Extremist Muslims give Islam a bad name... 

 

US president Barack Obama, British prime minister David Cameron, the Queen and the Pope are among a band of world leaders condemning a deadly shooting at the offices of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

At least 12 people were killed and 11 injured by gunmen reportedly armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket-launcher who opened fire in the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which has been attacked in the past for publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

The United States said it condemned the deadly attack in the "strongest possible terms" and Mr Obama committed US assistance to apprehend the gunmen responsible.

"We are in touch with French officials and I have directed my administration to provide any assistance needed to help bring these terrorists to justice," Mr Obama said.

"France is America's oldest ally, and has stood shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the fight against terrorists who threaten our shared security and the world."

US secretary of state John Kerry said the United States is offering France its deepest condolences.

The "pen is an instrument of freedom, not fear," Mr Kerry said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-08/charlie-hebdo-shooting-world-leaders-react/6005628

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/comic-riffs/wp/2015/01/07/cartoonists-react-to-charlie-hebdo-massacre-in-paris/

 

Thanks David Pope for this brilliant cartoon:

To have an automatic weapon and kill people is really easy. You don't need any talent to do that. You need talent to be a cartoonist. You need talent to be a journalist.

CAROLINE FOUREST, JOURNALIST
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/charlie-hebdo-survivors-defiant/6006018

from Crikey …..

The news hit London around morning teatime, a grainy image popping up in the Twitter feed. Pretty soon, the news made clear what it was part of -- a violent attack on the offices of Paris satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo (Charlie Weekly, or, Your Average Weekly), with at least 11 dead, and more injured. Barring bizarre events, there wasn’t going to be any doubt who had done it. Charlie Hebdo is more free-wheeling in its satire than Private Eye, its UK counterpart, and has been especially willing to go the tonk on religion, in old-fashioned, gauchiste anti-clerical style. From the '60s until Charlie Hebdo closed in 1981, that target was usually the church. When it came back in 1992, and in the wake of the Rushdie affair, and the rise of Islamism as a political movement, Islam began to get the same treatment. But it wasn’t a huge focus for them, with their attention turned more towards embedded French political power, showbiz and literary gossip (never really separated in French life) and cartoons more or less incomprehensible to anyone not up with Parisian idiom.

The magazine had received violent threats before, from both Islamist groups, nationalists and a French zionist terrorist group called the “Jewish Defence League” (not the US group) -- which objected to some low-taste "holocaust humour" cartoons which might be an unpleasant surprise to many of Charlie’s newfound friends. Other threats followed republication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2008. In 2011, it produced an issue ostensibly guest-edited by Muhammad -- "100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter" -- after which its office was firebombed and obliterated. It was back in action immediately with rising sales, and ever more brio, until this.

Three masked, black-clad men wielding AK-47s got into the building mid-morning, by hijacking a staff member as she was going in. They didn’t kill her, and ran down the corridor and into offices shouting the names of people they were after. They found most of them in an editorial meeting, killing 10, three writers and editors, and seven of the country’s leading cartoonists. On the way out, they shouted "we have avenged the prophet!", were blocked off by an arriving police car, and shot it out, killing a wounded officer execution-style, before getting away. They are still on the loose, having hijacked another car.

Hours later, Europe was still reeling from the shock -- not merely of the attack itself, but of the sudden loss of half the country’s great cartoonists, including two national treasures, Cabu and Georges Wolinski. It would be like, in one hit, losing Bruce Petty and Michael Leunig. And Coopes and Moir and First Dog and David Pope. Shocking also was the smooth professionalism of the attack, with video footage of the three killers suggesting that they had military training. The West likes its Islamist killers suicidal or deranged or both. This attack was like the sort of terror Paris is well-accustomed to -- the black-clad, right-wing OAS of the '60s, brazenly gunning down opponents of Algerian independence, Mossad assassinating Black September and other Palestinians, Turks taking out Kurds, and the bombing campaign by Carlos "the Jackal" Ramirez, trying to prompt release of his guerrillas in the 1980s. Early afternoon, the world held its breath for 10 minutes.

Then the usual imbecility began, the sort that the now departed staff of Charlie Hebdo would have pilloried remorselessly. Thousands reading their Twitter feed in line waiting for a hazelnut latte tweeted "#istandwithcharliehebdo" -- cost-free, zero-content pseudo-solidarity that flatters the issuer. Politicians, commentators etc made sententious statements about freedom of speech being absolute, a right etc -- as if the attack was some sort of opening gambit in a debate about religious vilification laws. American neocons issued effusive words of support, perhaps unaware that several Charlie Hebdo cartoons had ended up in Iran’s "Holocaust Humour" exhibition of a few years ago issued statements. French politicians, some of whom had tried to close down the magazine using draining legal assaults, now had to stand in solidarity -- including President Francois Hollande, last seen on the cover with his dick hanging out of his pants, the membre petite with a speech balloon saying "Moi, Presidente". All of them had, years earlier, asked Charlie Hebdo not to publish the Danish Muhammad cartoons. Now, with the act done, they were suddenly supporters in retrospect.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, whose government has unquestionably received French DGSE buggings of the Hebdo office, said "we are all Charlie Hebdo". Queen Elizabeth II, whose family have variously been depicted as vibrators, tampons, and everything else, issued her condolences. Peak asinine was reached when people gleefully remarked that the killers had only served to make Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons more widespread, declared that they had not won, and intimated that they were too stupid to have done so.

This was ridiculous. Of course the terrorists had won. They set themselves a narrow operation -- they harmed no one when they initially barged into the wrong office -- which was to obliterate the magazine’s staff, and they did it. The suggestion that there was anything "medieval" about such an operation was simply drivelling self-congratulatory liberalism on autopilot. What’s "medieval" about killing people who traduce your idea of the truth? Europe spent most of the 20th century doing that. That’s not an exception to modernity -- it’s most of what modernity has been. The shock in France relates in part to the very, well, French character of the event. Exemplary political terror is more or less a Parisian invention after all -- indeed the liberal republic from within which the right to free speech is intoned, was founded on terror. By 6pm, on BBC Radio, someone was quoting Voltaire "I disagree with what you say, but …’ etc. Voltaire never said that, but he did express hope that the last king would be strangled with the guts of the last priest, so he appears to have had a soft spot for terror too. All very confusing, isn’t it?

So of course they prevailed in this encounter. They punched a hole in French national culture. There’s nothing fair about one’s status in death and so it is cruelly true that to take out a bunch of the country’s most loved cartoonists is a harder hit, even though killing 12 random people on the street would have been no less tragic. But it’s important to understand what sort of a cultural attack this was. Charlie Hebdo didn’t have the cultural reach of Private Eye, with 200,000, still less of someone like Jon Stewart or The Chaser. It had sales of 50,000 a week in a country of 50 million. For a mainly Parisian elite, it was indispensable, part of the furniture of life that we call culture. Millions of French people have never heard of it, never seen a copy. For three young attentive Muslims -- no doubt freshly re-enraged by each succeeding issue featuring imams with their dicks tied into turbans etc etc -- Hebdo, one suspects, represented not the West en masse, but the elitist metropolitan culture that negated their faith by refusing to recognise its rules as sacred. Hebdo’s been as excoriating of the West’s imperial wars as any leftist publication. and there are plenty of French right-wing tabloids that are effectively fascist in their attitude to Muslims, triumphant examples of the Crusader West. The sophistication of the operation suggests not merely Islamic State-style field training, but proper military training. Survivors reported that they had spoken in native-tongue French, and they were later identified as two brothers, Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi and a teenager Hamyd Mourad. At time of going to press, there were reports that they had been captured in Reims, East of Paris.

By nightfall in Europe, the full absurdity of trying to say something meaningful against such a successful act of political assassination was becoming clear. For decades the Hebdo crowd had been pilloried as corrosive and cynical, enemies of society and especially of La Patrie. And for all that they are described as satirical, their humour had more than a touch of nihilism about it. The sort of gags that got the Chaser hunted down for months on end by the right-wing media were the weekly trade of Charlie Hebdo -- the name itself was the third it had had, after being twice banned by the French state, and having to re-emerge in another form. Indeed, their ragging on imams etc was starting to become a little obsessive. Though it was always pretty funny, there was a Richard Dawkinsesque quality to it, in which all the frustration that young men of the 1960s had had with the very powerful Church, was transferred to the pretty marginal institutions of European Islam, as their moralising began to contradict the secular 60s dream. But they were always good for a dick joke.

By late evening, Hollande was calling these late ageing enfant terribles "heroes of the nation" which was the last thing they had wanted to be. It was the sort of twist --- satirists enrolled as representatives of the state -- that would have been the sort of thing dreamed up by Charlie Hebdo.

For journalists everywhere, this unquestioned act -- which was first and foremost a targeted political assassination -- was also an act of terror. Less so for civilians. That the killers did not randomly shoot uninvolved strangers was a clear political act too. They wanted it to be clear that specific individuals, and the police, were the targets. For journalists, it was the sudden realisation that someone might be out there, reading everything you’d written or that your work was just appearing beside, and planning their move. Attacks in the weeks previous had been utterly random, with several Muslims driving trucks into crowds on the street. Crazed and far from effectual, they don’t sharpen the sense of threat overmuch.

The Charlie Hebdo attack prompted an almost manic release of statements of things that by their very nature should not need to be stated -- that free speech is a principle on which our societies are based, that we should not let fear start to determine what we write. Commentators outdid themselves in otiose stupidity, the best of which was Suzanne Moore at The Guardian, suggesting that "we should ridicule" the killers instead. But ridicule works in exactly the opposite direction to all the other ineffectual things people were saying. What could you possibly say about the killers that was both a) belittling and b) true, when they had succeeded absolutely, and the whole of the West had now reorganised the meaning of its being around these events? Like it or not, for the next while, this event is the black hole around which our universe turns.

Given the satanic darkness of the event, it is tempting to call it nihilistic. It is nothing of the sort, simply an extremely ruthless political act, founded on a set of fervent and concrete beliefs, not on a nothingness. We call it nihilistic because there is an asymmetry between the ungroundedness of our contemporary culture, and the fervent certainties of theirs. Indeed the sort of terror that violent Islamists can provoke is due to their radical refusal of any sort of common ground. Much of the terror that Paris has played host to over the decades and centuries was part of a dialogue, however violent, over the broad direction of modernity, and the claims of right of different groups. But violent Islamism has not the slightest interest in that dialogue. The more from the other side that you insist that a simple meta-political rule like freedom of speech is the sacred value to which you hold, and that you will not be intimidated, the more you emphasise how little is actually sacred in your culture, how contentless it is. Putting a meta-meta-practice like satire -- especially the undermining satire of a mag like Charlie Hebdo -- at the centre of your culture, is to say you have almost no culture at all.

This conundrum is one of the reasons that culture conservatives with a dash of Islam-envy -- people like Niall Ferguson or Andrew Bolt or Nick Cater -- put such emphasis on the idea of a Christian revival in the West, and it’s also why they regard organisations like Charlie Hebdo or the Chaser or whoever, as the true enemies of the Western cultural revival. But the weakness of our culture, its ungrounding by the forces of capital and technology over recent decades, means that we can no longer make a response of silent dignity and resilience to such acts. We have to have the whole theatre, the logo, the marches, and now god help us, laying out pencils as some sort of symbol of something or other. None of the routine terror that made its way across Europe in the post-World War II years drew out this desperate need to make meaning through jerry-built symbols. Words of defiance will do nothing to the killers. They’ll either go out in a blaze of suicidal glory if cornered, or they’ll go out on a Eurolines bus to Germany and disappear into the crowds of the cities. Even capture and lifelong imprisonment would be lit by the glow of their act. There’s something deeply pathetic about this search for a way in which to undermine a single focused act of terror whose meaning is complete, and doesn’t require any more inadvertent bigging up. I’m writing this from a city that was bombed for more than 500 days during World War II, waking many mornings to 500 deaths. My mother walked to school, aged seven, during the winter into spring 1944-45, when first the V1s and then the silent V2s missiles rained capricious mass death down on London. Had they stopped to put flowers on every obliterated terrace of houses, no-one would have got anything done. Resilience against that had little to do with obsessing on what the Nazis didn’t get. It was about the country itself was, understood in terms of itself, and not defined against a force it had already seen as negating.

In Australia, the situation is much worse, since we have been willing to wear down the resilience that our culture once prided itself on, with a ceaseless performance of public emotionality, and a weird celebration of fear as a form of collective being. Our culture is so atomised and so depresso-genic, that a mainstream media desperate for public events takes any occurrence, wraps it in overkill, and then puts a Beyond Blue message at the end of it. Having spent two weeks mourning a cricketer killed in a freak accident, we then tried to turn a fucked-up hostage taker -- whose complaint was that the High Court would not recognise his loyalty to Australia -- into a terrorist mastermind. What will we do if we have to face a Charlie Hebdo situation on our own soil? The systematic undermining of our self-possession -- done for the most obvious political purposes -- suggests that we would be consumed by it.

For those who would like to avoid that, if/when a well-planned and executed terror event is visited upon us, we need to start talking back to this attempt to enrol every aspect of society as a "hero" in defence of its "values", a sort of soft militarisation of the pluralist and untotalised way of life that is ostensibly the thing we value. Violence is a refusal of dialogue, and any complex modern society will always contain a small number of people willing to make that refusal at any given time. Shaping your discourse around their acts is pointless and stultifying. For some people, changing aspects of your life to respond to such threats is not giving into fear, it is a simple recognition that the notion of universal consent to "democracy" is pure rhetoric, and hides the fact that there is no ultimate court of appeal where a turn to violence can be rebuffed by an act of speech. There is never a point, or never for very long, when every group in society has renounced violence as a legitimate act, and trying to "disprove" their claimed legitimacy as if it were an error in maths is futile. They must simply be treated as crimes, even if they have a political dimension, prevented where they can be, apprehended where not. It is the few who are exposed to excess risk that should be taking extra precautions not the many, uninvolved, who should be mobilised in a form of pseudo-national defence, with its denial of pluralism, and nscription to what usually comes with it -- an imperial vision that threatens mayhem over the next hill, against the next other.

Charlie Hebdo, terrorism and the distortion of popular memory

Most of the cartoonists around the world have found simple symbolic ways to express the horror at the shooting of satirists in Paris... I could not compete with such clever yet sad imagery... Here I used a reconstructed version of the cartoon from Jean Jullien a French cartoonist living in London as a headline at top, in sympathy and sadness with all the satirists of the world. The image of the pope is from CH itself. 

I believe that cartoonistry is like a religion (this is not literal, please) in France. So in my own style, often too intellectual way, I hope I express here what Charlie Hebdo was — I mean is — about... 

a pencil sharpener...

--------------------------

 

From Chris Floyd

As you might expect, the very secular "Angry Arab, As'ad AbuKhahlil, has some pertitent observations on the Charlie Hebdo attack. You should read the whole piece, but here are some excerpts from his "Notes on the shooting in Paris":

 

1) I used to be a cartoonist: as a child (I had my first school exhibit at age 10) and then as a boy but stopped once I discovered Marx and politics in my mid-teens.  I even considered becoming a cartoonist but my talent was not great.  So I feel strongly about the right to offend and to mock as an artist (and as a human being).  That right should be absolute.
2) Muslims do need to lighten up, and should feel secure enough to stomach mockery and satire against their religion. And they should not allow their enemies (even the bigots among them) to provoke them so easily.
3) No, the magazine in question did not "equally" mock Muslims and Jews and others. This is like the way Islam is mocked by Bill Maher and others in the US: they don't hold the same standards. They reserve a special bitter and vicious streak against Islam and Muslims, and remember that France is not a country of absolute freedom of speech.  You can go to jail in France and pay a fine if you offend Jewish people by mocking, say, the Holocaust.  I believe that either there should be laws to protect the feelings of all religions, or--I prefer--there should not be protection whatsoever.  IF there are idiots and bigots who want to offend Jews and Muslims they should be allowed to make fool of themselves.
4) It is idiotic for many reasons for Muslims to be easily provoked.
5) Excuse me: yes, one should vehemently condemn the crimes against the cartoonist and writers and journalists but should in the same vein condemn the on-going French and US bombing raids that are taking place from Mali to Afghanistan, passing through Yemen and Syria. And those bombs are real and they are killing real people.  Those are terrorist actions as much as the shooting in Paris was a terrorist action.
6) Western policies in Syria have produced, and will continue to produce, terrorist organizations the likes of which we have not seen since the creation of Al-Qa`idah. The enthusiastic policies of arming and sponsoring "rebel groups in Syria" are responsible for the proliferation of fanatical terrorist groups which will terrorize those countries that had sponsored them.
7) the source of all those terrorist groups is known: Gulf regimes and their Western sponsors. They have been indulging those regimes form the days of the Cold War.  I was on the side of the left and progressive forces during the Cold War, while you--in the West--were on the side of those speaking the language of Jihad and...oil.

 

 

The direct roots -- and bitter fruits -- of actions like the attack in Paris and the depredations of ISIS in the ruins of American-raped Iraq go back 100 years, to the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, then forward through decades of fateful, and fatal, decisions by Western elites to support, advance -- and arm -- the most retrograde forms of Islam in order to prevent the rise of any alternatives to the authortiarian client states they favored in the region. At every turn, the West has exacerbated the century-long crisis within Islam, producing -- as AbuKhalil notes above -- a relentless series of extremist groups, each seemingly more virulent than the last, who, as he rightly says, "terrorize those countries that had sponsored them." 

http://chris-floyd.com/component/content/article/1-latest-news/2458-a-hundred-years-of-evil-folly-the-bloody-roots-of-the-paris-attack.html

---------------------------
GUS:
 In item 3 the Angry Arab claims that:  No, the magazine in question did not "equally" mock Muslims and Jews and others. This is like the way Islam is mocked by Bill Maher and others in the US: they don't hold the same standards. They reserve a special bitter and vicious streak against Islam and Muslims, and remember that France is not a country of absolute freedom of speech. 

UNTRUE. Charlie Hebdo has served barbs more or less equally to the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians. Charlie Hebdo has always been unobservant of French "restricted" freedom of speech. Charlie Hebdo's tenet is that nothing is sacred, and that above all, GOD DOES NOT EXIST, NEVER EXISTED AND WILL NEVER EXIST. As well, to Charlie Hebdo, most (ALL) people in power are hypocrites and spychos. Charlie Hebdo has been as savage about the way the West has behaved since the "end of Colonialism"... (We all know about the Gulf regimes and the sponsorship from the West)... Charlie Hebdo always exposes the HYPOCRISY of us. 
Destroying Charlie Hebdo because it has insulted the prophet is inexcusable. The Muslim extremists insult the prophet daily with their dirty guns and irresponsible bloodshed... And so do the Capitalists (Mostly Christians) and their drones...
At no stage can Charlie Hebdo be classified as a voice of the West... Charlie Hebdo has sometimes (often) been deliberately stupid with a twist of clever satire on every fronts, and CH has always been fiercely independent.

It has been a hard day for me. A hard day...

 

 

• Charlie Hebdo editor and cartoonist Stephane "Charb" Charbonnier, 47, who had been living under police protection since receiving death threats
• Cartoonists Jean "Cabu" Cabut, 76, Bernard "Tignous" Verlhac, 57, Georges Wolinski, 80, and Philippe Honore, 73
• Economist and regular magazine columnist Bernard Maris, 68, known to readers as Uncle Bernard
• Mustapha Ourrad, proof-reader
• Elsa Cayat, psychoanalyst and columnist, the only woman killed
• Michel Renaud, who was visiting from the city of Clermont-Ferrand
• Frederic Boisseau, 42, caretaker, who was in the reception area at the time of the attack
• Police officers Franck Brinsolaro, who acted as Charb's bodyguard, and Ahmed Merabet, 42, who was shot dead while on the ground

• Source: Le Monde newspaper and other French media

 

...

For all of the moderate mainstream Muslims who might be offended by anything I’ve said here, I feel for you. The same way I feel for moderate Christians who are constantly lumped in with the likes of Fred Phelps, Franklin Graham, and most recently, Josh Duggar. But, let me just remind you – it’s still your religion, not mine. Sure, sure – you can distance yourself as much as possible by claiming that self-described Islamic terrorists are “not real Muslims”, but just as I reminded my Christian friends back in my days of ministry, silence is agreement. As such, if you have a problem with “radicals” giving your religion a bad name, the problem is yours, not mine – speak up! While I no longer have any fear of Hell (or Jahannam), I do fear the actions of humans, carried out in the name of conveniently elusive gods made in their own primal images.

I would like to state emphatically that this project is not being cancelled out of any sort of respect for any irrational ancient religions that threaten to silence critical thinking and/or satirical questioning with death. No, it is being cancelled because of very rational fears brought on by the reality that such threats (and actions) are still carried out today – in 2015 – right under the noses of a modern society in the light of day, all in the name of [a prophet nobody has ever met who made a series of unprovable promises in exchange for their willingness to kill to prove their devotion].

As much as I’m frustrated to live in a world where it’s still necessary to “kill” creative projects to keep from being killed, as Penn Jillette said regarding Islam,“The worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you’re afraid to talk about it.” So, we’ll let the cancellation of this project speak for itself (for now) and I will join the long list of “cowards” who’d rather enjoy a glass of wine with family and friends rather than dying over… a book that has already been used to end millions of lives and silence many more. 

Cheers to reason,
– Horus Gilgamesh

http://www.awkwardmomentsbible.com/project/kids-koran-cancelled-thanks-islam/

Marika Bret, long-time member of Charlie Hebdo, does not fool against Twitter. The social network has blocked her account after the broadcast of a caricature of Charb, cartoonist of the satirical newspaper killed during the attack of January 7, 2015.

 

Twitter, for the umpteenth time, has become the object of criticism as it censors the contents posted on the platform. The social network has indeed decided this 17 September to block the account of Marika Bret, historical figure of Charlie Hebdo, because of her profile photo: a caricature of the cartoonist Charb, murdered with 11 others of his colleges during the attack against the satirical weekly, January 7, 2015. According to the network, the caricature in question, however chosen as a profile picture since the creation of her account a little more than three years ago, shows a priest and an imam holding each other's sex and titled "The extremes are touching each other", violates Twitter's rules of use.

 

Read more:

https://francais.rt.com/france/54025-compte-membre-charlie-hebdo-censure...

 

Charb did campaigns against discrimination:

 

The catch phrase: "I would employ you but I don't like the colour... of your tie"...

 

Read from top. See also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/29625

 

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/32911

 

An arson attack on an anime studio in Japan has left at least 12 people dead and dozens injured.

The perpetrator, who was also injured and has been taken into police custody, walked into the 1st Studio building of Kyoto Animation in Uji, Kyoto prefecture at about 10.30am. He poured what is suspected to be petrol in multiple areas of the building before igniting it.

There were more than 70 people were in the building, which is Kyoto Animation’s main studio, and 12 people died, according to the police.

About 30 fire engines and ambulances went to the three-storey building after an explosion. Victims were taken to various hospitals in Kyoto.

The suspect, identified only as a 41-year-old male, was reportedly taken to hospital before being arrested by police, who said he had admitted starting the fire. No motive for the arson attack has been reported, but Japan’s public broadcaster said he had shouted “drop dead” as he set the fires.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/18/dead-suspected-arson-attack-kyoto-animation-japan

 

 

Read from top.

 

Read also:

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/36783

At least 26 people are dead and dozens injured after a suspected arson attack at an animation studio in Kyoto, Japan, local emergency officials have said. 

Local media quoted police as saying a man broke into the Kyoto Animation Co studio on Thursday morning. Police say the suspect, a 41-year-old, sprayed petrol before igniting it.

Some people still remain unaccounted for, broadcaster NHK reported. 

The suspect has been detained and was taken to hospital with injuries.

Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said the incident was "too appalling for words" and offered condolences to those affected.

How did the incident unfold?

The fire broke out at the three-storey building at around 10:30 local time (01:35 GMT) on Thursday. Rescue operations are still ongoing. 

Police also found knives at the scene, say local media. 

NHK said the man had been heard saying "drop dead" as he set fire to the building. 

It is unclear if the suspect had any relationship with the company.

 

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49027178

 

 

Read from top.

 

PARIS (AFP) - The trial of 14 people accused of helping the militant gunmen who attacked the Charlie Hebdo newspaper and other Paris targets in January 2015 has been postponed because of France's coronavirus lockdown, prosecutors said on Wednesday (March 25).

The presiding judge for the trial, originally set to open on May 4, said the strict home confinement rules made it impossible to bring together "all the parties, witnesses and experts under the necessary sanitary conditions," according to a court order seen by AFP.

No new date has been set, although the national anti-terrorism prosector's office said it would probably be pushed back until next autumn.

 

Read more:

https://www.straitstimes.com/world/europe/coronavirus-frances-lockdown-d...

 

 

Read from top.

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which was targeted by jihadists in 2015, is to republish the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad ahead of the trial of the gunmen this week.

A special edition of the magazine on Wednesday will feature interviews with family members of the victims of the terrorist attack, an article on the public’s attitude towards freedom of expression and a reprint of Islam-themed cartoons, including those featuring the Prophet Muhammad, Charlie Hebdo announced on Tuesday.

The prophet cartoons triggered the 2015 spree of terror violence in Paris, in which 17 people were killed over the course of three days. Of those lives, 12 were lost in the January 7 raid on the Charlie Hebdo office. The 12 drawings were initially published by a Danish daily in 2005 and then reprinted by the French magazine.

 

https://www.rt.com/news/499594-charlie-hebdo-prophet-cartoons/

------------------

 

Humanism is a general philosophy or framework for life, rather than a movement or an organisation that people join, she says. But Humanists UK is “extremely needed”. The organisation helps train humanist celebrants, supports people across the world who are persecuted for their non-religious beliefs, and “provides a much-needed voice for humanism”, she says.

“Religion still carries immense political weight in the UK, despite the steep fall in the proportion of people who define themselves as religious,” she says. The UK is the only country in the world apart from Iran that reserves places in its legislature for clerics, with 26 Church of England bishops sitting by right in the House of Lords. “And yet we think of ourselves as a progressive nation!”

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/aug/31/alice-roberts-atheism-humanism

 

Please note that there is no Imam in parliament in Saudi Arabia (Sunni), because there is no parliament and the "country" (it's not a country but a fiefdom) is ruled by the Royal family, absolutely...

 

See also:

when the weather influenced the course of history...

 

Read from top. 

Knowing that Charlie hebdo is as important as Voltaire to many true French people, Macron who was born (1977) after the advent of Charlie Hebdo (1970) could not condemn this desecrating magazine — offspring from the journal “bête et méchant” (Hara-Kiri born 1960)— for being insensitive… 

French President Emmanuel Macron said on Tuesday it was not his place to pass judgment on the decision by Charlie Hebdo to publish a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad.Macron, speaking during a visit to Lebanon, said it was important for French citizens to be respectful to each other, and avoid a "dialogue of hate" but he would not criticize the satirical magazine's decision to republish the cartoon. His comments were reported on French broadcaster BFM TV.Macron extolled the virtues of democracy and freedom of speech as he said: "It's never the place of a president of the Republic to pass judgment on the editorial choice of a journalist or newsroom, never. Because we have freedom of the press.""There is in France a freedom to blaspheme which is attached to the freedom of conscience. I am here to protect all these freedoms. In France, one can criticize a president, governors, blaspheme," he said.Macron also paid tribute to the victims the January 2015 attacks, stressing that Wednesday, on the first day of the trial, that "we will all have a thought for the women and men who were cowardly shot because they drew, wrote, corrected, were there to help, to deliver."On 7 January 2015 two men forced their way into the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Armed with rifles and other weapons, they killed 12 people and injured 11 others in the French capital. The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to an Islamic terrorist group.

https://www.dw.com/en/emmanuel-macron-refuses-to-condemn-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-of-prophet-mohammad/a-54788078


It has to be remembered that French politics have been decidedly anti-clerical, thus anti-Catholic and anti-Muslim in its secular value since 1905. This does not mean it can stop people to worship who they wish, including the devil. But this attitude is designed to prevent religious groups infiltrating he government. This is an important aspect of France where religious groups are always tying to influence politics or trying to get special treatment. Charlie Hebdo is a beacon of dedication to this secular freedom ideal, idiotically or/and satirically...

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Jules Letambour asked me to publish his views. I hesitated as they are as controversial as they are unfortunately ringing the bells of truth.

Apparently Chris Sweeney at RT tells us that "Charlie Hebdo’s anti-Islamic jokes are getting old and the attention seeking and scandal-mongering is neither big nor clever”… 

But following the massacre of a teacher in Paris and of a few people in a church in Nice, Jules makes sense — and said that cleverness is not what Charlie Hebdo is about...

This is what Chris Sweeney tells us, in his conclusion:

That's basic logic and will be of no surprise to Charlie Hebdo, but they are perfectly happy to disregard it. They have become adrenaline-junkies who no longer want to satirise the news but become it. They are purposely trying to create scandals.
They now even keep their headquarters secret. Isn’t one bastion of a progressive society for the media to be accessible and not hide away?
Their agenda-driven egos hardly do anything for freedom of speech. Genuine satire breaks down walls and allows people to interpret things in new ways. Charlie Hebdo is only digging deeper and deeper, entrenching long-held positions and insulting anything that will bring the spotlight their way.
It’s not only Islam, the Jewish and Catholic faiths are also featured in the magazine, along with multiple public figures from the celebrity and political world. Having a go at any of these is not the issue. It’s the way it’s carried out.

Read more:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/504890-charlie-hebdo-anti-islamic-jokes/


A few years ago, Charlie Hebdo was dying. It was dying, not because of persecution by annoyed religious mobs or spurned government departments, but because of lack of readership — that is people prepared to pay money for satire and below it, some real news that the main stream media had been too shy to publish. Circulation of Charlie hebdo was thus going down the toilet like most newspapers and possibly faster. 

On the 8th November 2014, Charlie Hebdo appealed to his readership (rough translation by Jules Letambour):

Readers, friends, the last time we contacted you for help was in November 2011, the day after an attack on Charlie Hebdo.  … What had not melted or been set on fire, we carry on working with. We are frugal. We save. Your support helped us to relocate urgently. We are still grateful.

One can be a miser, and find cheap ways to do things, but it is becoming more and more difficult to fight what has been called for a while “the crisis of the press”, which has destroyed a many fine publications printed on paper. It’s a crisis that may have been engendered by the press itself.

Publishers and distributors have not be able to get together and find a way to salvage a process that is become more and more costly without being more efficient. Yes we know that you [name supplied] cannot find your magazine of choice [Charlie Hebdo] like you used to, at your local café. You need to drive to the next towns [names supplied]. Meanwhile, the local newsagents work like dogs and earn nothing.

“Smart” publishers have used advertising to given away the contents of their magazines for nothing but ...


This was the dire situation. Charlie Hebdo was not viable and about to close down… Lack of readership and atrocious publishing mechanics, without advertising, were killing it...

Two months later, January 2015:

At least 12 people have been killed by gunmen reportedly armed with Kalashnikovs and a rocket-launcher who opened fire in the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

French officials said 11 other people were injured, at least four seriously, in the shooting at the central Paris offices about 11.30am (local time) on Wednesday.

Two police officers and ten journalists are thought to have been killed.


So what happened? What it because Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohamed? Sure, but this was not the first time the magazine had tackled Islam. Let’s be real. Charlie Hebdo is infantile, crass, imbecilic and crazy on many depiction of issues. But its lack of “sensitivity” is actually a mirror of the crassness, imbecility and craziness of the issues it tackles. Charlie Hebdo is an affront to what is as an affront to what should be viewed as upsetting our proper secular social norms. Bill Wirtz explains without gloves:

Individuals make a difference in this cultural rift. The French people should lead by example by selling the virtues of a free society, not as just another set of ideas, but as a better set of ideas. Islamism is obscurantism, not substantially different from the medieval inquisitions or the desolate rule of the absolute monarchy. Europe can be blamed for many things, but it has done well to separate itself from those ideologies that reject the principles of a free society. Islamism deserves the same treatment, and so do its apologists.

Bill Wirtz's work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Examiner, CityAM, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and Die Welt.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/free-speech-in-france-is-under-attack-by-islamism/

In a strange way, the butchery of Charlie Hebdo personnel by Muslim extremists in January 2015 created martyrs to the cause of the Freedom of speech, even if these martyrs had been crass, imbecilic and crazy. Suddenly, the truth came out: Charlie Hebdo was correct. Islam and its extremists were imbecilic, crazy and did hate freedom… The first issue of Charlie after the massacre sold 500,000 copies while previously, they were scratching dirt to sell 5,000…

Meanwhile, the latest Erdogan cover of Charlie Hebdo is far less offensive than the authorities in Qatar inspecting the vaginas of Western (mostly Australian) women transiting in Doha [before Charlie Hebdo’s cover showing Erdogan, I believe]. If you want offence, this is it. Including a 60 year old woman? What?

Erdogan is an aggressor. Charlie Hebdo has been a simple mirror showing his crassness, duplicity and hypocrisy. Macron can handle him with freedom of expression, hopefully — a freedom which MOST Muslim hate, because they are indoctrinated and brainwashed since childhood, like some Nazis were. Worse than Nazis actually. And so were Catholics of the inquisition, then. To this day, anyone who profess atheism say in Saudi Arabia will be beheaded. Think about this. Why this does not happen in Europe is simple: the Muslims in Europe do not have control of power, yet. But their extremists try hard to get ahead while shouting something unscientific...

Jules Letambour.
Still holed up in the Jura, France.