Yet More on Charlie Hebdo

The shooting at Charlie Hebdo has obviously generated a tremendous amount of publicity and debate since it occurred last week.

It has also begun to divide. There are those who feel that the tragedy was an attack on free speech, as Charlie Hebdo was essentially publishing an image and material that the Muslim community found particularly offensive, and that Islamic fundamentalist extremists acted out on it by murdering a dozen people.

Fact of the matter is that there are so many aspects of this case, so many arguments to be made on both sides, and with some measure of legitimacy for each, that it remains divisive even after the dead have had services honoring them, and as they have been buried.

There are those who equate this incident with freedom of expression, and suggest, at least on the surface of it, that this was all about intolerance and a hatred of free speech. This is not far from being an unwitting extension of George W. Bush's argument that terrorists attack us because they hate our freedom. If not outright agreeing with Bush, it lends his arguments, which were of the "us versus them" variety, some measure of credibility.

Who knows?

But there are various different aspects to this story that can be explored, and I thought sharing some thought-provoking articles on the matter would be helpful, in this instance.

There is also the question of how a shooting by violent Islamic extremists in France that killed 12 and targeted a news publication run by and meant for adults got so much publicity, yet a shooting by violent Islamic extremists that killed an estimated 150 people remained largely in the shadows.

And what of the violence now in Niger?

Here are some that I thought could do that, and even if I did not agree with everything that everyone who wrote these articles suggested, they definitely felt worth reading:




Charlie Hebdo: a letter to my British friends  Olivier Tonneau Tuesday 13 January 2015

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/13/charlie-hebdo-solution-muslims-french-arab-descent-newspaper-fight-racism




“Charlie Hebdo”, not racist? If you say so…by Olivier Cryan,  December 5, 2013:

http://posthypnotic.randomstatic.net/charliehebdo/Charlie_Hebdo_article%2011.htm




The Charlie Hebdo cartoons no one is showing you. by ProgNet, January 11, 2015:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/11/1357057/-The-Charlie-Hebdo-cartoons-no-one-is-showing-you





Why coverage of the Paris shooting has overshadowed a massacre in Nigeria by Peter Kim, January 15, 2015:

http://globalnews.ca/news/1776017/why-coverage-of-the-paris-shooting-has-overshadowed-a-massacre-in-nigeria/




Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an "Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over" the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on "members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power".

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would "provoke an outcry" and proudly declared it would "in no circumstances... publish Holocaust cartoons"?

Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life - especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.

Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama - who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye behind bars, after he was convicted on "terrorism-related charges" in a kangaroo court - jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren't you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the "unity rally" in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent "extremists" committed to the "overthrow of democracy" from appearing on television.

The provocative quotes above were taken from the following article, written by a Muslim guy who was tired of the hypocrisy that he saw as glaringly obvious in the western interpretation:

As a Muslim, I'm Fed Up With the Hypocrisy of the Free Speech Fundamentalists by Mehdi Hassan, January 13, 2015:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/charlie-hebdo-free-speech_b_6462584.html