Je Suis Charlie: Charlie Hebdo republishes Mohammed cartoons
Remember all that ‘Je Suis Charlie’, the outpouring of solidarity after the deadly attack by Islamists on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. The mag published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. On January 7 2015, in response Islamists murdered 12 people. This week Charlie Hebdo republished those cartoons, all 12 of them. “Tout ça pour ça,” says the headline – “All of that for this.”
Very soon 14 people will go on trial accused of helping the two Islamist attackers carry out their massacre. Hebdo has honoured the victims in the best way it can, by championing free speech and the right to cause offence – by mocking oppressive piety in all its guises, showing us how dumb humanity can be and that what we revere might just be another human with an active imagination. That does not mean you can be gratuitously offensive and rude. You need to make a point about shared humanity for satire to work best.
Too many who marched beneath the banners “Je Suis Charlie” are less champions of free thought and speech than they are against Muslims, possessed of monocular vision and the ugly inability to treat people are individuals, lumping all Muslims as something uniquely other and wrong.
People have asked the magazine to republish the images. And many doubtless just delighted in poking Islam and would be upset where their own beliefs caustically lampooned. But, as the magazine’s editorial says, the time was not right. There was no point.
“We have always refused to do so, not because it is prohibited – the law allows us to do so – but because there was a need for a good reason to do it, a reason which has meaning and which brings something to the debate,” it says. “To reproduce these cartoons in the week the trial over the January 2015 terrorist attacks opens seemed essential to us.”
Lead image: Pallbearers carry the casket of Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Verlhac, known as Tignous, decorated by friends and colleagues of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, at the city hall of Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2015
Posted: 1st, September 2020 | In: News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
