Charlie Hebdo is an irreverent left-wing French publication created in 1970 as a successor of Hara-Kiri magazine after it was banned for mocking the death of former French President Charles de Gaulle. Charlie stopped publishing in 1982, but resumed in 1992 and currently has a circulation of 45,000. It’s sort of a magazine version of The Daily Show.
Charlie has a long history of rubbing the wrong people the wrong way. The recent attack on Charlie Hebdo by Muslim extremists was not the first such incident. In 2007, the Grand Mosque, the Muslim World League and the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF) sued, claiming the cartoon edition included racist cartoons. In March of 2007, executive editor Philippe Val was acquitted by the court. Following the state attorney's reasoning, the court ruled that two of the three cartoons were not an attack on Islam, but on Muslim terrorists, and that the third cartoon with Muhammad with a bomb in his turban should be seen in the context of the magazine in question, which attacked religious fundamentalism.
A November 2011 issue was renamed "Charia Hebdo" (a reference to Sharia law) and "guest-edited" by Muhammad, depicted Muhammad saying: "100 lashes of the whip if you don't die laughing." Apparently, Muslim radicals don’t have much of a sense of humor when it comes to Muhammad. On 2 November, the newspaper's office was firebombed and its website hacked.
This year on the 7th of January, two Islamist gunmen forced their way into the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo and opened fire killing twelve and wounding eleven, four of them seriously.
During the attack, the gunmen shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great" in Arabic) and also "the Prophet is avenged.” President Francois Hollande described it as a "terrorist attack of the most extreme barbarity". Police later hunted down and killed the two gunmen, Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, French Muslim brothers of Algerian.
End of story? Not even! It has been evident to authorities for some time that there were sleeper cells of Muslim terrorists in Europe. Directly on the heels of the Charlie Hebdo incident, another Muslim gunman killed a policewoman and took hostages at a Jewish supermarket, killing four people. The gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, was killed by police.
These incidents have been perceived as direct attacks on freedom of the press and attempts to silence criticism of the horrific acts perpetrated by radical Islamic militants. On Sunday, January 11, a march for unity was held in Paris. Around 40 world leaders joined more than one million people in a march to honor the victims of the Paris shootings. Conspicuously absent were high-level leaders of the United States. Apparently, our own President was too busy (did he have a pressing Tee time?), and lesser minions were deemed unnecessary to attend.
While Israel’s Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas saw fit to join in marching arm-in-arm with the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel, England’s David Cameron, and France’s Francois Hollande among others, the most notable figure was the one that was not there. The US President Barack Obama “let the world down” by failing to make the journey to France, according to the front page of the New York Daily News.
It seems Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) does not apply to the one country that prides itself on the constitutional guaranty of freedom of the press. Maybe this is just another example of Mr. Obama’s detestation for the constitution. Or did he simply not want to offend the Muslims in his cabinet by attending an event protesting deadly attacks by Muslims lacking a sense of humor?
By the way, the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo sold over a million issues the week following the attack. Their normal run is 60,000. Issues on eBay have reportedly sold for $1,000 apiece. Not bad for an irreverent left-wing, dirt stirring rag.
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