“We Will Never Give Up”: Charlie Hebdo Republishes Mohammed Cartoons Giulio Meotti Gatestone Institute, Sept. 2, 2020
Yesterday, one day before the opening of the trial for 14 defendants accused of involvement in a string of terrorist attacks in France, which included the murders of their fellow journalists and cartoonists on January 7, 2015 at their Paris office, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo republished the “Mohammed Cartoons” under the title “Tout ça pour ça” (“All of that for this”). “We will never give up”, they said.
The defendants in the trial, some in absentia, “face a variety of charges related to helping perpetrators carry out attacks that killed 17 people over three days in January 2015.” In addition to the 12 victims in and around the office of Charlie Hebdo, a police officer was murdered in the street and four people were murdered in a kosher supermarket.
François Molins, then public prosecutor of Paris, recalled his arrival at the Charlie Hebdo office. He found “the smell of blood and gunpowder. In the newsroom, it is carnage. It is more than a crime scene, it is a war scene, with a frightening tangle of bodies”.
Charlie Hebdo‘s editor, known as Riss, has detailed the heavy security surrounding the weekly since the terror attack. Charlie Hebdo is now subsidizing part of its own protection, spending 1.5 million euros per year. “When you take 3 euros out of your pocket to buy a copy of Charlie Hebdo, 1.30 euros goes to the distributor and with the remaining 1.70 euros the magazine pays the employees, the rent, the service providers, as well as its security”, he said. After paying an even greater price in 2015 in terms of blood, and paying an exorbitant price in terms of security, it would have been understandable for Charlie Hebdo‘s editors to have stopped using their freedom of speech to subject Islam to criticism. That is not what they chose to do.
“We have often been asked to publish other cartoons of Mohammed”, they wrote.
“We have always refused to do it, not because it is forbidden — the law allows it — but because we needed a good reason to do it, a reason that made sense and that would bring something to the debate”.
The last time Charlie Hebdo had run a cartoon of Mohammed was five years ago, on the cover of the issue just after the massacre, which sold eight million copies. It showed the prophet of Islam accompanied by the title “All is forgiven”.
“We must continue to portray Muhammad; not to do that means there is no more Charlie“, said Patrick Pelloux, a cartoonist who has since left the magazine. Is Charlie still Charlie, many wondered after the massacre? Today, yes — but France is starting to reflect on the dramatic decline in its freedom of expression. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
France to Relive Charlie Hebdo Attacks as Landmark Terror Trial Opens in Paris Court France 24, Sept. 1, 2020
More than five years after a three-day killing spree in the Paris area that claimed 17 lives – including some of France’s leading cartoonists – victims of the January 2015 attacks and their loved ones will finally face suspects during a special terror trial.
Over the next few months, 14 suspects – including three in absentia who may be dead – will be tried at a courthouse in northwest Paris amid tight security.
The suspects are being tried for assisting in terror attacks, including supplying weapons and financing to three jihadists who were killed shortly after the attacks.
The hearings are set to reopen a traumatic chapter in contemporary French history, which started on January 7, 2015, when two brothers – Saïd and Chérif Kouachi – stormed into Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices, killing 12 people, including a police officer outside the premises.
The assault ushered three days of bloodshed that ended when Amedy Coulibaly, a friend of the Kouachi brothers, was killed after attacking a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris.
The trial was scheduled to start before the summer, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and will accommodate fewer observers in the court room due to social distancing measures.
It will be one of only a dozen trials to be filmed in France due to the judicial importance and “emotion stirred” by the attacks, which “profoundly marked the history of national and international terrorism”, according to anti-terrorist prosecutors.
The January 2015 attacks triggered a rallying of national unity encapsulated by the “Je Suis Charlie” slogan. It also heralded a wave of Islamist violence that year and raised unsettling questions about modern France’s ability to preserve security and harmony in a multicultural society.
While the trial is immensely important, it could also be traumatic, with the proceedings including statements and testimonies from survivors and loved ones of victims who have waited more than five years for justice. “This is completely new: the first few weeks of this trial will be devoted to the victims’ words,” explained anti-terrorist prosecutor Jean-François Ricard in an interview with France Info radio on Monday. “They will be able to explain, question, try to understand, and that is fundamental.”
Charlie Hebdo republishes Prophet Mohammed cartoons.
Accredited journalists from 90 national and foreign news organisations will be reporting on the trial. French cartoonist François Boucq and writer Yannick Haenel will be covering the trial for Charlie Hebdo, posting daily reports on the magazine’s website on the progress of a trial in which “we are not just witnesses”, as Editor-in-Chief Gérard Biard explained to AFP. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
January 2015 Bombings Trial: Day One Yannick Haenel and Francois Boucq Charlie Hebdo, Sept. 3, 2020 – trans. from the French
Today, the first day of the trial, the president and his first assessor read the “Presentation of the Report” for nearly four hours, which describes all the criminal facts that occurred during these three cursed days of January 2015. As and As the qualification of the charges against the defendants unfolded, and as our eyes were raised towards them, locked in their glass boxes, the crime scenes that we have been rehashing for five years were doubled by a strange tale in which s ‘tangle the contacts between the defendants, their connections, their preparations, their responsibilities.
And we discovered that these thirtysomethings with cropped hair or wearing ponytails, who declared themselves “without a profession”, entrepreneur in the textile industry or garage manager, and who seemed to wander in the shady mists of some noir romance where one deals and wanted to, or without wanting to (the trial will say), a criminal circuit whose mosaic, minute by minute, cracked the media scenario of the so-called “second knives” which this trial should, it seems. , be satisfied.
We discovered confluences, a whole network of intermediaries hatching little by little, with purchases of vehicles, handguns and long weapons – “machine guns” as one of the defendants said while playing no doubt naivety – the logistical possibility of a massacre. Arms trafficking which in a few months made it possible for the Kouachi brothers, and especially for Amedy Coulibaly, around whom the bundle of complicity revealed by the file revolves, to kill 17 people.
We began, from that first day, to understand how the worst starts: with traffic.
We learned, for example, that Coulibaly had financed his taking action through credit scams allowing him to buy and resell cars: fraudulent financing files, contracted with Financo, which amounted to 60,000 euros.
We were beginning to understand – and this will be one of the most interesting things in this very long 49-day trial – the synchronicity of the Charlie Hebdoand Hyper Kosher killings (because the Kouachi and Coulibaly brothers knew each other well, j ‘will come back to this in the next few days).
We saw a system, we approached with a terrible clarity, that where the derisory and the terrible, where delinquency and criminality coincide. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
Edward Alexander: A Champion of the Jewish People (1936-2020) David Isaacs World Israel News, Aug. 25, 2020
Edward Alexander should have been a household name in the Jewish community. Perhaps the community was too busy celebrating the very people he was defending them against, the likes of Thomas Friedman, Michael Lerner, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, Peter Beinart, and many others.
Alexander was a professor of English literature who wrote on the great Victorians, notably John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin. About 40 years ago, he shifted gears to largely write on Jewish issues. His style sharpened by studying literature’s greats, he entered the lists an eloquent champion of Israel against its detractors. His writing was arresting: “The birth of Israel just a few years after the destruction of European Jewry was one of the greatest affirmations of life ever made by a martyred people.”
In an essay praising historian and thinker Yoram Hazony’s The Jewish State for analyzing the maladies of Israel’s intellectuals, Alexander writes that in Hazony, Israel has perhaps found its latter-day Jeremiah, “but given the widespread tone-deafness of the country’s enlightened classes to their Jewish heritage, perhaps what is needed at the moment is an Israeli Jonathan Swift.” Alexander himself is the closest the Jews have come to their own Swift with his erudition, wit and scathing shafts against the moral hypocrites and self-haters.
For Alexander was fierce as well as erudite and eloquent. His erudition and masterful style were on display in works like The Holocaust and the War of Ideas and The Resonance of Dust. But he also impaled the sacred cows of the literary and political establishment. In The Jewish Wars he unmasked Nobel Peace Prize winner Bishop Tutu, “whose speeches against apartheid,” writes Alexander in 1990 “return obsessively to gross, licentious equations between the South African system and Jewish practices, biblical and modern.”
In “Professor of Terror,” an essay on Columbia’s Professor Edward Said, darling of the “progressive” scholarly/literary world, Alexander points to Said’s “longstanding habit of confidently reciting the most preposterous falsehoods” and notes acerbically that his “double career as literary critic and ideologue of terrorism is a potent argument against those who believe in the corrective power of humanistic values.”
In his last years, Alexander increasingly devoted his energy to exposing Jewish haters of Israel, including Israeli self-haters. He wrote and edited a series of books whose titles reveal their themes, including The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies; With Friends Like These: the Jewish Critics of Israel; The Jewish Divide Over The Jewish Wars; and Jews Against Themselves. In the last few years he also wrote trenchant columns for the Algemeiner. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
Charlie Hebdo Republishes Cartoons that Prompted Deadly 2015 Attack:
Norimitsu Onishi, NYTimes, Sept. 1, 2020 –– The French satirical magazineCharlie Hebdo has republished the same cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad and Islam that prompted a deadly attack on the magazine in 2015, an act that will be seen by some as a commitment to free speech and by others as reckless provocation.
How Not to Fight Terrorism: Sam Westrop, National Review, Sept. 3, 2020 –Despite media attention currently being focused firmly elsewhere, it is desperately important to remember that multiple terrorist attacks by both Islamist and far-right fanatics have killed and injured numerous Americans over the last year, and there is certainly no shortage of other terrorist plots in the works.
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