionary and certainly sparked some outrage.

Yes. Notably, there is a tenuous relationship between the magazine and fascistic nationalism. They received some attention for their frequent harassment of Jean-Marie Le Pen.

i.e. it's impossible to contextualize this horrible situation into familiar themes.

what's the english word for verlan?

Verlan is the inverse of L'inverse (lan-ver). Not sure there's an English word equivalent, but a cousin of Cockney slang.

http://p5.storage.canalblog.com/58/13/177230/59962592.jpg

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/former-onion-editor-freedom-speech-cannot-be-killed

The Charlie Hebdo gunmen also shot a police officer in the head as he lay dying on the sidewalk. These people are not just enemies of cartoonists or the ideals of the West. They’re enemies of human life. They care for nothing, believe in nothing worth believing in, and therefore their ideology, whatever it may be, is worthless. Moot. Not even worth our consideration for a moment.

They cannot kill everyone who disagrees with them. There are not enough bullets in the world for that. The most responsible thing we can do is be aware that the most likely threat to freedom will now come from within. We cannot, should not, police our own thoughts – or the thoughts of our fellow citizens. Because the First Amendment does not just protect our free speech; it protects all expression, including religion.

former onion editor otm

Seems like a lot of European countries/cities are torn between their well-meaning, progressive, open-society instincts and a sort of reactionary nationalism. Like, wasn't it France that banned, or tried to ban, headscarves? Iirc, they did it, or at least couched it, in the name of equality, but the result seemed reactionary and certainly sparked some outrage.

i know what you mean, but a strong national self-identity of secular egalitarianism is critical in France, and defines the approach away from an open society/reactionary nationalism axis.

i'm sure everyone knows this already but secularism in France is called Laïcité + has a long history

Verlan is the inverse of L'inverse (lan-ver). Not sure there's an English word equivalent, but a cousin of Cockney slang.

― bit of a singles monster (Eazy), Wednesday, January 7, 2015 3:18 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I use verlan for lots of words myself! Anagram and spoonerism both makes sense to me.

i know what you mean, but a strong national self-identity of secular egalitarianism is critical in France, and defines the approach away from an open society/reactionary nationalism axis.

― Fizzles, Wednesday, January 7, 2015 3:23 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Indeed, secular egalitarianism is so loosely defined that it has been used by both fascists to discriminate and even generally more open minded people view 'becoming french just like the others' as the ultimate goal for an immigrant, it's assimilation instead of integration, like how well the terrorist spoke french is debate you would only have in France (perhaps I'm wrong here).

but I think CH was such a weird institution that it's hard to place it in a debate concerning the immigrant french youth.

"was"

I hope the will exists to keep the mag going, frankly. As a fuck you to zealots

But I suppose not

the three shooters have been identified.

Unconfirmed reports three suspects have been arrested.

http://www.liberation.fr/societe/2015/01/07/le-siege-de-charlie-hebo-vise-par-des-tirs_1175326

but I think CH was such a weird institution that it's hard to place it in a debate concerning the immigrant french youth.

― Van Horn Street, Wednesday, January 7, 2015 9:36 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The culture of satire and mockery in media in France is so ancient, I doubt in France it's perceived as a "weird institution"?

The three supposedly arrested according to Liberation.

liberation liveblog say not arrested, just located?

Said arrested two minutes ago but has changed.

French media reports have circulated claiming to identify the three shooters as Saïd Kouachi (age 34), Chérif Kouachi (age 32) and Hamyd Mourad (age 18). Saïd and Chérif Kouachi are said to be brothers native born to France, while Mourad’s nationality is unknown. Police have also reportedly conducted raids on two apartments in the efforts to track down the shooters.

Chérif Kouachi, one of the alleged assailants in today’s attack, was sentenced to three years in prison in 2008 for attempting to travel to Iraq and join the insurgency active there at the time. As Bloomberg News reported at the time of his sentencing:

“Kouachi said on the stand that he was inspired by detainee abuse by U.S. troops at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, though he was relieved he was stopped. The court said Kouachi had wanted to attack Jewish targets in France, but Benyettou had told him that France wasn’t a “land of jihad” but Iraq was.

Kouachi, who alternated between periods of smoking marijuana and attending Benyettou’s classes, said he’s now working in a supermarket and his main interest is rap music.”

Update (4:04PM): Le Point reports that Saïd and Chérif Kouachi had “returned to France from Syria last summer”.

not quite clear on how fixing the place where these men learned how to talk, walk, and eat without dribbling food on the floor is relevant to this story of mass murder

Guardian is reporting arrest now.

Tons of Europeans are in Syria/Iraq fighting on one side or the other at the moment, and people have been warning that they would be 'radicalized' when they came home for quite some time (also, traumatized and all that) So news that they were warriors in Syria is very very relevant to this story.

yeah the syria angle is one of the scariest parts of this whole, very scary thing.

btw i didn't say by the way that the charlie hebdo folks were not provocateurs (the cover above intimating incest b/t marie le pen and her dad is a case in point!) just that they were hardly /just/ provocateurs. or put another way, they were unusually sophisticated provocateurs. and good artists. that they were assassinated like this is just...

and yeah although i liked juan cole's piece a fair bit the "irony" he identifies is lost on me.... muslims killing other muslims is not an anomaly--it's actually, horrifically quite routine these days.

Channel4News: Ukip's Nigel Farage tells #c4news what happened in Paris is the result of having "a fifth column" living in France and the UK who "hate us".

muslims have been killing other muslims since the dawn of the religion, it's kind of a thing

xp

obviously the dog whistle he's employing there is repulsive (since he doubt means to implicate all muslims in europe, not just the radicalized few), but in a sense he's not incorrect.

xpost to tracer

That makes sense about Syria, I didn't think that through, still there's something unhelpful about establishing "french born" vs not, as like the primary piece of valuable information about these people

It is to french people, what with Marine Le Pen and the FN and their nationalist rhetoric.

it's not unhelpful if we're looking at how this will push the oncoming debate about integration here. there's a lot of effort put into integrating new arrivals (I know, we're among them!) but it's different for those from here. I'm talking about in schools, where these murderers were educated, how they were educated; because this will be a point of discussion right away (and rightly so)

Tons of Europeans are in Syria/Iraq fighting on one side or the other at the moment, and people have been warning that they would be 'radicalized' when they came home for quite some time (also, traumatized and all that) So news that they were warriors in Syria is very very relevant to this story.

Thats been a big big thing here in AU as well - a rising number of mostly young kids (male and female - and not always already muslim either) running away to join the ISCircus. And, more often than not, ending up dead about 15 mins after they land there.

In Britain the government is trying to find ways of revoking passports of the impressionable young men who go out there, rendering them stateless. VERY dodgy, against international law etc. - better to take these young adults back home and deal with them maturely, because there will always be impressionable hot-headed young adults with grievances and it is possible to direct that energy to a less toxic place.

It is very important that they were french born. It is a big change in terrorism in Europe that it is no longer foreign cells, or cells organized from abroad, but perhaps small groups radicalized and choosing to do something on their own. It changes how intelligence should work massively.

Of course, big reason they are getting radicalized is massive amount of islamophobia going around in Europe.

Arrest operation going down in Reims

Is there a good streaming radio station with live / updates? I've tried BBC 4 and World Service but they're just doing bulletins.

It is a big change in terrorism in Europe

unless you're taking a long view, it's not really that new. the train bombers in london were uk-born.

and Mohammed Merah was also french born.

idk if there are any up-to-date English-language resources. Guardian just walked back the arrest story that the raids in Reims overtook half an hour ago.

Rolling coverage/pictures of the raids here: https://twitter.com/France3CA

Though "police go into a building"..."police come out of a building" doesn't add a whole lot to our knowledge.

Lost of French tweets now about the Reims raid being a decoy operation iirc. Stunned by the poor reporting on the raid from French journalists, even if it is a chaotic situation. Unless this is the effect of the authorities having asked the press to stay put while this is going on.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/paris-magazine-attack/paris-attack-suspect-dead-two-custody-n281761
maybe

That's been up for a while, but no French media are confirming it.

There is however a new big raid going on, in Charleville Mézières right now.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6ypp1KIcAAjo6V.jpg:large

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html

that's a great article, thx alba

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-cartoonist-says-gunmen-threatened-to-kill-her-toddler-daughter-unless-she-let-them-in-9963788.html

Holy shit, just imagine being this woman right now. Or her toddler for that matter.

Grenade attack on a mosque in Le Mans. Thankfully no reports of injuries.

i don't really believe in "evil" but it's really hard to think of much else right now

I do believe in cretinism however.

things are really fucked up today, obviously

I can't help feeling disturbed by some of today's headlines and thinkpieces. What happened was barbaric - there's no justifying a massacre of this kind, no matter what. However, the right-wing are saying it's an attack on freedom; the liberal papers an attack on democracy; while so many others are saying this is an attack on freedom of speech. Possible alternate agendas aside, this was an attack on a satirical magazine by a group of highly confused people who felt that the paper's provocations somehow justified the killing of over a dozen people.
The buzzwords being used in the media and online - 'democracy', 'freedom' - are direct echoes of post-9/11 rhetoric, but with the added sexy militancy of 'freedom of speech' thrown in. In this context, these words are needlessly evocative. They elevate these murderers from the ranks of cold-blooded killers to enemies of fundamental Western virtue.
These are not just terrorists who've been brainwashed into thinking that killing civilians and law enforcers is justified by their beliefs, they represent a more insidious attack on our right to vote, our right to roam, and our right to say whatever the hell we like whenever we like.
I believe we already have a thread for this, and I'm sure it's been said elsewhere and in not-so sensitive terms (one article from the FT was especially insensitive in a 'what did they expect?' kind of way) but is this what 'freedom of speech' is all about? I can imagine a lot of right-thinking moderate Muslims weren't all too happy about Charlie Hebdo's representation of the Prophet. This is, after all, one of the more sensitive parts of Islamic tradition. So should we hold up or 'sacralize' CH as a pillar of Western virtue any more than we should hold the gunmen up as anything more than faith-blinded murderers?

Muhammed waged wars, battles and invasions all over the place. He ordered slaves, sold woman and children into slavery, had a child by a slave woman.

He had people assassinated for writing bad poems about him. (http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Supported_by_Muhammad)

Imagine if Jesus, an important but of course subsidiary prophet in Islam, did any of this stuff? Struck people down with his sword? Wouldn't be possible to follow his teachings.

why are we comparing the two?

Like I said, Muhammed ordered people killed for "mocking him through poetry". How is that different to what these people did? They are just following it to the word.

Plenty of Christians follow the Bible to the word, and would be prepared to kill over it too.

i don't see how this conversation is relevant. these are atrocities committed in the name of religion and like it or not, killings in the name of religion happen around the world on a daily basis.

wikiislam.net definitely seems like a site with rigorous standards for accuracy.

dog latin, don't feel like you have to respond to this person in good faith.

so sad about these killings.

xp

You're saying you don't see how following the words and actions of Prohpet Muhammed are relevent in an attack waged in his name, for his justice, and for his vengence? ("The prophet is avenged" is what they shouted.)

I think I'm going to follow horseshoe's advice and politely ignore you, RT as I can't see your argument for all the strawmen you're putting up. If you're insinuating that there is some sort of inherent evil in the teachings of Islam, then I'm definitely ignoring you.

You need to read up.

is this what 'freedom of speech' is all about?

yes

ban tanuki

i did flag tanuki but immediately regretted it because he does get an absurd number of bites, that conscious rap thread is hilarious

def looking forward to tanook's analysis of cherif kouachi's rap skills tfs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OoRjFCP5spE

am in the Paris office today, and we just had a minute's silence. everyone very pre-occupied. it reminds me of the aftermath of the July London bombings in that respect. A number of people here were down at the Place de la Republique last night, saying the atmosphere was very reflective - people remembering when they'd first bought the magazine, the part it had played in their life etc.

there was visible military presence at Gare du Nord, light police presence on the metro. And that thing I remember with the London tube bombings, of people scrutinising each others' faces, not in an aggressive way, but as if searching for responses from behind their own inscrutable mask. I guess in a large city community, with a typical mixture of anonymity and general civic trust, this was for me the clearest expression of a social trauma. It's obviously a very multicultural city and country as well, with a large number of people feeling uncomfortable in the public space.

Feel bad for LOLing but LOL (xxp)

Well, ILX was deeply affected by the London Tube Bombings.

Let's get this straight first - Cherif Kouachi is not a devout Muslim, he is an angry disenfranchised street kid, he's an orphan, he was in Paris gangs, he's had no guidenace or positivity in his life. This is the social problems we should be looking at more than Islam. There are millions like him. He drank, smoked weed, had girlfriends, listened to hip hop. This is not a man following scripture devoutly. He admitted this himself. This is someone looking for something to grab hold of on his very last wits and at the end of sanity in todays world.

xposts to contenderizer
I guess I need to actually learn more about CH, their brand of satire and the offending images therein to truly make sense of all this. I have an old copy of it at home but I'm not sure how much of it I'd be able to contextualise.
I guess my concern here, is with people suggesting that the gunmen had a problem with 'satire' - that ultimately they 'just don't get it' or can't take a joke - that the ultimate issue here is a concrete lack of humour.
Putting aside the obviously indefensible atrocities committed here for just a moment, isn't this a bit like saying someone's an enemy of freedom of speech because they're opposed to a racist joke or a rape joke? And is it a satirist's duty, as a defender of free speech, to continue to provoke their targets via these jokes?
I'm not sure I know the answers myself here, I admit. It may very well be an unequivocal right to be able to poke fun at anything. And the last thing I want to do here is echo that shitty FT piece which made out the victims of these attacks 'had it coming'.
However, I do believe it's important not to be derailed or blindsided into malice by yet another conceptual value like 'freedom of speech' any more than previous buzzwords like 'freedom' and 'democracy'.
Freedom of speech is of course an important liberty to hold and should be cherished, but trying to make sense of these atrocities on these grounds just doesn't quite work for me in this context.

The corporate media been shutting down free speech for years so this is rich.

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/07/on-debating-dead-moral-questions/

There's a strong possibility that many of their cartoons would have fallen foul of British laws about inciting racial and religious hatred. Many would have been equally as at home in a Neo-Nazi publication as they were in a libertarian satirical magazine. It's clearly possible to separate the belief that they have a right to publish from a belief that other organisations should republish as a point of principle, though.

Putting aside the obviously indefensible atrocities committed here for just a moment, isn't this a bit like saying someone's an enemy of freedom of speech because they're opposed to a racist joke or a rape joke?

it's like saying someone's an enemy of freedom because they murdered 12 people because they're opposed to a racist joke or a rape joke. you can't put the atrocities aside.

From '08: 60-70% of prisoners in France are Muslims. (via Perrin, who says "Clearly something to satirize.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR2008042802560.html

xpost I appreciate the difference and the seriousness of the situation, but I do not appreciate the idea that this is an explicit attack on the Western value of 'freedom of speech'. As ShariVari says, a lot of these cartoons would have been censored in other countries and some of them do seem remarkably right-wing for a supposedly left-leaning satirical mag. So I'm wary of politicians and the media using free speech as an unassailable liberty to be upheld in the face of atrocities like these.

https://medium.com/@asgharbukhari/charlie-hebdo-this-attack-was-nothing-to-do-with-free-speech-it-was-about-war-26aff1c3e998

It may very well be an unequivocal right to be able to poke fun at anything.

yep

Blimey, Tony Husband, of Yobs infamy, currently being interviewed on Sky News.

In USA, we let media corporations self-censor. They do it as well as the guvmint would.

ITT: lots of Americans who have no idea how racist France is. Don't forget this is a country that banned the burqa.

for the love of god please shut up

LOL why do you care so much tracer hand? Is it really affecting your life so much?

ILX posters hate freedom of speech.

Waiting for a computer scientist to pop up and tell us RT just passed the Turing test.

All this is being done to drive us against each other, polarize the world, there's no rational "explanation" for it all. Our society creates outcasts like Sherif Kouachi and his brother. And so called Guardian reading librals are all for the Burqa ban yet will be the first to talk about Islamophobia. You're all the same, just fucking sheep, left, right, liberal, conservative. You all try to be rational, talk about Islamophobia, read your Zionist media, trying to pretend you can rationalise and integrate a strictly monothesitic religion into a new atheistic godless society. You can't. You don't even want to. But you want white people newspapers to have the right to crudely mock whatever religion they want to. You don't want people like Sharif Kouachi to exist but YOU create him.

Look at this place. People call for me to be banned because I say Taylor Swift and Charlie XCX is garbage lowest denominator copoprate music. People here can't even deal with that stupid opinion on this fucking worthless inconsequential message board without blowing up and losing their shit but you want some disefranchised outcast angry street thug who sees what he considers his people murdered in the middle east by our governments put up with being mocked? Check yourself.

Shouldn't you be at school today?

dear god.

anyways. should press print cartoons today, tomorrow or not, or have we covered this (and has ILX opinion changed since?) etc

Losing patience with this imbecile. Other message boards are available.

flag posted to expedite that process

yup

i'm sure RT can find a new home at infowars

or, if ppl are going to jesuischarlie but not occupy the same challenging space of eg belief that cartoons of Muhammad are fair game, then what does jesuischarlie mean exactly

xps obv..

Not particularly inclined to jesuis any publication that ran cartoons of Boko Haram rape victims, pregnant and screaming 'hands off our benefits' tbrr but it's possible to think the cartoons shouldn't have been drawn and to uphold the right of racists to draw them. Mainstream papers republishing inflammatory racist / offensive cartoons to take a stand against the actions of two people who are dead and one who is in prison is nagl.

otm

yep

two people who are dead

?? not seen anything about this, BBC/Guardian still reporting police are searching for them

xpost I appreciate the difference and the seriousness of the situation, but I do not appreciate the idea that this is an explicit attack on the Western value of 'freedom of speech'. As ShariVari says, a lot of these cartoons would have been censored in other countries and some of them do seem remarkably right-wing for a supposedly left-leaning satirical mag. So I'm wary of politicians and the media using free speech as an unassailable liberty to be upheld in the face of atrocities like these.

https://medium.com/@asgharbukhari/charlie-hebdo-this-attack-was-nothing-to-do-with-free-speech-it-was-about-war-26aff1c3e998

― this is just a saginaw (dog latin),

You can believe free speech as an unassailable liberty to be upheld in the face of atrocities like these and think "the West" has antagonized the shit out of Muslims for decades with drones and bombs.

for decades read centuries IMO

?? not seen anything about this, BBC/Guardian still reporting police are searching for them

Sorry, had seen that on various French twitter accounts without checking to see whether it was confirmed.

for decades read centuries IMO

― Ratt in Mi Kitchen (Neil S)

oh for sure

i keep thinking about Dieudonné in all of this

i mean, not constantly, he's an unpleasant person to think about, but at how differently his "poking fun" at Jews was treated by the courts compared with Charlie Hebdo's comparably consistent - and insistent - "poking fun" at Islam

I'd say thats about right sharivari

yea sharivari, alfred otm

sharivari very otm throughout this thread

i mean, not constantly, he's an unpleasant person to think about, but at how differently his "poking fun" at Jews was treated by the courts compared with Charlie Hebdo's comparably consistent - and insistent - "poking fun" at Islam

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, January 8, 2015 9:21 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Dieudonné problems with the french court started way before the antisemite sketch on France 3. If I recal correctly, he got in trial for apologies to terrorism for a brillant sketch on 9/11 terrorists. Dieudonné never care about fickle french laws when it comes to hate speech in a way Charlie did.

Sudden expert on a magazine that barely had a circulation of 30, 000 in France pains me the most: Charlie Hebdo was not a racist publication, if anything racism has been their main target for all these years.

my kids have returned from school today, and in all their classes they talked about the murders. teachers cried, put pics of victims up, showed lots of CH cartoons. my kids'schools are pretty heavily Muslim (we're in the south in an immigrant rich city), and teachers specifically addressed the role of religion in Islam. after Sandy Hook in american schools there wasn't discussion like this, but that's different obv. after 7/7 did British schools do this? we weren't here for the banlieue riots, so I don't know that went. I taught a university class on 9/12 (or 13? maybe the university shut down that wednesday?) but that's different than talking about it with early teens. & I wouldn't expect american teachers after 9/11 to have been talking about Islam but I just don't know, we only had babies then.

ugh that's barely coherent, I am writing too much French these days, starting to lose a bit of grip on english prose. I meant to say: they talked about the role of violence in Islam.

Yeah I've heard different stories from different schools and different teachers, not everyone in France is as well meaning right now, unfortunately.

Necessary declarations about the freedom of press aside, how long will it take before western leaders understand that constant intrusion into the islamic world has been a tragedy for all sides of the equation? Are we going to live in constant fear of terrorist attacks forever? Are the muslims and arabs going to live under oppressive regimes for generations to come? Isn't there a solution? Sorry to sound corny but I'm so so tired of this situation.

yeah I'm sure; it'd be hard to avoid talking about it down here I think? and it's collège ; though even in l'école primaire they talked about it today. xp

a complication in France / Islamic world is the role of North African troops during Liberation obv

and the whole "Algeria once being a colony of France" thing, notable that the suspects are of French Algerian heritage.

not too surprising, most French Muslims are of Algerian heritage ; with Morocco and Tunisia, also French colonies in the 20th century, providing the next biggest populations

Sorry to sound corny but I'm so so tired of this situation.

no this is exactly where I'm at now as well. i'm sure that ruling elites think they're doing a lot, i.e. aid budgets, military support for "pro-democracy" regimes etc but it has all been an utter failure. And there appears to be absolutely no one prepared to confront the issue head-on, that there are historical injustices that poverty and lack of dignity and respect are twisting, in some fucked up individuals, into this insensible, unending series of violent spasms which do nothing except kill innocent people and ratchet tensions up past the point where you could do anything meaningful even if you wanted to, which it appears no one in power does

Which gets conflated as "for no reason".

OTM x2

i am totally with you van horn street and tracer hand, so frustrated and despondent

xxpost or "they can't take a joke!"

xp "senseless killings"

no this is exactly where I'm at now as well. i'm sure that ruling elites think they're doing a lot, i.e. aid budgets, military support for "pro-democracy" regimes etc but it has all been an utter failure. And there appears to be absolutely no one prepared to confront the issue head-on, that there are historical injustices that poverty and lack of dignity and respect are twisting, in some fucked up individuals, into this insensible, unending series of violent spasms which do nothing except kill innocent people and ratchet tensions up past the point where you could do anything meaningful even if you wanted to, which it appears no one in power does

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Thursday, January 8, 2015 11:48 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It has been going for so long now, we are talking over 200 years of failed policy (to put it lightly) that I highly doubt we will find a solution in our lifetime. But at least I would love to see someone try something new.

Well, that's what they said about Ireland, but </optimist>

Somewhat larger scale this problem

well ye fucked off out of ireland once ye didnt find oil, is the thing

Brits still there ... you might not have noticed way down there in the south.

they're indigenous by now...you may not have noticed over there in the east

No results found for "ulster tar sands"

A man who passed through the village of Longpont says he was told the Charlie Hebdo suspects may be in the nearby forest.

"There was a man who told me that apparently they left their car and are in the forest. 'Don't go by the forest, take the road that runs parallel to the forest to avoid running into them.'."

Sound advice that man

Just looked up Longpont and found a fantastic street view.

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/1/charlie-hebdo-gouaillesatireislamjournalism.html

good article on charlie hebdo, though i tend to think they had more of a discernable point of view than simply the urge to mock and offend. though the latter was very much foremost.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/01/07/islam-allah-muslims-shariah-anjem-choudary-editorials-debates/21417461/

The truth is that Western governments are content to sacrifice liberties and freedoms when being complicit to torture and rendition — or when restricting the freedom of movement of Muslims, under the guise of protecting national security.

So why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

and a prophetic (?) article about charlie hebdo's (arguable) baiting of muslims from two years ago: http://en.qantara.de/content/mohammed-caricatures-in-charlie-hebdo-provocation-as-a-marketing-strategy

Prophetic? The attack in 2011 on their office was a major story in France.

Good summary of the suspects' jihadi CV (in French though): http://www.lemonde.fr/attaque-contre-charlie-hebdo/article/2015/01/08/attaque-a-charlie-hebdo-que-sait-on-des-deux-suspects-recherches_4551181_4550668.html

Even well-prepared, well-resourced terrorists make mistakes though - the article says that one of them left his ID card behind in the hijacked car after fleeing, which is how the police identified them.

Mordy, I assume when you posted that article by Anjem Choudary you were not aware of the fact that the guy is a running/ jumping/ standing still joke figure and rent-a-gob trolling machine?

no i posted it bc i agree w/ him that if the west is going to break the rules of liberalism for torture or drones then they should throw the muslims a bone and ban mohammad cartoons too

Hands across the barricades! *sob*

mordy have you heard the expression "two wrongs do not a right make"?

no i posted it bc i agree w/ him that if the west is going to break the rules of liberalism for torture or drones then they should throw the muslims a bone and ban mohammad cartoons too

― Mordy, Thursday, January 8, 2015 6:42 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What if the cartoonists are against torture and drones? Should they be victims of censorship because their western government decided to throw their victims a bone?

Freedom of speech is of course an important liberty to hold and should be cherished, but trying to make sense of these atrocities on these grounds just doesn't quite work for me in this context.

― this is just a saginaw (dog latin), Thursday, January 8, 2015 4:12 AM (11 hours ago)

I guess the problem I have is that the "free speech isn't the issue" arguments often seem constructed to at least implicitly suggest that there was something wrong with CH using their free speech rights in this particular manner, that they earned the outcome, created the monster, whatever. Freedom of speech and the press are entirely relevant here, though of course they aren't the only or even the most important issues to consider.

Two people sit on a bus. One says, "I will stab you in the eye if you look at me funny." Regardless of how we construe the dictates of common sense, society has an obligation to ensure that the would-be eye stabber does not act on his threat. It need not concern itself with the funniness of looks given.

if the west is going to break the rules of liberalism for torture or drones then they should throw the muslims a bone and ban mohammad cartoons too

― Mordy, Thursday, January 8, 2015 3:42 PM (12 minutes ago)

bah. this bathwater has too many babies in it.

I guess the problem I have is that the "free speech isn't the issue" arguments often seem constructed to at least implicitly suggest that there was something wrong with CH using their free speech rights in this particular manner, that they earned the outcome, created the monster, whatever. Freedom of speech and the press are entirely relevant here, though of course they aren't the only or even the most important issues to consider.

Two people sit on a bus. One says, "I will stab you in the eye if you look at me funny." Regardless of how we construe the dictates of common sense, society has an obligation to ensure that the would-be eye stabber does not act on his threat. It need not concern itself with the funniness of looks given.

― contenderizer, Thursday, January 8, 2015 6:54 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah and this work for sexual abuse too, 'oh but you know man are pigs, just don't sexually provoke them'.

Freedom of speech is of course an important liberty to hold and should be cherished, but

now imagine Rush Limbaugh saying this

This discourse around these tragic events is still way too much about "freedom of speech" imho. That's such an empty vessel of an expression anyone can pour into what they want. Who here actually believes the people who did this read the new CH every week at breakfast and one day thought "Oh they've gone too far this time!". The west sees it this way, and I understand why, but in trying to make sense of why this happened, it hardly makes sense. Just as little sense as saying 9/11 was "an attack on liberty/democracy". It wasn't. The perpetrators didn't go "yeah let's attack democracy, let's attack liberty!". It was fueled by deep hatred and the desire to retaliate and make as many casualties as possible.
I have very few jihadists among my friends (...), but an attack on freedom of press can't be the reason, or what incited these attacks. The constant hammering on "this attacks freedom of speech!" and #jesuischarlie is as understandable as it is unhelpful to try and begin to understand why this happened. This is what I find difficult: press rooms around the world stood up today in solidarity. I did too, with my newspaper. But I don't feel it's just about that.

it's not a direct attack on freedom of speech but it def is an indirect attack. killing someone bc they said something that made you really angry is an attack on the freedom to speak (pretty much anything and live) - but ur right that it wasn't like a principled stand against the "freedom of speech/press" ideological/legal construct

my favorite caricature of the aftermath:

http://imgur.com/CTWLw1g

Sorry

http://i.imgur.com/CTWLw1g.jpg

I think it's possible that bigotry of the sort apparently evinced by CH cartoonists contributes to the radicalization and recruitment of potential criminals and terrorists, and I think it's possible to believe that while also believing that "let's have less freedom of speech" is not a coherent response to this.

No I agree, but I heavily doubt these people ever really read an issue of CH. The hatred that induced this is of a much broader nature than an attack on free western press. Though I can't back that up with a shred of evidence.

On them being on the loose: it's over 36 hours now. I am not optimistic tbh. The ID left in the car? The picking up an extra shoe just before getting in the getaway car? Don't want to succumb to conspiracy theories here, but the "they are murderers, they are by default not in their right mind so he could defo carried his ID and left in the car by mistake" also seems too easy. It stinks tbh.

That was an xp to Mordy btw

these guys will be caught, they can't hide in the woods forever

People in Siberia have been doing so for decades!

Seriously though, who's to say they are in the woods? All last nights action got us was some house searching at places hardly related. They seem to be way behind every time. (This could also be because of the, quite frankly, dire French reporting on the chase. Don't know if it's because they are abiding authorities to take it easy or w/e, but in surrounding countries like Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain I know for a fact journo's are rather befuddled at the poor reporting on this. So chaotic, fragmented)

xp I think all that means is that they didn't necessarily need to read an issue to know that it was blaspheming the prophet

If you think this was not about blaspheming Mohammed tho - at least to a significant degree - you are deluding yrseld imho

If you think this was not about blaspheming Mohammed tho - at least to a significant degree - you are deluding yrseld imho

― Mordy, Friday, January 9, 2015 1:42 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bold. How do you know any more about the motives than anyone else?

If the identified suspects are indeed the people who did this, then we are talking about people who travelled to Syria, radicalized, got brainwashed or took a turn to IS. You think they returned and thought "oh yeah that bloody cartoon! Let's off CH!" That, imho, is deluded. It's not about a cartoon any more, it's that CH is a perfect symbol to attack "the west". That is the difference I've been trying to point out. Again: I've no evidence to back this up. But if you think this is *only* about cartoons! you are deluded imho.

This is what I find difficult: press rooms around the world stood up today in solidarity. I did too, with my newspaper. But I don't feel it's just about that.

― a pleasant little psychedelic detour in the elevator (Amory Blaine), Thursday, January 8, 2015 4:23 PM (8 minutes ago)

of course it isn't just about free speech, but when you have people (silby) suggesting that CH were bigots who brought this on themselves, then some defense of free speech seems appropriate. like, we don't have to make a choice between basic principles and a more nuanced evaluation of the situation. we can have both.

What I am trying to say: the whole western media has expressed their concern about free press today. I get why. But I don't think the attack was meant as an attack on free press. It was meant as an attack, full stop. Focusing on free speech and free press is a divergence - and I say that as an editor in chief...

I didn't mean to suggests they brought it upon themselves!

Contenderizer, wow, any "they brought this on themselves" argument I will vehemently deny. That "yeah but she wore a short skirt" argument doesn't apply. And indeed, we can have both. We *should* have both. As I said: this is about free speech, defo. But not just about that.

Clearly being bigoted doesn't merit being murdered in a mass shooting, nor should anyone have to factor that risk into their decision of whether to create or publish bigoted material.

Basically I think I agree with Amory Blaine here.

Otm.

I think it's possible that bigotry of the sort apparently evinced by CH cartoonists contributes to the radicalization and recruitment of potential criminals and terrorists

― The Understated Twee Hotel On A Mountain (silby), Thursday, January 8, 2015 4:31 PM (29 minutes ago)

i have problems with this. if i've misconstrued your intent, i apologize, but it can't have escaped anyone's notice that CH was criminally attacked by terrorist radicals. so suggesting that CH contributes to radicalization does seem to place blame back in its lap. and to describe their work not as satire or journalism but as "bigotry" really drives that nail home. imo. i find this line of thinking offensive, personally.

Greatest dilemma today was whether or not to republish CH cartoons. Colleagues were about 50/50 divided opinion wise. Personally I thought it was best to - as ever - go our own way and create a powerful front page. That doesn't have to include a replacing of a CH cartoon though. Most agreed, but got quite some responses from readers saying "cowards! You should've printed the most insulting cartoon CH ever published! To make a statement!" Fuck that stance imho.

This discourse around these tragic events is still way too much about "freedom of speech" imho. That's such an empty vessel of an expression anyone can pour into what they want. Who here actually believes the people who did this read the new CH every week at breakfast and one day thought "Oh they've gone too far this time!". The west sees it this way, and I understand why, but in trying to make sense of why this happened, it hardly makes sense. Just as little sense as saying 9/11 was "an attack on liberty/democracy". It wasn't. The perpetrators didn't go "yeah let's attack democracy, let's attack liberty!". It was fueled by deep hatred and the desire to retaliate and make as many casualties as possible.
I have very few jihadists among my friends (...), but an attack on freedom of press can't be the reason, or what incited these attacks. The constant hammering on "this attacks freedom of speech!" and #jesuischarlie is as understandable as it is unhelpful to try and begin to understand why this happened. This is what I find difficult: press rooms around the world stood up today in solidarity. I did too, with my newspaper. But I don't feel it's just about that.
― a pleasant little psychedelic detour in the elevator (Amory Blaine), Friday, 9 January 2015 00:23 (43 minutes ago) Permalink

Just catching up with the thread but this is pretty much exactly what I've been trying to express all day

We don't know motive yet, do we? I'd imagine drones and bombs reigning o'er citizens in Mesopotamia are more apt to piss people off than cartoons, but who knows?

*raining

Well this is it. But when every newspaper describes it as an attack on freedom/democracy/free speech, an assumption is being made.

it's not like they maybe said something that might give a clue to their motivations

Thanks DL, feel you got your point across very poignant today tbh, I felt in alignment with what you wrote.

All the pencils and pens in cartoons, I get it, but it is also very much looking out over a misty sea, and it only extrapolates the divide. The people who did this didn't do it because of a bloody drawing of Mohamed. If you believe that, you are ignoring the feeding ground of decades of war, western sent drones killing people, or soldiers marching in and out countries because "WE" think we should, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process. For me, that element seems to have been eliminated in the process, or at least shamefully ignored, in commentary in the media.

Xps yes Alfred and DL, exactly what I wanted to say.

Yeah contendo I probably overstated the case vis a vis CH potentially contributing to the radicalization of the perpetrators. But I have no reason to back down from accusing CH of bigotry—having seen a few of the cartoons in question, from my (white, American, Anglophone, etc.) perspective, some of them were bigoted.

xp Indeed, it's fully plausible that they would have attacked another target if CH wasn't around. The cartoons didn't cause anyone to leave a happily integrated life and commit to jihad. But there's a reason why CH was picked as a target, and that *is* tied up with freedom of speech.

Sad, mundane reality is I got the front page I wished for today. Didn't re-publish a CH cartoon but made something great and truthful on our own. Had the minute of silence with my journalists. It was impressive. But the "what does it all mean" feeling is what really remains. Debate everywhere is dominated by freedom of speech, freedom of drawing the most insulting cartoons you can. And while that freedom should exist, it must, it still doesn't feel that that is what this is about...

I agree Seandalai, it's not for nothing, certainly not! But "the west" is deducing it so much to "attack on freedom/press/free speech" so much that it becomes foolish. Ch was intentionally chosen, but as a symbol for something, not for CH itself.

Who here actually believes the people who did this read the new CH every week at breakfast and one day thought "Oh they've gone too far this time!". The west sees it this way, and I understand why, but in trying to make sense of why this happened, it hardly makes sense. Just as little sense as saying 9/11 was "an attack on liberty/democracy". It wasn't. The perpetrators didn't go "yeah let's attack democracy, let's attack liberty!". It was fueled by deep hatred and the desire to retaliate and make as many casualties as possible.

― a pleasant little psychedelic detour in the elevator (Amory Blaine), Friday, 9 January 2015 00:23 (43 minutes ago)

Maybe I'm wrong, but afaict, no sensible person actually thinks these attacks are intended as blows against vague abstractions like liberty, democracy and free speech. We understand that they have complex causes related to a long history of conflict and oppression and that they intend to take human lives. But I strongly doubt that CH was chosen at random. The fact that they ran cartoons seen as insulting to Islam is almost certainly a factor here. The attack was targeted response to their particular exercise of press freedom.

When we call the CH murders an "assault on free speech" or w/e, we're saying that the attempt to silence this particular form of speech amounts to an attack on free speech in general. We're saying that this is the principle at stake. On that level, it's the correct response, imo. Freedom of speech and the press really are threatened by the silencing of controversial voices.

I hear you, but I'm trying - knowing so little - to steer away from the predictable rhetoric that rises so soon. Western rhetoric, made out of the need to make a statement, to respond, to do something, to galvanize what happened and neatly shape it into something even a fool can understand. But I'm afraid it's not that simple.

We - press - are defo threatened and shocked by this. No mistake. But it's this scratching at the surface and probably leaving it at that, that bothers me somewhat.

But it's been a long day, defending freedom of press, #jesuischarlie posters on our windows, dealing with my employee journo's (who've mostly been great tbh), so I should probably refrain. Bed now.

Didn't I read that they reportedly called the soon to be murdered up one by one, by name, and shot them? This was no random shoot anything that moves thing. They knew their targets. The cartoons mocking Mohammed definitely provoked the wrong people. Or the right people, I guess. It's a tough one, because free speech should not be infringed upon, but then, we live in an era where there are some people who will kill you over a cartoon. This is not the first time this has happened. I don't think the villains in this case are anti-freedom so much as self-righteous, self-appointed censors and arbiters, a la the kangaroo courts of the Taliban or the religious police in Iran.

But I have no reason to back down from accusing CH of bigotry—having seen a few of the cartoons in question, from my (white, American, Anglophone, etc.) perspective, some of them were bigoted.

― The Understated Twee Hotel On A Mountain (silby), Thursday, January 8, 2015 5:29 PM (12 minutes ago)

I've seen more evidence of juvenile crassness and brazen insult in CH's satire than outright, concentrated bigotry, but that has to be judgement call when applied to the publication as a whole. It's a crucial distinction. Among liberals/progressives/leftists, the charge of bigotry has enormous condemnatory power. When we class CH as "bigoted" in general, we're placing it across the line of battle, faulting it in some fundamental way. Bigots, some would say, deserve to be censured, perhaps even censored. I don't class CH that way. I don't see it as an agent of oppression.

there seems to be a lot of confusion over CH from people in some cases, i've seen more than a couple FB friends discussing the paradox of defending a "right wing" publication in the wake of this event.

Been thinking about Uncle Rhabdo a lot the past couple days.

http://static.tabatatimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Rhabdo3.jpg

xp a point that seems to be being missed in translation quite often is the the odd effects that laïcité and the more general tradition of universalism has on acceptance of religious (and other kinds) of diversity across the french political spectrum

That is my impression though I know much less about it. I sometimes wonder if being a "secular" french person is kind of akin to being "white" in America -- where for most people who possess it it's not seen as an "identity" so much as the default state of being, in a privileged sort of way (where the bearer is not aware of the privilege). Like it's a "universalism" that is actually very culturally french, only the culturally french people who subscribe to it often miss what is not "universal" about it?

I don't feel like I'm articulating this well.

Debate everywhere is dominated by freedom of speech, freedom of drawing the most insulting cartoons you can. And while that freedom should exist, it must, it still doesn't feel that that is what this is about...

I thought the point of freedom of speech was mainly so you could say things you thought needed to be said, even where these insulted people; with insult and controversy as a bad but necessary side-effect of something good, not the main point

I sometimes wonder if being a "secular" french person is kind of akin to being "white" in America -- where for most people who possess it it's not seen as an "identity" so much as the default state of being, in a privileged sort of way (where the bearer is not aware of the privilege)...

I don't feel like I'm articulating this well.

― man alive, Thursday, January 8, 2015 7:17 PM (4 minutes ago)

No, you are, and what you say makes good sense. I can't speak to this in any informed sense, having never lived in France as an adult, but it's my armchair idiot's impression that left-leaning French secularism is often guilty of exactly this kind of blindness to privilege. But I'm extremely suspicious of the inclination to raise the issue under present circumstances. When the editorial staff of a satirical newspaper are butchered in cold blood by terrorists, my first impulse is not to scold French progressives for their habitual myopia.

Yeah can't really argue with that.

IMO it was attack not on the principle of free speech necessarily but on its consequences (by three people who very well may not /understand/ let alone appreciate the principle)… which in terms of practical impact means about the same thing.

i mean, they don't hate us for our "freedoms"... but they hate us (or at least CH) for insulting their prophet, which is a consequence of those freedoms. and our ability (if not our "right") to exercise such freedoms is one thing that will be affected by the shooting, whether or not this was the murderers' intent.

of course, they hate us for more than just insulting their prophet, but they didn't attack a US military installation in iraq, they attacked a newspaper.

(i'm not sure btw that their avowed 'intent' matters as much here as how the event will affect our actions.)

Like it's a "universalism" that is actually very culturally french, only the culturally french people who subscribe to it often miss what is not "universal" about it?

The people who came up with French secularism thought they were talking about a universal thing called 'Religion', but were really just talking about 'the Catholic Church in france and its Protestant discontents circa the 18th century', because that was all they really knew.

The French then proceeded to take jolie et gallant steps across the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, where, when they weren't adventurously killing people, they encountered various things, such as Islam, which they have been trying ever since to fit into the category they call 'Religion'.

Removing 'Religion' from the public sphere (i.e, Church land + influence broken up and shared out among the bourgeoisie) resolved some conflict and resulted in authority, comfort and stability for an emerging middle class. Understandably descendants of the winners see this in glowing terms of Peace and Freedom and see secularism as the magic key that made this possible.

How then could enforcing secularism on colonial subjects be anything but a kindness?

Not that it's easy to call the UK 'better' in any of its equivalent points, but our secularism has a fuzzy, partwork, quality to it whereas the French version is hard and mechanistic; we tell people they should be more in line with our modern values whilst bishops sit in the house of lords, whereas France, on principle, tells little girls they cannot come to school wearing a headscarf because School is Public so No Religion is Allowed.

amateurist otm

i mean, they don't hate us for our "freedoms"... but they hate us (or at least CH) for insulting their prophet, which is a consequence of those freedoms.

IIRC, a previous generation of Mohammed cartoons were printed out, and affixed to a placard, together with pictures of mutilated women and children from Iraq, Afghanistan and the Gaza Strip, these were then taken around poor neighbourhoods by Imams and used as an object lesson in why the West was Bad and needed to be fought.

I am not a mind reader but I suspect the mindset here may be 'THEY bombed us, shot us, raped us and tortured us; then THEY printed insults to the prophet', i.e., the infidel countries all act as one bloc, ceaselessly attacking and humiliating Muslims; an attack on a Muslim is an attack on myself, and the French cartoonists are (in terms of targeting) the same as the American soldiers, of one substance through complicity.

Opinions about freedom of speech might not even come into it, once you've become the gunman like this - 'freedom of speech' is neither here nor there, if in your mind, you're going to kill a monster who pauses sometimes from ripping children's arms off (military interventions) to spit in their face (mohammed cartoons). When you pull the trigger, you're not 'saying' that France should be different in some way to the way it is now.

Which is why criticising 'freedom of speech', or criticising the cartoons, in good faith, whoever you are, doesn't make anyone an apologist for the shooters

And if the shooters are thinking in simple terms of Muslim tribe versus infidel tribe, and if we want the moderate Muslims not to become shooters, and if we're saying 'No, please listen, when we print Mohammed cartoons it's more enlightened than just our tribe insulting your tribe ...', then we'd better have a substantial proof of that

I think that's broadly right.

Multiple xposts but, and Van Horn Street will correct me if i'm wrong, it's not accurate to frame CH as a 'right-wing magazine' or a 'racist magazine' but a magazine that constantly tested the boundaries of permissible speech, partly with a view to puncturing the assumptions of both right and left. Part of testing those boundaries was publishing racist cartoons by racist people.

It probably makes sense to talk about the wider 'freedom of speech' issue alongside but separate from the terrorism issue. Fear of violent reprisal is the worst reason for not publishing but it's not the only one. It's easy (and understandable / correct in the current context) for politicians and the press to come out in favour of free speech but in France and certainly in the UK, that has never been an absolute concept, nor would they want it to be. As the execrable Frankie Boyle pointed out, one of the stirring editorials in favour of free speech yesterday came from a paper that wanted him prosecuted for insulting the Queen with a joke.

When politicians and columnists lecture 'Muslim communities' about the 'Western value' of free speech, it's understandable there might be a kick back from some quarters - not simply because it conflicts with any deep-seated views but because of the remarkable hypocrisy involved. Western support for dictators like Sisi who have consistently curbed the free speech of Arabs is one factor, a more immediate one is the way in which speech has been curbed under a variety of laws at home. There was a significant outcry from the British right and left when laws prohibiting 'inciting religious hatred' were added to those against racial hatred - the idea being that it was a sop to oversensitive Muslims. That died down somewhat when, in the first year, there were six prosecutions and all but one were against Muslims. Subsequent to that, we've had people prosecuted, fined or jailed under a variety of laws for (among other things) writing poems interpreted as being supportive of terrorists, calling British soldiers 'baby killers', saying that David Cameron has 'blood on his hands' and vocally supporting anti-Assad groups that had previously been vocally supported by much of the Western world. Racists have continued been prosecuted as well but in high-profile cases, including one where the leader of a Neo-Fascist party was caught on film inciting an audience against Muslims, prosecutions have often not been successful. That's the UK, as Tracer Hand mentions, the frequent bans on Dieudonné M'bala have also created, at the very least, the perception of arbitrage.

It's incorrect to view the boundary between permissible and impermissible speech is simply about 'offending delicate sensibilities'. It's also frequently about hardening the attitude of the majority against minorities. It's going to be harder to convince people of abstract values when the implementation of those values leads concrete discrimination and violence against minority communities.

None of that is to say that there should be more free speech or less free speech, just that the current position is incredibly complex and not necessarily neutral.

gah, ignore the typos.

very well put

well done SV, an excellent post.

http://www.secondshiftblog.com/2015/01/wont-see-posting-je-suis-charlie/

This article from Prospect on Muslims in France is worth a read: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/opinions/after-charlie-hebdo-muslims-in-france-charlie-hebdo-attack-shooting-islam

France Info radio has obtained an extraordinary account from a salesman who said he shook one of the suspect’s hands when they arrived at the printing business at 8.30am this morning, writes Angelique Chrisafis in Paris.

The man, who would only gave his name as Didier, said he had an appointment with Michel, the owner of the printing and publicity material business. Didier said he shook one of the gunmen’s hands who he took to be police special operations officer. He was dressed in black and was heavily armed with at least one rifle.

He said when he arrived at the business his client came out to meet him with what he took to be a policeman, dressed in black combat gear, with a bullet-proof vest.

“We all shook hands and my client told me to leave.” Didier added that the man he took to be the policeman said: “Go, we don’t kill civilians”. He added “I thought was strange.”

He said: “As I left I didn’t know what it was, it wasn’t normal. I did not know what was going on. Was it a hostage taking or a burglary?”

"we don’t kill civilians” <- maybe sheds some light on how they saw Charlie Hebdo

it is just so hard to understand how you could think the stakes are so high wrt cartoons that you would murder and die to fight against them. and here I am thinking at least as much of the people who ordered this, than I am of the murderers themselves, who are obviously just losers following orders.

...I have no reason to back down from accusing CH of bigotry—having seen a few of the cartoons in question, from my (white, American, Anglophone, etc.) perspective, some of them were bigoted.

― The Understated Twee Hotel On A Mountain (silby), Thursday, January 8, 2015 5:29 PM (12 minutes ago)

I've seen more evidence of juvenile crassness and brazen insult in CH's satire than outright, concentrated bigotry... I don't class CH that way. I don't see it as an agent of oppression.

― contenderizer, Thursday, January 8, 2015 6:39 PM (Yesterday)

In other words: my apologies, silby.

Euler a clue might be in one of the many posts upthread where various ppl have suggested fairly convincingly that this sort of violence occurs not just because of cartoons but because of decades (centuries?) of high- and low-level oppression, lack of respect and just straight killing

I know but then why target those cartoonists? you could murder all kinds of other agents of oppression and lack of respect and violence. so why target these cartoonists rather than those? it's not like these were easier targets than others; here there was police oppression present. I'm just thinking: in the hovel in Yemen or whatever where the leaders of the murderers plot their plots, knowing the shock waves the murders will cause internationally, why are cartoonists at the top of the list?

Well, purely from a likely shockwaves, 'box-office' point of view, the Danish cartoons episode was huge and divisive, so that might have been a factor.

Who fuckin knows. Frankly I don't really care - this week cartoonists, next month a crowded marketplace, it never fuckin ends

ugh I meant police protection present

I'm just trying to think through the "we don't kill civilians" quote and trying to think about how you come to see cartoonists as non-civilians

Who fuckin knows, they've been driven psychotic by years of resentment and degradation

xposts Great post Sharivari.

One of the more troubling things, as most prominently seen on yesterday's Question Time, is the idea that newspapers and mags should be republishing the offending cartoons as a matter of principle. The issue was raised by an audience member who suggested that publications who didn't do this had 'bottled it'. Perhaps ironically, the only reason the participant herself said she wasn't wearing a t-shirt of the cartoon was because she had young children. Uh-huh.

But as has already been said, it's not so much about the cartoons themselves - they're ultimately a mcguffin in a much bigger shitstorm. And no, it shouldn't be about refusing to print the images for fear of another threat. Reprinting these images as some sort of act of defiance is not only offensive to moderate Muslims and a deliberate incitation, but it also misses the wider point - the fact there has always been and will continue to be an ongoing political conflict between the Western and Arab worlds. There are much more burning issues to be addressed than whether or not we should be allowed to publish some cartoons.

It's this kind of irresponsible conclusion-jumping that makes me despair following an expression of violence like this. 'Looters are Scum' etc... It allows a bigger platform for right-wing pundits to wield concepts like 'freedom of expression' as a sacred cow under threat, while blithely ignoring the deeper causes of the issue. Ultimately it becomes a witch-hunt and a moral panic - 'They terk err satire!' 'Where does the buck stop?', 'Save our Viz!', 'Save our Monty Python!'... It's not satire that is under threat here though, and this is a clouding of the issue.

if you're not racist you're letting the terrorists win

Just wanted to say, some great posts here this morning by all of you!

who are obviously just losers following orders.

Uh, I don't know that it is obvious that they were 'following orders'.

The Guardian’s Anne Penketh reports that the maintenance worker who was the first victim of the killers at Charlie Hebdo was shot dead on his first day working at the offices of the satirical magazine.

A friend told BFM TV news that Frédéric Boisseau, who was employed by facilities management company Sodexo, was standing in the reception area with a colleague when the Kalashnikov-toting killers burst into the building and asked for directions to Charlie Hebdo’s offices. They shot him before heading for the magazine’s office.

fffff....

He wasn't a civilian then?

i know i'm just reposting stuff from the guardian liveblog at this point but jfc enough of this shit already

BFM TV is reporting that the man suspected of killing policewoman Clarissa Jean-Philippe in Montrouge yesterday is holding five hostages, including women and children, at a kosher supermarket near the Porte de Vincennes in the 20th arrondissement in Paris, Jon Henley reports from Paris.

The suspect reportedly told police officers at the scene: “You know who I am.”

The channel said at least one person has been injured.

Is that connected or a separate incident? I've lost track of what's going on. Are there two hostage situations happening concurrently?

yes i think so

connection is this second hostage-taker (who apparently shot dead a policewoman yesterday) is reportedly part of the same group as the kouachis

One hostage sit in supermarket holding five people
One hostage sit in printery by the two shooters from Wednesday

AP: Two dead in the supermarkt...

AFP, that is

Does anyone have any idea who this other gunman is?

isn't he the guy who shot the policewoman yesterday morning?

some reason to think that maybe the 2nd guy has a bomb. the police are evacuating people near the supermarket saying there is "another problem"

Police just released these photos of suspects supposedly linked to the supermarket hostage situation:

http://i.imgur.com/WE9uY3y.png

And the report about the two deaths is retracted again...

great, and now something's going down at Trocodéro

ok false alarm at Trocodéro. we've had those down here today too. country's obviously on edge

they're closing all the businesses on the Rue des Rosiers today but lots of them will already have closed since it's Friday afternoon

horrible, Porte de Vincennes is currently closed down, Trocodéro evacuated but yes, false alarm. colleagues just shaking their heads in dismay.

But as has already been said, it's not so much about the cartoons themselves - they're ultimately a mcguffin in a much bigger shitstorm. And no, it shouldn't be about refusing to print the images for fear of another threat. Reprinting these images as some sort of act of defiance is not only offensive to moderate Muslims and a deliberate incitation, but it also misses the wider point - the fact there has always been and will continue to be an ongoing political conflict between the Western and Arab worlds. There are much more burning issues to be addressed than whether or not we should be allowed to publish some cartoons.

I think this is mostly correct (except it should say "muslim" rather than "arab" world obvs, to the extent that there is such a thing as either). But it also elides something about why there is a "political conflict" between the two "worlds," in the first place, something that I think is pretty complex and difficult to pin down. But someone above mentioned the distribution of images of Iraqi, Afghani, and Palestinian children together with the Mohammed caricature. Why does a French North African muslim identify him/herself specifically with children from such disparate cultures/geographic locations? Because political-religious bodies have sought to unite those people under a certain banner and way-of-life, and Mohammed is one of the "symbols" that unites them (in quotes since it's actually so sacred it can't even be depicted and "symbolized"). So it can't be understood purely as a clash over free speech or "values" but it also can't be understood purely as a conflict over children dying from western bombs, or land struggles, or oil, or immigrants experiencing racism in the slums of europe, etc. although there's no question that all of these factors push people to one side vs the other. This is about lives, and resources, and land, and a way of life, and a religion, and values. All of the above. But I think "terrorists hate us because we did bad stuff to their people" is an incomplete picture, not as much so as "they hate our freedom," but there are a lot of people in the world to whom many "western values" actually are repugnant, to whom valuing free speech to the extent of permitting blasphemy actually is repugnant, to whom a culture where sex is constantly on display is repugnant, to whom modern western gender roles are repugnant, etc. I think more people are pushed into those views when they are by reasons of race, class, national origin, unable to reap the potential benefits of a western way of life. I don't mean this derisively, I think fundamentalist Islam could seem to offer a lot to a person unable to experience the better benefits of capitalism, especially a man.

Since Hannukah was just here, I was thinking about how depending on which historians you believe, Hannukah was really about a war between religious zealots and secularist assimilationists. The zealots are the celebrated winners, but that gets downplayed by many modern reform/conservative Jewish groups. But you know, people have fought wars over stuff like that for all of human history.

I've got no idea if it constitutes a trend or a continuation of long-standing trends, but but between the shooters in Ottawa a few months back, and Sydney a few weeks back, and now this, I hope this is not the new reality of groups of one or two extremists shooting things up, or taking and shooting hostages, just because they can. I'm frankly surprised it's been relatively rare in the west before this, since it seems a lot easier to pull off than some other more ambitious schemes, with many of the same results (short of huge death toll). It's all so sad.

I think fundamentalist Islam could seem to offer a lot to a person unable to experience the better benefits of capitalism, especially a man.

that is pretty OTM but as a good materialist i would have to contend that the repugnance of Western culture is only intolerable, or leading to these psychotic outcomes, because of grinding high- and low-level degradation, loss of dignity and power imbalance - take these out of the equation and you've got something to kid each other about over a soccer game, or wrinkle your nose at in an issue of national geographic

xpost

this is one of the best things I've read recently on the tensions caused by Westernization (for lack of a better word ottomh) in the ME:

http://pando.com/2014/10/09/the-war-nerd-technology-culture-wars-jihad/

Yeah that's a whole other interesting conversation, why people who do experience all the benefits of material wealth choose a seemingly fundamentalist religion. There are social and emotional benefits to religion that materialism doesn't really account for. Or maybe the materialist explanation is that, as the elites, they have to, at least outwardly, get with the program that they benefit from.

they've shut down all jewish business in the marais (historical jewish neighborhood), apparently. i don't know if it's b/c of specific threats or just out of caution. i have several friends who live in that neighborhood. also have an old boss who lives in vincennes. this is too immediate right now for me to think abstractly very well. i just hope this ends without more death.

why people who do experience all the benefits of material wealth choose a seemingly fundamentalist religion

http://www.trbimg.com/img-1333924268/turbine/os-amway-easter-sunday-service.jpg-20120408

Hezbollah chief: Extremists harm Islam more than cartoons

xp, well tbf most megachurch-goers are not really the wealthy/elite of the US. They may experience abundance by world standards, but they experience degradation/humiliation/difficulty in some of the same ways muslim immigrants in the slums may. I mean, immigrants in france get social welfare benefits and all, they have housing, they have food, so it's not ONLY about absolute per capita material well being.

this may be the first and last time i say "hezbollah chief otm"

xpost

a lot of times the folks in the west involved in this are disturbed w/ criminal inclinations and radical islam gives these inclinations a "focus"

that seems more of a common denominator than any particular class origin

This is one reason my places like Saudi Arabia are fascinating. Tons of money, and tons of extremism/repression, but strange places where things get muddled, like lingerie stores in malls for wealthy women clad head to toe in scarves and robes

There was a stabbing in a mall in Abu Dhabi in December, seemingly random, seemingly terrorist-motivated and seemingly carried out by an affluent woman.

There are huge tensions within elites in placed like Saudi Arabia and political Islam is one of the mediums through which they appear, even among the very wealthy. If you wanted to depose the House of Saud, there aren't many other obvious options.

Yeah, if you just want to focus on the actual gunmen, then there's definitely mental illness often at play, but if you want to also focus on who is directing them and/or helping them carry it out (assuming not lone actors) then that's not really the most important point imo.

Charlie Hebdo staff vow to print 1m copies as French media support grows

Quoth a friend: "If you are willing to be martyrs, you do not need hostages. Losers."

I would not ID intellectual consistency as a prime trait of this cohort

Gunfire & explosions being reported at dammartin

Yeah that's a whole other interesting conversation, why people who do experience all the benefits of material wealth choose a seemingly fundamentalist religion. There are social and emotional benefits to religion that materialism doesn't really account for. Or maybe the materialist explanation is that, as the elites, they have to, at least outwardly, get with the program that they benefit from.

― man alive, Friday, January 9, 2015 10:44 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and of course OBL and Zawahiri and Qutb et al, the deeply warped idealogues who cast the mold for whoever is providing the rhetorical vim and vigor to these guys these days, were all wealthy scions, doctors, academics... their brand of fundamentalism reads to me as a kind of wounded narcissism where the non-existence of a theocratic empire is the insult they cannot abide.

More explosions, I guess they're using those rocket launchers. Fucking hell

jesus

raid on the supermarket in Paris as well

and of course OBL and Zawahiri and Qutb et al, the deeply warped idealogues who cast the mold for whoever is providing the rhetorical vim and vigor to these guys these days, were all wealthy scions, doctors, academics... their brand of fundamentalism reads to me as a kind of wounded narcissism where the non-existence of a theocratic empire is the insult they cannot abide.

― a drug by the name of WORLD WITHOUT END (Jon Lewis), Friday, January 9, 2015 11:09 AM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

At some point the question starts to look like "what is power and why does anyone want it in the first place?" which is obv one of those fundamental questions you can't answer satisfactorily. And "what is identity and why does anyone even have one?"

Anyone claiming that Charlie Hebdo is racist really need to pick up a few of the actual magazines and understand that satire works in complicated contexts.

guess it's ending. gonna be a great weekend! won't be going to the mall.

rumor on belgian TV: the two idiot brothers are dead but their hostage is alive

AFP is reporting that a source says the Charlie Hebdo suspects, the Kouachi brothers, have been killed.

As far as the mag I wonder if it's just not quite comprehensible to me, the way clickhole would seem to someone who had never been on the internet. Sometimes I get that impression, other times I get the sense that yeah it's just the french equivalent of South Park-style edgy "equal opportunity offender" humor. But it's an unknown unknown for me, I don't understand whether I don't understand.

BBC:

AFP is reporting that the Kouachi brothers' hostage has been freed and is safe following a police assault on the warehouse in Dammartin.

Only the dude in the supermarket left.

he's dead too

Yup. It's over. I mean this instance is over. Feel like crying again.

Anyone claiming that Charlie Hebdo is racist really need to pick up a few of the actual magazines and understand that satire works in complicated contexts.

anyone claiming that people on this thread have claimed the mag as a whole is "racist" really needs to refresh this page a few times and understand that posts need to be read carefully

i have picked up CH many times, usually while killing time in train stations, and yes, many of their cartoons perpetuate lazy racist stereotypes

thanks for the tip, though

Thank fuck xps

Wasn't directed at people on this thread, I only respect for the people of ILX and the discussion has been healthy mostly. I was thinking of the hoodedutilitarian blog mostly, wasn't clear enough, my bad.

I won't pass judgment on CH's aesthetic bcz ive never seen the mag, beyond thinking that the worst of the cartoons online are as bad as the South Park dudes' dumber slurs / lazy libertarianisms. Which has nothing to do with making a defense of this bloodbath, obviously.

ok all good VHS :P

Good Kenan Malik response to the ideas in the Jacobin/Medium/Hooded Utilitarian articles contenderizer linked to - "What is called ‘offence to a community’ is more often than not actually a struggle within communities. There are hudreds of thousands, within Muslim communities in the West, and within Muslim-majority countries across the world, challenging religious-based reactionary ideas and policies and institutions." Richard Seymour bluntly dismissing the whole magazine as "a racist institution" reminds me why I don't read Richard Seymour.

https://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2015/01/08/je-suis-charlie-its-a-bit-late/

I don't understand what that Malik quote actually means.

Hats off to the French police teams in today's actions.

Joe Sacco OTM: http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks

Those who claim that it is ‘racist’ or ‘Islamophobic’ to mock the Prophet Mohammad, appear to imagine, with the racists, that all Muslims are reactionaries.

http://i2.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/015/orly.jpg

it's not that CH has mocked Mohammed (what would this even mean) c'mon now

StanM otm

Hats off to the French police teams in today's actions.

Had a feeling they'd be good at this sort of thing... also no way the two brothers were getting out alive.

Well if there is one thing the french police are good at is tracking down arabs.

^ Charlie Hebdo ton esprit à jamais.

Didn't want to say but...

well they didnt want to increase the percentage of Muslim inmates

wokka wokka

was kind of worried the police would do a friday afternoon rushed job of this

also no way the two brothers were getting out alive

read somewhere that they actually came out firing at the police/security forces?

the sacco cartoon otm

anyone one in the French govt likely to reproduce Dubya's memorable "Bring it on" remark? (tho he wasn't talking in the immediate aftermath of a domestic attack at that moment)

Not so good, hostages dead @ the supermarket

and an accomplice at Porte de Vincennes dead too

oh fuck xp

where are people getting info?

BBC site. Having said that, we should wait for confirmation.

BBC news website:

Breaking News

Posted at 16:57

At least four hostages killed in Paris supermarket siege, Reuters reports quoting police sources.

As far as the mag I wonder if it's just not quite comprehensible to me, the way clickhole would seem to someone who had never been on the internet. Sometimes I get that impression, other times I get the sense that yeah it's just the french equivalent of South Park-style edgy "equal opportunity offender" humor. But it's an unknown unknown for me, I don't understand whether I don't understand.

South Park it isn’t. I remember a joke from a few years ago that referenced Alfred Loisy! However, I think the Clickhole comparison is fair.

Nonetheless, they have remained steadfast in their opposition to both fascism and religion. Is it bigoted to be intolerant of fascism or religion? Certainly. While I’m religious, I don’t find it problematic even when I find it offensive.

i have picked up CH many times, usually while killing time in train stations, and yes, many of their cartoons perpetuate lazy racist stereotypes

Would you mind elaborating? If you’re talking about monkeys and such, I find their re-appropriation hilarious (e.g. the cartoon where the monkey that wrote Shakespeare is heckled, etc.) for the same reasons I find the thread of crazy conservative comics hilarious.

I'm reading France Bleu and Le Monde. yes, four hostages dead confirmed. ugh

The female hostage taker escaped alledgedly

http://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2015/01/09/fusillade-a-paris-porte-de-vincennes-le-tireur-retranche-dans-une-epicerie-casher_4552721_3224.html

interesting that "le monde" doesn't modify descriptions of the killers with the word "suspected" or "alleged" as the US/UK papers standardly do.

Don't think the rapid release to the press of photos of the 'alleged' killers would have happened in the UK either (probably have to be rubber stamped half a dozen times), don't know about the US.

i think that has to do with the US being the most litigious nation on earth

UK infinitely worse for libel, etc

New hostage situation in a Montpellier jewelry store

oh ffs

that jacobin piece is nauseating imo

Hostage sit in Montpellier seems to be a botched robbery

sources say to Le Monde that the woman of interest with the Vincennes situation was not in fact in Vincennes during all of this. they're still looking for her.

I think the fact that Seymour's first response, after the obligatory throat-clearing, was to call the murder victims racist says a great deal about his priorities. Don't say you care about the dead and then piss all over them, unless you have some really solid evidence that CH relentlessly targeted French muslims rather than extremists or the religion itself. "Go read Orientalism" isn't enough.

also evidently the brothers didn't know they had a hostage? I'm so confused

They did invent farce after all.

I think the fact that Seymour's first response, after the obligatory throat-clearing, was to call the murder victims racist says a great deal about his priorities. Don't say you care about the dead and then piss all over them, unless you have some really solid evidence that CH relentlessly targeted French muslims rather than extremists or the religion itself. "Go read Orientalism" isn't enough.

― Minaj moron (Re-Make/Re-Model), Friday, January 9, 2015 12:44 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I don't think responses like his are "with the terrorists," but I do think there's a shade of cowardly self-distancing to it.

what's his excuse for the targeting of the kosher supermarket? actually nm i don't want to know.

xp For sure

I think the fact that Seymour's first response, after the obligatory throat-clearing, was to call the murder victims racist says a great deal about his priorities.

Are these bad priorities?

If your first response to the massacre of cartoonists is to call the victims racists, then yes, your priorities seem bad to me.

what if ur first response is to explain the assailants legitimate grievances?

Same. Their actions make their grievances illegitimate.

xxp and is this 'don't speak ill of the dead ffs' or 'don't call these men something they were not' or ... ?

xp to Mordy - That's different from adding context, as Juan Cole did in his follow-up post explaining how they were radicalised.

Given that this was a tragedy consumed by a lot of people via social media and #jesuischarlie has been (literally) the most commonly used hashtag ever, it seems fair to interrogate what that means. The idea that the cartoons mustn't be subjectively interpreted as racist seems more corrosive than the argument that they were, even if that argument might be incorrect - particularly as a lot of people being shouted down were French minorities and the people doing the shouting were using the trad 'if you're not with us you're an apologist for terrorism' line. Naturally the terrible Jacobin piece was written with all the nuance and subtlety you'd expect from the owner of a site called "leninology" though.

juan cole is an asshole sorry

xp It's like, I didn't get the impression Seymour's article was painting the cartoonists + their magazine as pure racists - if he had, that would have been wrong, of course

ie, must've called Israel an apartheid state

xp

it's remarkable to me which radicals get to define their entire culture/group and which ones the left rushes out to give the proper context and #notallmuslims defenses

xp Of course. There are - and indeed were - many better ways of interrogating the hashtag, thinking about the magazine, assessing the cartoons, etc. My distaste for the Seymour article isn't to say everyone should follow the same line. It's how he said it that bugged me.

From the article: "what is frankly a racist publication", "a racist institution"

@Mordy, could it also be said 'it's remarkable to me which dead people get due diligence and respect in articles written about them, and which ones are quickly forgotten as analysts get on with the important business of Context Studies'

i have no idea what that means

Like how some victims are discussed as people, articles and coverage pauses to discuss who they were outside their status as the victim of a shooting or bombing, other victims are reported as statistics

the Jacobin piece is disgusting, but the Bill Maher conclusion that the shooters are representative of Islam as a whole is equally offensive. I find the knee-jerk tut-tutting of CH's content in the wake of the mass slaughter of most of their staff just as gross as the ra-ra nationalism and "they hate our freedom" bullshit. The actions of the shooters make their personal grievances illegitimate, but I can't pretend to know anything about institutionalized Islamophobia in France, or the extent of CH's bigotry, and how it contributes to an oppressive and threatening atmosphere for all Muslims.

explain the assailants legitimate grievances?

oh FFS. we don't know what their specific "greivances" were. and likely never will.

i assume that for some of them the grievances were "the jews" - not exactly a new complaint

i don't even want to read this jacobin article, since so much of what is published there feels like self-satisfied grad-student contrarianism already. in this context it's hard to imagine that approach not making me puke.

pretty much every line of it is as self-satisfied and smug as you'd expect

tbh i'm starting to think that magazine is one of the worst things to happen to the u.s. left in years

Charles Pierce on Maher:

Maher unlimbered himself with noted theologian Jimmy Kimmel the other night concerning the slaughter in Paris. Apparently, the audience reacted as though it had been hit with a truckload of dead fish.

Good for the audience.

Maher's atheism comes down to little more than pure Ivy League snobbery -- he's smarter than you are, you superstitious git. His movie, Religulous, shows Bill being smarter that a collection of religious grotesques. His criticisms are obvious, his conclusions easy and glib...

...You know why the late Christopher Hitchens was a terrific atheist? Because not only was he funny, but also because he knew Scripture backwards and forwards, better than a lot of our television preachers do, and far better than most of the Catholic priests I knew growing up. He wrote at length about the beauty of the prose in the King James Bible, and about its legitimate place in history as a monument to dissent, even though he didn't believe a word in it.

Pierce otm

idk lauding "hitch" as the #actually smart schoolboy prick doesn't really do it for me

yeah, hitch was a terrible snob too. i can't begin to list all the times i had to roll my eyes at one of his book "reviews" when he made repeated reference to his classical education. what a fucking bore.

anyway, this is kind of off topi i guess. sorry.

Hitchens was def smarter than Maher, whether or not he was better at being an atheist = eh I don't care really.

xp

imagine: a book review making references to classical education.

If I had to pick my performing monkey atheists, Hitchens was way better than Maher because he could argue with his combatants; he knew the material. That's all Pierce was saying.

um, alfred, you know exactly what i mean. "when i was at eton, sophocles wasn't even /on/ the reading list for classical civilizations." i don't mind if a reference is apposite, but for hitchens they were just far too frequent and demonstrative to be about much other than his trying to impress us with his pedigree.

but yeah i don't think you'll find much disagreement on here that maher is an idiot and a fool, for sure.

xp well that's true. i guess i don't really think that explains much about maher! who strikes me as a dennis miller who likes weed enough that he didn't want to totally ditch his democrat audience

um, alfred, you know exactly what i mean. "when i was at eton, sophocles wasn't even /on/ the reading list for classical civilizations." i don't mind if a reference is apposite, but for hitchens they were just far too frequent and demonstrative to be about much other than his trying to impress us with his pedigree.

no I don't! Hitchens never came off like George Will and his tags of learning, dropping refs to Montesquieu to impress an illiterate audience; but, no, I don't think we'll agree.

the audience reacted as though it had been hit with a truckload of dead fish.

just looking at Maher's face can induce this reaction.

Years ago on his ABC show a panelist made a reference to means testing for government benefits, and Maher asked "What's a means test?" Such are political smarts by US TV standards.

xpost

yeah, we can agree to disagree. it doesn't really matter anyway. and it's off topic. sorry again.

same here

From http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/world/europe/raising-questions-within-islam-after-france-shooting.html:

Khaled Fahmy, an Egyptian historian, was teaching at New York University on Sept. 11, 2001, after which American sales of the Quran spiked because readers sought religious explanations for the attack on New York.

“We try to explain that they are asking the wrong question,” he said. Religion, he argued, was “just a veneer” for anger at the dysfunctional Arab states left behind by colonial powers and the “Orientalist” condescension many Arabs still feel from the West.

“The Arab states have not delivered what they are supposed to deliver and it can only lead to a deep sense of resentment and frustration, or to revolution,” he said. “It is the nonviolence that needs to be explained, not the violence.”

Only a very small number of Muslims pin the blame directly on the religion itself.

“What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” an outspoken atheist, Ahmed Harqan, recently asked on a popular television talk show here, using common shorthand for the Islamic State to argue that the problem of violence is inherent to Islam.

Considered almost blasphemous by most Egyptian Muslims, his challenge provoked weeks of outcry from Islamic religious broadcasters and prompted much-watched follow-up shows. In subsequent debates on the same program, Salem Abdel-Gelil, a scholar from the state-sponsored Al Azhar institute and former official of the ministry overseeing mosques, fired back with Islamic verses about tolerance, peace and freedom.

But then he warned that, under Egypt’s religion-infused legal system, the public espousal of atheism might land his opponents in jail.

“When a person comes out and promotes his heresy, promotes his debauchery, and justifies his apostasy on the basis that ‘Islam is not good,’ then there is the judiciary,” Sheikh Abdel-Gelil said. “The judiciary will get him.”

harqan has huge cojones, i think we can agree.

I assume he's in jail

he's not, but he was nearly killed in an assassination attempt and the police apparently failed to apprehend his would-be assassin.

he's also a former salafist. whatever we think of bill maher (very little, if you're anything like me), i think we have to take harqan's critique of islam at least a little more seriously.

“What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” an outspoken atheist, Ahmed Harqan, recently asked on a popular television talk show here,

Wowwww

Respect

Since then Harqan has been among the few non-believers in Egypt, who has dared to speak openly about being atheist and Harqan has appeared on several Egyptian talk shows to speak about non-religious rights. In a TV-show on the channel Al-Kahera Wal-Nas on October 21, 2014, Harqan explained why he had become an atheist and said that Islam is a "harsh religion," which was being implemented by ISIS and Boko Haram. They are doing "what the Prophet Muhammad and his companions did," said Harqan. The TV-show was Taht al Koubry (under the bridge) with Tony Khalife [2][3][4]

According to media reports, Harqan and his pregnant wife, Nada Mandour (Saly) Harqan, survived an assassination attempt 4 days later - in the evening of October 25, 2014. Harqan managed to flee with his wife after having some injuries and went to the Alhanafie–Alajlany police station to report the incident along with their friend Karim Jimy. Instead of taking action to help Harqan and his wife, the police officers further assaulted them and they were imprisoned charged with blasphemy and "defamation of religion" under article 98 in the Egyptian penal code for asking "What has ISIS done that Muhammad did not do?” on a popular Egyptian television talk show[5]. Harqan's lawyer was humiliated and kicked out of the police station.[6]

Eventually Ahmad and Saly Harqan, and their friend Kareem Jimy were released and charges against them were dropped.

i imagine that many if not most people in egypt perceive harqan a bit like we in the west might perceive a guy who goes on a talk show and sticks up for pedophiles

i.e. disbelief/horror

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/solidarity-charlie-hebdo-cartoons/

The problem with a lot of American atheists is that "atheism" includes not considering the material - for example, the Bible is strictly a religious book and has no literary or historic value.

he's also a former salafist. whatever we think of bill maher (very little, if you're anything like me), i think we have to take harqan's critique of islam at least a little more seriously.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Friday, January 9, 2015 3:23 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm. i feel the same way about ayaan hirsi ali and thought it was cowardly when she was prevented from speaking at yale.

i know that she is easily invoked by people who want to say islam is evil and want to stem immigration -- and in that sense she's a problematic figure -- but still, it's weird to tell people what they are supposed to think about the society they grew up in.

(ok - just doublechecked and apparently ali wasn't prevented from speaking at yale)

Hirsi Ali was on Dutch telly speaking absolute bigot rubbish again last night. She should have the freedom to say bigot rubbish everywhere though.

Then again, its good that Katie Hopkins is in Big Brother right now.

That Intercept article is good. Provocative too.

Defending free speech is always easy when you like the content of the ideas being targeted, or aren’t part of (or actively dislike) the group being maligned.

consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for a writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/alwaki-paris/

consider the fact that Charlie Hebdo – the “equal opportunity” offenders and defenders of all types of offensive speech - fired one of their writers in 2009 for a writing a sentence some said was anti-Semitic (the writer was then charged with a hate crime offense, and won a judgment against the magazine for unfair termination). Does that sound like “equal opportunity” offending?

― gyac, Friday, January 9, 2015 5:14 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is only a point-scorer if you ignore an awful lot of the other stuff Charlie Hebdo has done.

https://theneedleblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/charlie_hebdo_shoah_hebdo1-agchbtbki00g00gk88s80skw-brydu4hw7fso0k00sowcc8ko4-th_.jpeg

The inspiring media policies of the Mujahideen of Al-Qaeda especially of Inspire Magazine

wiki:

The magazine is an important brand-building tool, not just of AQAP, but of all al-Qaeda branches, franchises and affiliates.

While the SITE Institute and at least one senior U.S. government official described Inspire as authentic, there was some speculation on jihadist websites and elsewhere that the magazine, due to its low quality, may have been a hoax.

wait sorry that one is apparently not a real charlie hebdo, but there are others xp

not to mention this, where the point is precisely to make fun of the apparent taboo of mocking Jews

http://img.src.ca/2012/09/18/400x600/AFP_120918_lh1lf_charlie-hebdo-2_p8.jpg

greenwald is a piece of shit

where did that come from?

well we know how you feel about that, but regardless, he's pontificating on a subject he doesn't know

xp https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/09/solidarity-charlie-hebdo-cartoons/

Knew Mordy was gonna say that. I think he makes a provocative, though necessary, point.

mordy doesnt like glenn-chan because he refuses to kiss israel's feet and lips and buttlips. let's just be real about it

― turds (Hungry4Ass), Tuesday, May 21, 2013 10:43 AM (1 year ago)

Sadly otm

One of the disingenuous things about that Greenwald piece is that he clearly agrees with at least some of those cartoons and would happily publish them regardless.

Also, no one is shooting him for it.

Probably, but so what? I don't think he'd deny that tbh xp

He makes a pretty strong point, but if you're too blind by GG hatred and refuse to see it, hey ho

that Greenwald column is dumb and gross

go hang out w/ your jihadi friends lbi

maybe they can help u understand why jews have been and continue to be explicitly targeted in france

go hang out w/ your jihadi friends lbi

― Mordy, Friday, January 9, 2015 11:32 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Stay classy, man.

it's pretty sick on a day when there are dead jews who were shopping w/ their children for shabbos to be talking about fear of islamophobic retribution. go fuck yourself.

toulouse, today, no no tell us more about how it's really the terrorists that are suffering

Instead of fucking myself I'd point you to killfile, so you won't have to read me anymore. Easy peasy.

You suspect foul play (you started the GG thread by calling him shit in the title, so what else is to be expected?), I think it's ok to point to the fact that CH wasn't solely anti-Islam. There will be retributions, too, for many Muslims who denounce what happened. Why can't that be talked about today? Why should we refrain speaking about anything, at any time? Casualties "on both sides" 24/7, the debate - in it's many guises - should not have to be stopped because of that.

Also, "it's really the terrorists that are suffering" is a really dumb, and simply false, interpretation of what that piece is about.

bc i notice you get real outraged about all kinds of murders except when muslims kill jews when suddenly you're very frightened for the murderers and i wonder if that's bc jewish lives aren't worth as much in yr eyes

i don't really wonder it, that was just trying to be even 1% polite

I think he's worried about the reprisals for muslims who did't kill anyone tbf

it's all of a piece - trying so hard to understand the socioeconomic realities of the killers and of course the double whammy that after expressing their cultural right of murdering jews that ppl who weren't even involved might possibly get some blowback at a later date

mordy & matt otm re: that greenwald bit

reprisals which have already happened. i'm trying to dig up the ref (with map) i saw earlier today on twitter. twitter search sucks.

denying that these attacks were anti-semitic (among other motivations) is just dense tho, of course they were

not that i've read GG, or will, probably

xps

gee, Greenwald should really hear about CH's stance on Israel.

Yes, Wins.

bc i notice you get real outraged about all kinds of murders except when muslims kill jews when suddenly you're very frightened for the murderers and i wonder if that's bc jewish lives aren't worth as much in yr eyes

― Mordy, Friday, January 9, 2015 11:44 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I understand you are really angry, but this is crossing the line imho. I could say the exact opposite about you, you rarely get outraged by the killing of Muslims. But I have never said that and won't.

It's rich to assume I think "Jewish lives aren't worth as much". Not just rich, it's sickening. You certainly give off the impression it's the exact opposite for you but do I call you out on that? No. Because it's a vile, uninformed thing to say. You haven't a single clue. I'll kindly ignore you and ask you to do the same. Calling me a friend of jihadi's, to go fuck myself, and now this. Have a good one.

did you not write: "I have very few jihadists among my friends (...),"?

It was a pun, as if that wasn't obvious enough....

what's the pun?

Not a "pun", it was sarcastically meant, and in the context of a discussion where we were trying to get into the minds of the people who did this.

But it's telling you remember that without context, attach it to me and now pull it out like some red flag. Good on you.

for some reason i had no trouble imagining that you have friends who would justify these attacks

Oh no doubt. That's because you've already made your mind up about me: Jew hater! While you don't even know me. Big surprise dude.

i take some of greenwald's points, but it's infused throughout by mildly and more than mildly disingenuous stuff like

He forgot to mention that the very same university just terminated its tenure contract with Professor Steven Salaita over tweets he posted during the Israeli attack on Gaza that the university judged to be excessively vituperative of Jewish leaders

I thought the U of I effectively firing Salaita was gross, but his tweets were far worse than being "vituperative of Jewish leaders" (i'm placing the most suspect part of Greenwald's gloss in parens).

I don't like being talked down to, and unfortunately Greenwald will alternate between showing his readership a lot of respect and treating them like idiots.

p.s. Mordy, calm down.

If you'd actually read my posts in this thread you'd see a couple of things: that I have been sucking up views on this from all sides, that I have been relatively open about how this affected my work as an editor in chief having to deal with freedom of press, care for my paper, for my journalists, dreading these tragic events yet trying to make sense of it.

All you extract from it is that I value a Jews life less than anyone else's. You know what? You go fuck yourself.

fellas no fighting in the war thread.

mordy the inability to see obvious jokes or sarcasm is a kind of classic indicator that the red mist has descended no?

antisemitism is rife in france no doubt but it's not generally muslims who are the source of it afaik? i.e. those neo-nazi marches the day before holocaust remembrance day, etc. i mean i don't know, but i sort of feel like jews died today for roughly the same reason that journalists died on wednesday - they were symbols of the enemy these psychos think they're at war with. a decadent, money-corrupted west. what a bunch of martyrs these psychos were. well done guys!! what a bunch of tough guys!!!! look at you with your guns, shooting people going about their fucking day!! did they lose their way??? funny thing happened, on the way to fight assad, wound up in the center of paris. no biggie i just started shooting people anyway. WHAT THE FUCK??

actually it is generally muslims who are the source of it and while the muslim community in france is booming the jewish community is emigrating at greater and greater numbers

tracer there is lots of anti-semitism in france and sadly i do think that immigrant communities 9esp from east europe and middle east, less so africa) are a major repository of it.

a side note... the CH cartoons alternated between being hostile or derisive of islam, being derisive of muslims (something that is gratuitous and gross), and (most often) being derisive of radical islamism in particular. for example their most infamous (?) showed mohammad basically lamenting that so many of his followers are fools. i've seen a lot of cartoons that have Jesus saying much the same thing. of course, depicting Mohammad in the first place is an offense to many if not most practicing muslims, but that's not really the kind of prohibition you can or should really respect an athiest cartoonist to respect.

sorry, tracer i know your partner is french and i realize i sounded like i was talking down to y ou.

of course i realize there's plenty of anti-semitism among its :ahem: traditional supporters in the right wing.

but it's not generally muslims who are the source of it afaik?

"Generally" defined how? Muslim anti-semitism pretty obviously exists in france and has expressed itself. I don't know what percentage of French anti-semitism it accounts for, and I don't know what percentage of French Muslim sentiments about Jews it accounts for, but it is visibly there.

http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188204/the-frightening-reality-for-the-jews-of-france

From what I know the rife anti-semitism in France is definitely mostly by Muslims. There's the extreme right (FN) but they seem to 'switch' making either Jews or Muslims a target however it becomes handy for them tbh.

Another point: the much mocked Le Pen and her Front National are barred from the silent march this Sunday. I am still not sure: is that the right thing to do? To ban such a huge but questionable movement from something like this, that is felt from left to right?

a funny thing happened on the way to fight assad

worst joke setup ever

great musical though

the weird thing about le pen and her ilk is that they'll stop with the crypto-anti-semitism long enough to cry crocodile tears over attacks on jews by french muslims. see also pretty much everybody involved in the ukraine crisis.

this

May 19, 2014: A poll of 3,833 French Jews reveals 74 percent have considered emigrating.

is really sad and illustrates how the situation of jews in france is qualitatively different from that of jews in the UK or USA

opportunism isn't weird

xp

Totally. And somehow that 'crypto'-thing seems to make them untouchable. Geert Wilders is a self-declared Zionist, but in Europe wanted and alliance with Le Pen, who's known for her rabid anti-semitism. It's like xenophobia reigns supreme: it's more important to both hate some race/belief than have them to be actually aligned. And they get away with it! It's opportunism in the most scary way imaginable.

Xp yes!

Paris Grand Synagogue Didn't Hold Shabbat Services For The First Time Since Nazis Occupied France

well, shit.

i should know better than to talk about shit that i don't have on lock, in a thread like this

Another point: the much mocked Le Pen and her Front National are barred from the silent march this Sunday. I am still not sure: is that the right thing to do? To ban such a huge but questionable movement from something like this, that is felt from left to right?

i wonder about this too. it would definitely be combustible if they showed up.

tempted to start a twitter account just attributing all sorts of cartoons to charlie hebdo now and posting them in solidarity. like donald duck and onion stuff and garfield

Antisemitism and anti-Muslim prejudice are of a piece. Jews aren't free where Muslims aren't free, and vice versa. I'm too alienated from the cultural context of the Middle East, North Africa, even Israel specifically to know what to say about that dynamic there, but if bigots in the West are going to caricature Jews and Muslims with the same nose, I will inveigh against antisemitism and anti-Muslim racism in the same breath.

tempted to start a twitter account just attributing all sorts of cartoons to charlie hebdo now and posting them in solidarity. like donald duck and onion stuff and garfield

― celfie tucker 48 (s.clover), Friday, January 9, 2015 5:26 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that would be a wonderful contribution, sterling "guy debord" clover

You should have said it would be a "sterling" contribution.

sterling "contribution" more like

no wait

l'esprit de l'x-post

i wonder about this too. it would definitely be combustible if they showed up.

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Saturday, January 10, 2015 12:25 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's "combustible" if they don't show up, too. A 'cordon sanitaire' will most likely only fuel FN even more. That makes it a political thing, I realize. But banning one party from something so big that shocked the whole nation... I don't know.

the whole "free speech" dimension of the current issue makes that decision even more fraught

Charlie Hebdo tried to get the FN banned at one point. Not that that decides the issue obv.

Amateurist otm. And CH has been (rightfully) harsh on Le Pen. Saw a clip from last year tonight where she was flipping to "hurtful" cartoons about her on her iPad. She was *not* pleased. Yet denying someone's right to show up at a mouring parade: it doesn't sit well with me. As much as I detest Le Pen, telling this one party: you can't be here, this is *our* mourning! Don't seem right, makes it political and will probably only make FN grow even bigger in the process.

watching french TV made me realize that although marie le pen--who from reading about the FN abroad you might think is a kind of pitbull--comes across as something like a crybaby. i guess that makes her seem more "human." she just seemed grotesque to me.

sorry, marine le pen, i keep mistyping

On the other hand: Le Pen was outraged about a cartoon of her having a Hitler-like pubic hair 'stache' above her vagina, shaving it off. To attend the mourning march for Le Pen is also, obviously, political. She wants to gain votes from people defending "free speech" over the bodies of cartoonists she detested up until Wednesday.

Oh she's grotesque alright...

_tempted to start a twitter account just attributing all sorts of cartoons to charlie hebdo now and posting them in solidarity. like donald duck and onion stuff and garfield

― celfie tucker 48 (s.clover), Friday, January 9, 2015 5:26 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
_

that would be a wonderful contribution, sterling "guy debord" clover

Fuck em if they can't take a joke, right?

Re: exclusion from march, it would truly be a pity, and a massive own-goal, if FN's constant feeling of being singled out and oppressed by some mythical hegemonic plurality of undeserving interest groups be "validated" by that decision. where's the line? if the KKK wanted to attend a march for 9/11 victims? i.... don't know how i'd feel about that!

Yeah I have mixed feelings on that too. The FN turning up would be unseemly, in a "the nerve of them coming to the funeral!" way, but the idea that only "republican parties" are invited, where that definition covers everyone including the Communists but excluding the FN, is political horseshit imo.

Exactly! That's what I'm struggling with. This concerning an event that shocked the nation, I tend to think one shouldn't exclude anyone. No matter wow controversial and vile one's opinion is. I tend to feel excluding political figures from a march like this goes against the idea of trying to be unified on a day like that, which is obviously what it's about. I'd say: let them join and blend in. It serves the idea of freedom of speech, and also gives them less ammo to do something on their own somewhere else on that day tbh.

I think KKK sympathizers at least engaged in 9/11 marches. Not the heads of the movement maybe (though I don't know that), but certainly people who agree with the KKK in some way, more or less. I don't think it gave them any traction simply being there with all the other people. Singling out a party seems more dangerous tbh.

Xp otm

they should allow the FN but make sure that there are a ton of people shouting them down and holding up signs that equally condemn anti-semitism and anti-muslim sentiment. that shouldn't be too hard in the heart of paris which isn't exactly the FN's playground.

Greenwald's piece fizzles into absurdity when he starts citing someone who has been disinvited to speak at a university. I'm sure the Charlie Hebdo staff could have handled being disinvited. I'm all for big picture perspectives but these people weren't disinvited, they didn't lose tenure, they didn't get death threats, they were slaughtered. This makes all equivalencies with cases in which nobody died grotesque.

But I agree that republishing any cartoons except those that specifically target jihadists is crass and pointless. This is a good piece on why most of CH's Islam-mocking cartoons were both unfunny and unnecessary, without a hint of victim-blaming.

https://medium.com/@hugorifkind/there-is-a-difference-between-being-brave-and-being-funny-af2f33ded10e

Some French-comix academic from U of Glasgow was just on On the Media, and said CH "was in financial difficulty two days ago, but it isn't now." Press run of a million next Wednesday.

I did see the cartoon of Jesus fucking the pope up the ass; I'm guessing Newt Gingrich hadn't.

the current pope, or a generic pope

apologies -- it's actually a Holy Trinity chainfuck

https://twitter.com/billmon1/status/552947402391707650

(presumably even more offensive to a good non-Catholic Christian like Newt, then)

Hari Kunzru also v good

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/08/charlie-hedbo-collusion-terror-jihadi-twisted-logic?CMP=share_btn_tw

Some French-comix academic from U of Glasgow was just on On the Media, and said CH "was in financial difficulty two days ago, but it isn't now." Press run of a million next Wednesday.

― touch of a love-starved cobra (Dr Morbius), Saturday, January 10, 2015 2:24 AM (27 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

True. They were down to 60,000 subscribers. At the moment of the attacks the most prominent post on their website was a plea to get more subscribers/money in, as otherwise they wouldn't be able to survive. Odd twist of fate that this occurrence puts them in the center of attention again, out of the margin, with shitloads of new subscribers. From France and abroad, too. 'Subscribe to CH to support them/make a statement" is a thing already.

1/7 WAS AN INSIDE JOB

7/1, it's Europe

:)

Of that million, I know the Netherlands asked for 2500 copies of the next issue and got appointed a mere 500. High demand, Germany, Belgium and other surrounding countries asked for thousands of copies, too.

cnn.com's scorecard shit today is gross tbh

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/150109134454-four-suspects-dead-wanted-2-exlarge-169.jpeg

That's terrible... But hey, CNN. No other redundant network dealing with it's own identify crisis as much as CNN tbh

Greenwald's piece fizzles into absurdity when he starts citing someone who has been disinvited to speak at a university. I'm sure the Charlie Hebdo staff could have handled being disinvited. I'm all for big picture perspectives but these people weren't disinvited, they didn't lose tenure, they didn't get death threats, they were slaughtered. This makes all equivalencies with cases in which nobody died grotesque.

But I agree that republishing any cartoons except those that specifically target jihadists is crass and pointless. This is a good piece on why most of CH's Islam-mocking cartoons were both unfunny and unnecessary, without a hint of victim-blaming.

https://medium.com/@hugorifkind/there-is-a-difference-between-being-brave-and-being-funny-af2f33ded10e

― Minaj moron (Re-Make/Re-Model), Friday, January 9, 2015 8:23 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

They did get death threats, for a very long time.

I think you're missing the point

er, you know, just insert a "merely" in front of "get death threats" for clarity

I just wanted to say this thread has been a helpful island of information bcz I really have had no idea how to begin comprehending this. Well, I mean I comprehend it but my brain is just like AAGGGH FUCK YOU

Good Kenan Malik response to the ideas in the Jacobin/Medium/Hooded Utilitarian articles contenderizer linked to... Richard Seymour bluntly dismissing the whole magazine as "a racist institution" reminds me why I don't read Richard Seymour.

― Minaj moron (Re-Make/Re-Model), Friday, January 9, 2015 8:41 AM (10 hours ago)

I said it but perhaps not clearly enough: I linked those articles not because I agree with them completely or think they're all that great, but because I think they collectively make a credible case for the bigoted nature of some of the cartoons published by Charlie Hebdo. Intent & context can be debated endlessly, but the reliance on cheap, grotesque ethnic caricature strikes me as both self-evident and self-evidently racist. Joe Sacco makes this point, if indirectly, in his illustrated response (first linked by Neil S., upthread). It's the reliance on crudely stereotypical depictions that I find most troubling, given France's Muslim immigrant underclass and rising tide of xenophobic nationalism. Will Self echoes this in a statement provided to Vice:

"Well, when the issue came up of the Danish cartoons [of Muhammad] I observed that the test I apply to something to see whether it truly is satire derives from H. L. Mencken's definition of good journalism: It should 'afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.' The trouble with a lot of so-called 'satire' directed against religiously motivated extremists is that it's not clear who it's afflicting, or who it's comforting."

Now take all of this one step further and ask yourself: why are you offended by the cartoons that offend you?

Cherrypicking some of the cartoons from a publication that tries to find *everybody's* personal boundaries only to make us question ourselves and then declaring those cartoons to be bigoted only tells us that the writer has indeed discovered his own boundaries and where they are.

jesus fuck nothing brings out the great philosophers of scatalogical humor quite like the horrifying murder of innocents huh.

do we spend this much time contemplating what a caricature waving a dick means outside the context of mass murder, or does the body count make it somehow more meaningful

well obv the body count is what makes it meaningful, how many non-french ppl would had even heard of this dumbass magazine had they not got shot up

and now that these people have all been killed why is it now a moral imperative to familiarize ourselves with a dubious body of work and cast approbation or approval on aspects of it as though it makes a difference or has anything to do with what happened. suppose we were to understand this magazine more deeply than the killers did, more deeply even than it does itself, what purpose does that serve in this context

b/c the cry of solidarity in response to this being #JeSuisCharlie means that it behooves one to find out just what one is JeSuis'ing, for one thing

after sandy hook there was no mass movement "i am an elementary school student"

Seriously? There hasn't been enough of a shitstorm in here already?

There's a strong possibility that many of their cartoons would have fallen foul of British laws about inciting racial and religious hatred. Many would have been equally as at home in a Neo-Nazi publication as they were in a libertarian satirical magazine. It's clearly possible to separate the belief that they have a right to publish from a belief that other organisations should republish as a point of principle, though.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Thursday, January 8, 2015 7:31 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a good post and i keep thinking about it. if it were an out-an-out white nationalist magazine that got shot up i'm guessing the public response would be a bit different.

http://paper-bird.net/2015/01/09/why-i-am-not-charlie/

wrt the actual magazine and its place in French culture this is probably the most measured thing I've seen so far and may possibly have even been written by someone who was familiar with CH this time last week: http://junkee.com/the-problem-with-jesuischarlie/48456

and yes I did roll my eyes at The hashtag translates from the French as “I am Charlie” ftr

None of this excuses Islamophobia in France – and it’s worth remembering that in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo attack vigilantes across France have attacked a mosque, an Islamic prayer hall, and a kebab shop – but it does mean that French Islamophobia is not the same thing at all as the Islamophobia with which we are familiar here in Australia. (For example: while publications around the world were keen to peg the 2005 banlieue riots to terrorism and jihad, in France the discussion was dominated by socio-economic issues.) The issue in France is not Islam itself, but its role in public life and whether certain cultural and religious practices are compatible with the universal principles of French republicanism.

This seems extremely reductive, tbh. It's one of the core issues with Islam in France but not the only one. There's plenty of crossover with the bigotry of the rest of the world.

actually the Front national are about ethics in French republicanism

Jean-Marie Le Pen: "moi je suis désolé, je ne suis pas Charlie"

Also, as a friend of mine put it: "soyons tout ce que nous sommes
#JesuisCharlieAhmedHypercasher"

To go back a few posts, the FN was not invited, just as no other political party was, to the best of my knowledge. i don't know if marine le pen was expecting some kind of nice invite through the mail but yeah, no one actully received any thing like that, political parties just said they'd join the march. there is however def some talk about whether or not they do belong to this march.
keep in mind that the le pen family has been as shameless as usual: jean marie le pen has come out saying that he wasn't charlie and that he didn't agree with the march (so yeah mixed messages there from the family), tweeted a horrible "keep calm and vote le pen" marine pic, while marine herself thought that the first thing she should talk about is how it'd be great if the government organised a referendum to bring back the death penalty. just a few days before the attack she also tweeted that fundamentalist islam was growing in France thanks to the complicity of UMP and PS... how strange that they wouldn't view the FN's presence too kindly.
FN thrives on playing the victim and they've really taken advantage of this whole situation, if you were to listen to them you'd be convinced they're the most hurt party in this whole story.

The PS were making (conflicting) statements about whether the FN should be allowed attend, and iirc it's being organised under the banner of almost every political party?

yes, most political parties have conflicting statements but tbh they're not the organisers of the march afaik. of course most ppl are kind of wary of the FN being present at the march, and the FN just ran with it, that they're forbidden from attending, cos they like nothing more than identify as victims of UMPS etc.

tbh if it were up to me this march should be free of anything to do with political parties but i'm not the one organising, so i'll just attend and shut up.

I'm annoyed at the way the FN is just using the situation to call attention to itself. I'm in the US and am trying to figure out why this particular attack scared me like nothing since 9/11, seeing FN pop in here is distracting from other meaningful commentary (on purpose?)

http://sarahhay.com/adventures/paris-charlie-hebdo/

Personal blog of one of my colleagues.

This seems extremely reductive, tbh. It's one of the core issues with Islam in France but not the only one. There's plenty of crossover with the bigotry of the rest of the world.

― Wristy Hurlington (ShariVari), Saturday, January 10, 2015 6:46 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. This sort of hand-wringing "unless you understand french politics you don't understand how this really offensive image was actually brilliant humor and how this guy farting is a commentary on the human condition and how all these people who don't like immigrants aren't racist but instead involved in an important discussion about unique french cultural values" apologism does nobody any good.

its just so... french. they can't even have normal racism like the rest of us loser countries. they have to have some refined triple-distilled artinsinal grown from only one village with special soil you-can't-even-understand-the-flavor sophisticated racism.

Who's saying this?

this what i got out of the junkee.com article above, but i've seen it elsewhere on the net too

The woman they're looking for left France for Syria on Jan. 2nd according to this:

http://www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/0c688eb6-989a-11e4-a324-342caa6c994c/Hayat_Boumeddiene_serait_maintenant_en_Syrie

OTM. This sort of hand-wringing "unless you understand french politics you don't understand how this really offensive image was actually brilliant humor and how this guy farting is a commentary on the human condition and how all these people who don't like immigrants aren't racist but instead involved in an important discussion about unique french cultural values" apologism does nobody any good.

Also why all this talk about liberty when French values are supposed to involve equality and brotherhood as well

I mean, 'why all this talk about liberty' is obvious, but the other two seem to have been left out of the analysis

http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000003439513/charlie-hebdo-before-the-massacre.html

OTM. This sort of hand-wringing "unless you understand french politics you don't understand how this really offensive image was actually brilliant humor and how this guy farting is a commentary on the human condition and how all these people who don't like immigrants aren't racist but instead involved in an important discussion about unique french cultural values" apologism does nobody any good.

I don't get that reading from the junkee article but I see how one could. If we're going to be taking stances on CH beyond "they didn't deserve to get shot" I think it makes sense to try to grasp the political and cultural context that informed it.

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/heroic-muslim-man-saved-jewish-hostages-during-paris-siege-by-hiding-them-in-chiller-9970051.html

glad that a good story can come out of that terror

^^ The overt festive and genuinely surprised reactions of white people on that on twitter are the absolute worst. "Oh wow, read this heartwarming story! A muslim actually did something good! Who knew eh?!"

Xp

ugh

Don't get me wrong, it is a wonderful story, a great deed and he is a hero. But I'm seeing so much focus on his belief he's being made into a token muslim. People are genuinely going: wow, a *muslim* did that!

ppl are stupid iirc

Ya otm

sterling you can't at once stay above the fray and condemn everyone in the thread for discussing what you feel is the trivial matter of trying to understand CH and its place in french life and politics, and join that fray the next day. which is it?

sorry but the outburst last night kind of grossed me out, we're all here trying to comprehend something that's really horrible; i don't see anyone really grandstanding here.

A good friend of mine, someone incredibly smart, someone I agree with on mostly everything, wrote about Ahmed, the dead policeman, that he was weirdly happy to see a muslim doing like Voltaire said 'I don't agree with what you say but I'll die for your right to say it.' I wanted to write that muslims die in the fight for western rights every day, whether they want to or not, and that it would be more surprising to see a westerner die for middle eastern rights.

'happy' is the wrong word. You know what I mean, right?

there's a jezebel story about the same guy that says he saved 15

cool either way

old tired point i know but i really hate having to wade through a tidal wave of info just to get yknow a fact about a thing :/

i guess someone could be 'happy' about it in the sense that they'd hope it would make other people realize that muslims are 'just like us', but then again i'm not sure how many of these 'noble muslims' would have to die to change the way some people think. evidence suggests it's a number we have yet to reach, based on the shitty things people continue to say about them.

No, I meant, he wrote in Danish, and 'happy' is the wrong translation. Sorry, screwed it even more up, I think.

Jeet Heer, incisive as usual:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/frances-deep-seated-tradition-of-subversive-satire/article22389678/

I like posts of s. clover & contenderizer on this thread (not only them, just especially). Thanks contenderizer for sharing the medium.com link, which makes a similar point to the GG article but even better.

This one is mostly in a similar vein, although the ending is purposefully scary - plenty people would be or are happy to take up the option named as "easier":

http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks

One of the victims at the Hyper Cacher store was the son of the Grand Rabbi of Tunis and tunisian national. I think he was 20 years old.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/unmournable-bodies

teju cole ^^

Brilliant article, New Yorker placement encouraging.

From Jeet Heer's Globe article Mail, linked by Jon Lewis a few posts back:

France’s culture of robustly virulent image-making has a downside. To this very day, it’s common for French cartoonists to use racist stereotypes of the most degrading form. In French magazines that feature comics, you can see cannibalistic Africans; hook-nosed and avaricious Jews of the Shylock variety; and wily, slant-eyed Asians who look as though they’ve escaped from a Fu Manchu novel.

I'm not saying that Swart's work has much else in common with Charlie Hebdo. The contents of the collection I'm talking about cover a 40 year period, and many "underground" cartoonists of the 60s & 70s employed the racist tropes of early 20th century comics in a knowingly ironic (or at least a deliberately shocking) manner, well aware of their poisonous implication. Rob't Crumb's a very obvious example of this. The flagrantly racist depictions in his early work strike me more as the warts-and-all unburdening of the artist's inner mind than an attempt to reflect exterior reality. It's confessional, in a sense. Also curatorial, a repository of design styles past. And also, sometimes, simply racist.

In America, contending with the legacy of slavery and more than a century of subsequent oppression, we've come to view ethnic and racial caricature as intrinsically and profoundly offensive. Some would say we've become hypersensitive about such things, but I don't doubt the image's power to wound hearts and shape minds. Much of the rest of the world, it seems, is a good deal less concerned. Racial stereotypes are still the common coin of European and Japanese cartooning. This includes French and Belgian work, but isn't in any notable sense exclusive to it.

I think this stuff was p common in the US pre-integration, and it disappeared from public view, very slowly from say the '40s to the '80s, out of shame... at least in the professional editorial world.

It may be worth saying that (and I'm projecting here) that it seems to me the Junkee article is written from an Australian POV, and done so in the context of our own recent siege and the general air of our govt bellowing "youre next! terror! Theyre all coming to get us!!!!" in the papers here. Frankly Australia has nothing to do with this situation. We're as safe as Iceland or something at this juncture. But try telling that to our media and general populous who want to think the brown menace is on our doorstep...

"we're full, fuck off" (as quoted in that piece) is an Australian racists' meme of sorts right?

of all the countries to claim peak capacity

I imagine liberals in every country imagine theirs to be the most bigoted but the idea that France's history of political secularism makes the bulk of the hatred towards Muslims there different from the hatred shown in Australia, the US, etc, is to romanticise it. Laïcité is a very real factor but doesn't explain the day-to-day discrimination against secular Muslims or irreligious people with Muslim heritage who form the bulk of the diaspora. The idea that the banlieue riots weren't racialised or seen through a religious lens seems false as well. CH can't be understood without reference to laïcité but to expand that out to the rest of French society without looking closer is simply wrong.

Yeah, well put

laïcité is actually super-weird from an american standpoint, because it isn't really like the "separation of church and state" tradition from the american revolution in many ways. it comes more out of a realignment of powers between the two, which was a flipside to the church having almost dominated the state pre-dreyfus. i've been wanting to learn more for some time, if anyone has recommendations for good articles or books that really explore it (as opposed to simply extolling it).

but yeah, the most immediate context really for discussion of race and religion in france is more the algerian war and aftermath, no? there's almost an ugliness in referring to people as "immigrants" when the reason they ended up in your country is entangled with the fact that you colonized theirs to begin with.

(which reminds me that political secularism also was a component of the algerian war, lets not forget)

not just that France colonized the Maghreb, but that soldiers from the Maghreb played a key role in French wars from the 19th century through WWII

at mass this morning here in France's second largest city there was a message read from the monseignor reminding us to be "artisans of peace" which sounded nice. & a message posted on the wall from a local Muslim/Catholic interfaith group reminding that one may disapprove of the content of CH's works but that French identity demands defending their right to make those works. none of this is surprising but it's interesting to see these things on the ground. my kids go to school with lots of Muslims and there's been universal loathing of the FN this week; an alliance of Catholics and Muslims against the FN would be interesting since it would represent a different right against the right of the FN; Le Pen's immediate declaration after wednesday was to call for the death penalty, which is about as anti-Catholic as you can get these days (and she is a nominal Catholic).

The idea that the banlieue riots weren't racialised or seen through a religious lens seems false as well.

Sarkozy took a lot of heat for describing the rioters as "racailles" which is a word with a lot of ugly connotations, many of them racial. There was this video too, if anyone remembers the discussion of it at the time.

https://twitter.com/StephenMarche/status/554311809357062144

reads better in the original

I preferred his earlier placards

Someone on FB just posted 'The values of La République are universal, 25 000 - 30 000 people in the streets of Montreal'. The incessant speaking on behalf of everyone on social media is nauseating, that and the competition to say the smartest thing, the post with the most likes etc.

Useful context from a Frenchman on the radical left, including, among many other things, CH's history of anti-racist cartoons.

http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/olivier-tonneau/110115/charlie-hebdo-letter-my-british-friends

Caveat: it's a long piece which covers a lot of ground so I'm not endorsing every single point but it's an interesting one to throw into the mix.

Was about to post this. Mostly otm

really don't get why the US didn't send any bigwigs to the march. first outrage du jour i've been down with.

http://www.understandingcharliehebdo.com/

Max's mea culpa: http://flyingfrenchy.kinja.com/charlie-hebdo-and-why-its-always-been-an-anti-racist-ne-1678770097/1678993766/+maxread

Man, Charb ruled.

Francophile friend who lived in France for significant time also says that (1) much of the content is anti-racist, (2) yes, you do need a certain amount of french cultural/political context to get it (3) some of the cartoons being interpreted as racist are being misunderstood and (4) yes, there are still certain french racist attitudes underpinning some of the cartoons.

Francophile friend OTM as far as I can tell

Good on Gawker for publishing that reply. The original post was far too poorly written to be making the claim it did.

http://flyingfrenchy.kinja.com/charlie-hebdo-and-why-its-always-been-an-anti-racist-ne-1678770097/1678993766/+maxread

Sorry, didn't mean to post the same link. It's this one.

http://gawker.com/how-much-did-we-need-this-blasphemy-1678317390

http://blogs.mediapart.fr/blog/olivier-tonneau/110115/charlie-hebdo-letter-my-british-friends

another piece trying to contextualise and defend CH, v interesting tho it still doesn't sit quiiite right with me

That the emergence of fundamentalism is posing serious problems to Arabs also sheds an interesting light on the law banning the hijab – a law that is routinely mentioned as a proof of France’s anti-Muslim bias. I do not have a definite opinion on this law. I was, however, stunned when I read a very angry article by a writer I admire, Mohamed Kacimi. The son of an Algerian Imam, deeply attached to his Muslim culture yet also fiercely attached to secularism, Mohamed Kacimi lashed out angrily at white, middle-class opponents of the law, who focused on the freedom of Muslim women to dress as they please. They were not the ones, he said, who had their daughters in the suburbs called prostitutes, bullied and sometimes raped for the sole reason that they chose not to wear the veil – let us remember that many Muslim women do not consider wearing the veil as compulsory: again, we have here Muslims being persecuted by fundamentalists.

thought this was very interesting + worth remembering that defending the most radical practices of a particular religion does not endear you to the vast majority of adherents who are modern/moderate

thought this was interesting too - particularly the second video of the ppl in the synagogue singing La Marseillaise:
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188225/two-scenes-from-the-grand-synagogue-of-paris

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/01/12/the-muslim-who-risked-his-life-at-a-paris-kosher-market-to-save-seven-jews/?tid=hp_mm&hpid=z3

More follow-up on the Supermarket employee. Not sure if this was mentioned upthread. It took him 90 some minutes after being put in handcuffs (after sneaking out of the market) to convince the police of what he knew and how he was helping and could help some more

ahh but of course

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/paris-march-tv-wide-shots-reveal-a-different-perspective-on-world-leaders-at-largest-demonstration-in-frances-history-9972895.html

Oh, put a sock in it. Nobody ever claimed they were part of the big crowd. They walked for half an hour photo ops aplenty, met the relatives and were led away from the masses. Did anyone expect them to risk their lives?

All the reports I read said they "joined" the march so yeah, there was the image of them being part of it. Doesn't diminish the march at all but will say something to many people about exploiting such events for PR purposes. Many will claim hypocrisy and I don't blame them.

New cover is not bad, and not in bad taste imho. Mohammed holding up a 'Je suis Charlie' sign, with 'all is forgiven' written above it, (too lazy to find an url soz)

seems at once daring and lily-livered, considering that mohammed might very well have approved what happened.

can't believe the endless headlines over on this side of the pond going on for 24 hrs about "where was obama??!!" so gross.

https://www.evernote.com/shard/s3/sh/1df7324b-355b-41e3-bb68-ef32b42168f1/dce66592e11874cc0331dc6963f08120/res/3d510230-779b-4646-a6e5-d66d79210b92/skitch.png?resizeSmall&width=832

Of course the racists are working from the Libération office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/arts/international/charlie-hebdo-staff-prepares-next-issue.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

New cover is not bad, and not in bad taste imho. Mohammed holding up a 'Je suis Charlie' sign, with 'all is forgiven' written above it, (too lazy to find an url soz)

― a pleasant little psychedelic detour in the elevator (Amory Blaine), Monday, January 12, 2015 4:57 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

seems at once daring and lily-livered, considering that mohammed might very well have approved what happened.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Monday, January 12, 2015 6:28 PM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think that's the joke.

I mean I think it's a mockery of the je suis charlie movement. A defiant middle finger from the grave.

I mean it's sort of operating in a complex way -- Mohammed himself holding a "Je Suis Charlie" sign which is absurd, an almost certainly sarcastic "all is forgiven" directed not only at the islamic extremists behind the attack but at EVERYONE rushing to take up their banner, and meanwhile they are yet again depicting an image of Mohammed, to hell with your sensitivity etc. That's the best I can interpret it from the US anyway.

everyone rushing to take up their banner = everyone rushing to hold up je suis charlie signs, not to take up islamic extremism

i gotcha. it has more layers than i had first grasped.

i'm impressed by how /impacted/ their satirical cartoons are, which is a good reason why they seem subject to so many (mis)interpretations.

I also read someone interpreting an additional "layer" as being a mockery of world leaders who now pose as taking their cause but actually don't support free speech.

It's kind of brilliant.

it's great imo

yeah, and heartbreaking

Great interview:
http://observer.com/2015/01/legendary-cartoonist-robert-crumb-on-the-massacre-in-paris/

on the left edge of the big photo of the libe offices, in the nytimes article, you can see a sliver of a circular window. it's the same window that godard is looking out of in this photo:

http://www.letemps.ch/rw/Le_Temps/Quotidien/2010/03/22/Culture%20&%20Societe/Images/jean-luc%20Godard%20%C2%A9%20Keystone%20-%20Agence%20VU--469x239.JPG

usually that floor is empty except for a coffee machine and a few lunch tables.

I'm actually astonished they managed to put out a magazine at all.

I think when I saw that cover I finally felt like I "got" their sensibility. It doesn't rule out for me that there could be racism or cultural prejudice underneath it all, I just think it's a little more complicated than the way a lot of pieces like that Jacobin garbage are making it out to be. (also, can I just say, lol @ the "read Edward Said" line).

wow @ crumb's "hairy ass of m-h-mm-d" cartoon

Love these tweets to Rupert Murdoch.

ok i love jk rowling now

also how did this steve emerson prick escape my radar til now

Jon Lewis' allusion:

I’m not going to make a career out of baiting some fucking religious fanatics, you know, by insulting their prophet. I wouldn’t do that. That seems crazy. But then, after they got killed, I just had to draw that cartoon, you know, showing the Prophet. The cartoon I drew shows me, myself, holding up a cartoon that I’ve just drawn. A crude drawing of an ass that’s labeled “The Hairy Ass of Muhammed.” [Laughs.]

...kind of?

well he continues it as a swipe at Bakshi: http://blogs.indiewire.com/animationscoop/r-crumbs-response-to-charlie-hebdo-incudes-swipe-at-ralph-bakshi-20150109

also, his thoughts about public reaction are worth taking into account:

I had the same reaction I had when 9/11 happened. I thought, “Jesus Christ, things are really going to turn ugly now.” That kind of thing, just like 9/11, it gives the government the excuse to crack down, to become very much more, like, you know, “Homeland Security” oriented. And the right wing gets like this kind of like fodder for its arguments. The right wing here is very down on the Arabs. And France has an Arab population that’s like, 5 Million, something like that – huge population of Muslims in this country, most of whom just want to mind their own business and don’t want to be bothered. Those kinds of extremists are a very small minority. We have friends here who are from that background, you know, Moroccan or Algerian. And they just don’t want any trouble, and their kids are mostly even more moderate than they are.