THE cartoonist Jean Cabut, below, was one of 12 people shot to death today by alleged followers of the Religion of Peace at the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper which has made fun of the Muslim prophet in cartoons and text. The killers are still at large.

From The Daily Mail: “Charlie Hebdo featured the author Michel Houellebecq this week. His latest novel imagines Muslims taking over the French government in 2022. Inside, there was an editorial, attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, and more cartoons – one showing the Prophet with a clown’s red nose.”

The newspaper was firebombed in 2011 and repeatedly threatened and yet kept going. According to Wikipedia, one of Cabut’s cartoons depicted Muhammad “under the caption ‘Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists,” crying : ‘C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons!’ (‘So hard to be loved by jerks!’).’

Here is a description of the newspaper, again from The Daily Mail:

Magazine Charlie Hebdo has become a byword for offensive statements in France after taking several highly provocative swipes at Islam.

The magazine once named Prophet Mohammed as its guest editor, published cartoons of the holy figure in the nude, and once renamed itself Sharia Hebdo with the cover slogan ‘100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter’.

The controversy began in 2006 when the publication reprinted now-infamous cartoons of Prophet Mohammed by Danish artist Kurt Westergaard.

When the images originally appeared they lead to days of protests across the Middle East and in Western cities. The decision to reprint the images landed the then-editor in court under anti-terror laws, though he was later acquitted.

The Hebdo offices were burned to the ground in 2011 when attackers used Molotov cocktails to start a blaze early in the morning of November 2.

There was nobody in the building at the time, and the target was instead thought to be the magazine’s computer system, which was completely destroyed.

Riot police were forced to stand guard outside the building for days following the attack, as the editors took a defiant stance, choosing to reprint the cartoon images multiple times.

In 2012 they again printed cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed as a deliberately provocative gesture while violent protests were taking place across the Middle East.

The following year the magazine’s office again had to be surrounded by riot officers after they published a cartoon booklet depicting the Prohpet naked as a baby and being pushed in a wheelchair.

On the final page of the booklet there was a note from the editor, Stephane Charbonnier, saying the images were ‘halal’ because Muslims had worked on them, and that they were factually accurate as they had been derived from descriptions in the Koran.

The satirical publication, widely seen as France’s answer to Private Eye, prides itself on a mixture of tongue-in-cheek reporting and investigative journalism.

Hebdo’s current office building has no notices on the door to prevent a repeat of the attacks that have occurred in the past.

In an interview with De Volkskrant in January 2013, Mr Charbonnier revealed he had been placed under constant police protection for four months after one of the cartoon issues was published.

He shrugged off criticism that he was only publishing the images to gain notoriety for Hebdo, and insisted that he was instead defending the right to free speech.

Mr Charbonnier pointed out that the magazine had poked fun at feminism, nuclear energy and homeland security, but the Islam issues always attracted the most publicity.

— Comments —

Dean Ericson writes:

I would say, “This Is What You Get From Leftists and Liberals”. It was leftists and their liberal toadies who deliberately imported this ancient enemy, Islam. It was leftists and their liberal lickspittles who deliberately let loose these blood-drenched Mohammadans among their own people. The carnage you see is leftists and their useful liberal idiots deliberately waging a war of extermination against us using Muslim proxies. And it’s not only Muslims they send to kill us; they open the borders to a tsunami of foreigners to drown us, they provoke blacks to murder us, they operate abortion mills to murder us in the womb, flood us with contraceptives, pour out our lives in endless, insane foreign wars, tax and regulate us to death — there seems to be no end to the diabolical hatred of evil leftist scum and their enabling army of liberal zombies in trying to wipe us out. Leftists and liberals murdered the Charlie Hebdo martyrs, and they’re coming for all of us, next.

Laura writes:

More from the The Daily Mail story:

Charlie Hebdo’s editor-in-chief Gerard Biard escaped the carnage because he was in London.

He told France Inter: ‘I am shocked that people can have attacked a newspaper in France, a secular republic. I don’t understand it.

‘I don’t understand how people can attack a newspaper with heavy weapons. A newspaper is not a weapon of war.’

He doesn’t understand it? Wow, jihadists have existed for more than 1,000 years and he doesn’t understand it. It also seems not to have occurred to him that a secular republic is not necessarily well-equipped to deal with religious warriors. In any event, these cartoonists were brave men. Charbonnier, the editor who was killed, is reported to have said, “I’d rather die than live like a rat” (under Islam).

Here is a photo. The four on the left were killed, with Charbonnier second to the left:

 Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

How long will it take, I wonder, for someone to say, “This has nothing to do with Islam”? Or to remind everyone that, of course, “Islam is a religion of peace”? And how high an office will the speaker hold, who says it?

Laura writes:

Mr. Biard has come through:

Mr Biard said he did not believe the attack was linked to the magazine’s latest front page, which featured novelist Michel Houellebecq, who has previously sparked controversy with comments about Islam.

And he said the magazine had not received threats of violence: ‘Not to my knowledge, and I don’t think anyone had received them as individuals, because they would have talked about it. There was no particular tension at the moment.’

And David Cameron is quoted as saying:

Prime Minister David Cameron joined the condemnation of the attack, saying: ‘The murders in Paris are sickening.

‘We stand with the French people in the fight against terror and defending the freedom of the press.’

 The fight is against “terror,” not Islam.

But here is an encouraging statement:

Jacques Myard, French MP with opposition party UMP, said: ‘We knew something would happen. The (security) services used to say to us it’s not if but when and where. We know that we are at war. The Western nations – like Britain, France, Germany – we are at war.’

David writes:

The magazine’s editors and writers should have stuck to satirizing Catholics, much safer.

Laura writes:

Cartoonists live in great fear of criticizing Catholics. Many are in hiding after drawing Benedict XVI. After all, “Pope” Francis said every religion has dangerous fundamentalists.

Dr. Bertonneau writes:

It was stunning and refreshing when President Obama earlier today appeared in the White House press room, standing before blow-ups of a dozen of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and urged American newspaper editors to republish those same cartoons to show solidarity with their French counterparts who, as he said, “have given their lives for the Western custom of free expression.”  It was even more stunning when the President explicitly retracted the words of his much-criticzed Cairo speech, in which he said that “the future must not belong to those who slander Islam.”  In a courageous gesture, the President confirmed a longstanding rumor that he wears a ring inscribed on its inner surface with the Shahada, the pronouncement by which a convert declares his submission to Allah and to the authority of the Koran.  He then conspicuously removed the ring, discarding it to the floor whereupon he explicitly rejected any sentimental ties that, considering his paternity, he might previously have had for the Islamic world and its faith.  Asked by a member of the press how American foreign policy might be changed by the Parisian massacre, the President said that he would ask Congress immediately to fund a program to assist Christians in the Middle East who have been persecuted by insurgent Islam.

Oh, wait – that never happened in this universe.  It happened in an alternate, sane universe, one where conscience is still a principle and even the wicked might reform.

Hurricane Betsy writes:

Let’s not lose too much sleep over the shooting of the employees at the satirical magazine. Have a look at their cartoons [pornographic cartoon included] that have nothing to do with Islam. Investigate their other politics – Marxist trash all around.

Hurricane Betsy adds:

One of the cartoons shows Jesus Christ engaging in sodomy.

A. Kern writes:

I’m appalled at the comment by “Hurricane Betsy” – not to lose sleep over the latest killings. My response to her addendum is, So What?!

It doesn’t matter that the Charlie people were sometimes horrid! And I too dislike seeing piss-Christ pictures and the like, but we MUST defend freedom of speech. It is a bastion of our culture.

Laura writes:

These crimes were odious and I feel sorry for the victims, all the more so if they left this world unable to distinguish between mocking Mohammed and mocking Christ.

 Pure freedom of speech is wrong.

Mary writes:

Lest anyone be under the impression that the publication Charlie Hebdo expended most of its energies taunting Islam, in a NYT piece titled “Proud to Offend, Charlie Hebdo Carries Torch of Political Provocation” we learn that:

“… the paper was often sued, including 14 times in recent years by the Roman Catholic Church. The New York Times has chosen not to reprint examples of the magazine’s most controversial work because of its intentionally offensive content [nudity, sexual acts]….But Charlie Hebdo thrived on breaking taboos. In the past, Mr. Charbonnier vowed that his cartoonists would keep poking fun “until Islam is just as banal as Catholicism…”

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