Nine years ago, on January 7, 2015, a terrorist commando broke into the newsroom of the weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo In Paris, where its director Stéphane Charbonnier was gathered with the staff of editors and the popular cartoonists Cabu and Wolinski, the twelve journalists were massacred to the cry of “Allahu-akbar” (Allah is the greatest), uttered between bursts of Kalashnikovs. . The next day, shocked by the news, journalists from all media outlets took to the streets of Paris along with hundreds of thousands of French people outraged by what had happened, as stated in the L’Echo editorial: “Not only has she been mortally wounded, freedom of the press but the values of the Republic.” Thierry Desjardins, deputy editor of Le Figaro, wrote: “Islamists seek to destroy Western civilization, democracy, human rights, equality between men and women, progress as we conceive it.” France still does not fully understand that the conception of Jihad or holy war of fundamentalist Islam, in its war to the death against the West, considers anyone who thinks differently from its beliefs to be an enemy and infidel, murdering even its own people when they disobey its dogmas. and norms, such as the horror of what is currently happening to women and young people in Iran.
Charlie Hebdo had already suffered attacks and harassment due to its editorial line, which since 1970 has been characterized by incisive humor and scathing criticism of the government in power. His complaints about corruption have always had well-documented sources, which is why presidents, businessmen and politicians fear him. He has been scathing and irreverent towards the church, Jews, right-wing and left-wing extremists, with special challenge to radical Islam, with his iconic caricatures being a source of commentary in all the bistros and cafes of France.
Among the cartoons about Islam that supposedly provoked the attack that day, one stood out in which Muhammad, kneeling and bound, is about to be beheaded by a hooded man, to whom the prophet says: “I am the Prophet, idiot!”, to which the executioner responds “Shut up, infidel!”, wanting to express with this the psychopathy of the jihadists who include among their enemies not only Jews and Christians, but also Muslims who do not accept the extremism of the Sharia or Islamic Law, whether Shiite or Sunni.
A caricature, beyond humor, whether cynical or irreverent, is ultimately an intelligent reflection on the events of our society. The caricaturist, endowed with a keen vision and incisive humor, is the translator of people’s feelings of indignation at abuses of power or any daily event that causes discomfort or surprise among citizens. That has no place in Muslim moral dogmatics and its equivalents in the West such as fascism, progressivism and communism, in short, it is part of a political psychopathy that seeks to destroy the right and freedom to think. This is why Glucksmann refers to “terror as the last ratio of any totalitarian strategy” (André Glucksmann, Dostoyevsky in Manhattan2001).
I am Charlie
Returning to today’s terrible anniversary, I think that, in the face of evil and the silence that it tries to impose with blood and fire, the individual is driven to affirm his humanity and his dignity armed with words, images and caricatures, like a infallible dictate of his own spiritual, moral and cultural survival, with which he fully exercises his freedom.
The cover of the January 14 edition of Charlie Hebdo, the week after the massacre of its staff, shows the Prophet Muhammad with a tear in his eye, holding a sign that says “I am Charlie” and on his turban, the phrase “All is forgiven.” In his editorial and in the rest of the pages, Charlie was reborn with his usual irreverence, intelligently mocking politicians and radical Islam. “Charlie, an atheist newspaper, has achieved what all the saints gathered together could not have done, the miracle of having the bells of Notre Dame ring in his honor,” writes Gerard Biard in his editorial, and then demands the deepening of secularism: “ Whether out of cowardice or electoral calculation, if we continue to legitimize or tolerate communitarianism and cultural relativism, we will open the way to religious totalitarianism.” Between caricatures and jokes, they forcefully denounce the ineffectiveness of the government’s security policies to contain the rise of Islamism and the ambiguity of politicians, who, for fear of losing votes among the six million Muslims who live in France, have adopted the ostrich strategy.
Courtesy/via Edgar Cherubini Lecuna
Courtesy/via Edgar Cherubini Lecuna
That issue of Charlie Hebdo exceeded 7 million copies sold. The editions of the main French newspapers, which on a normal day could sell 600,000 copies, rose to one million copies the day after the events. The situation caused the edition of Le Canard enchainé, another satirical weekly founded in 1914, to sell a million copies that week, Le Figaro had an increase of 134% and Le Monde of 175%. Citizens were looking for answers to their uncertainty in in-depth journalism.
The person who designed the cover was Luz, one of the survivors of the massacre, publicly committing to continue facing “obscurantophobia.” In successive interviews about the content of this issue, he has refused to reveal the motivations that led him to layout the front page, “I had many ideas, for example, I thought of a cartoon that showed the two jihadists who perpetrated the massacre, arriving to heaven and asking about the 70 virgins and a celestial choir that comes from a cloud where a party for the murdered cartoonists is observed, he answers: “with Charlie’s team, assholes!” However, he decided on forgiveness, arguing that it was a “cathartic design to unblock me after the events,” confessing that he burst into tears when finishing the sketch.
Mane, Tekel, Parsin
We know that without repentance forgiveness is meaningless. The act of forgiving is meaningless if the guilty party does not express it. Regarding the cover and the phrase “All is forgiven”, Jacques-Alain Miller, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, interpreted it in a premonitory way for France: “(…) Without a statement of cause, as if from nothing, as it was Mane, Tekel, Parsin. It is beautiful (the phrase) but it is a Christian illusion to expect Islam to proceed to repent.” To understand Miller’s cryptic phrase, we must go back to Rembrandt’s painting (1635) Baltazar’s Feast, which masterfully captures the king’s expression of fear at the surprising appearance of the words Mane, Tekel, Parsin, written by the hand of God on one of the walls of his palace. It is an expression that denotes an imminent misfortune and refers to the biblical passage from the book of Daniel, in which he prophesies the invasion and fall of Babylon after interpreting its premonitory meaning and the imminent catastrophe that was approaching.
History has proven that religion is a more effective mobilizing element than nationalism. The notion of “clash of civilizations” devised by Toynbee and popularized by Huntington (Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, New York, 1996), is being fueled by the variable of religious war within the conception of Jihad or holy war against the infidels, which seeks the creation of a world caliphate. The terrorist attacks committed in France are just examples of the escalation of organized violence in the globalization of Jihad, with the purpose of unleashing the demons of a religious war. According to Toynbee, religious wars are the breaking point of systems: “Significantly, the lines of fracture between civilizations are almost all religious. They are the first pushes that one civilization gives to another, which in turn responds in the same way and so on until one of them ends up paralyzed or defeated” (Arnold Toynbee, War and civilizationGallimard, 1962).
The cartoon that caused the massacre. Courtesy/via Edgar Cherubini Lecuna
Courtesy/via Edgar Cherubini Lecuna
The extremes of Shiite fundamentalism and Sunni extremism come together by drinking from the same source, the Koran, interpreting it in their own way, both factions wish to destroy Western culture and civilizations. In recent years, France has been the target of bloody jihadist attacks, and has also been the scene of a reckless relationship between the extreme left and Islamism. Those who do not think like left-wing extremists are ‘fascists’, ‘ultra-rightists’, ‘racists’, ‘Islamophobes’, in addition to maintaining a complicit silence in the face of terrorist attacks in their own country. For Pascal Bruckner, hatred of Israel, support for the Palestinian cause led by Hamas terrorists and complicity or collaboration with radical Islam, have become a symbol of the new ‘liberation struggle’: “After the fall of the Berlin Wall, leftist thought, orphaned of ideals, has found in Islam a substitute for the idea of the ‘proletariat’ and a ‘revolutionary model’. But, in addition, the anti-Western character of Islam gives them the aura of a Third World religion” (Pascal Bruckner, Imaginary racism2017).
In the West, especially in France, there is a proliferation of left-wing useful idiots transformed into collaborators of radical Islam, including democratic “leaders” who continue to feed goodism and turn the other cheek, two-faced populism in the face of immigration and the politics of the ostrich before the rise of Islamism, without understanding that it is impossible to bring the fanatic religious to the field of dialogue and negotiation, it is like trying to convince with philosophical and humanist arguments the executioner who has already raised the ax to decapitate you. For France, as for any other Western country, the dilemma that Churchill resolved by stating: “You should never try to make a pact with those who have declared war on you” arises again.
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