The attack occurred just a few minutes before I arrived at the Charles de Gaulle Airport on one of my yearly homecoming trips.
By midday Jan. 7, 12 people, including some of France’s most well-known cartoonists, had been shot in and around the Charlie Hebdo offices in the hipster Le Marais neighborhood.
That evening, from the base of the Marianne statue, I saw Place de la Republique overtaken by thousands of mourners. Some tried to chant, and, yes, a couple of people burned pages of the Quran, but they were promptly booed.
For the most part, we were there to grieve for cartoonists who were regarded with affection, though also with a degree of disapproval by some. They were viewed as you might a turbulent little cousin, a bright lad who could be downright rude at times but who should never have to see the end of a gun barrel. There was no arguing that.
Soon enough, the spontaneous wave of grief was submerged by one of the most popular hashtags in history and the largest march Paris had ever seen. The emotional reaction to these deaths was turned into a movement for free speech that ultimately flopped when the world realized the dead cartoonists were more antiheroes than martyrs.
That was the problem with Charlie Hebdo, too. In recent years, it invoked abstract principles to justify its repeated barbs against Islam, which is already under siege in France on multiple fronts. The paper was founded by old-time leftist intellectuals ― people who considered themselves humanists, anti-racists, anti-capitalists, and, thus, secularists.
An ancestor of Charlie Hebdo, Hara-Kiri, entertained a generation of ‘60s activists, including my father. It was crude, irreverent, and provocative. And the juvenile curmudgeons at Charlie Hebdo camped out in that era, convinced that the best way to liberate society was by stamping out the influence of religion. This conviction turned into a vendetta against Islamic fundamentalism.
Tensions came to a head ― or so we thought ― when the old Charlie Hebdo offices were firebombed in 2011. They were about to print an issue “guest-edited” by the prophet Muhammad, who was depicted on the cover with a wild smile saying: “100 lashes of the whip if you don’t die laughing!”
By then, Muhammad caricatures were a Charlie Hebdo staple, and the paper’s cartoonists, particularly editor Stephane Charbonnier, had fashioned themselves as free-speech guerrillas.
“I will continue, even if I have to do it alone,” he said on a France 2 talk show.
A rather dour mission for a cartoonist.
But the leftist free-speech advocates were giving ammunition to the extreme right, especially the Front National, which abhors the presence of Islam in France.
No love was lost between those strange bedfellows. Charlie Hebdo had even petitioned to have the Front National banned. The party had sued the paper several times and its leader, Marine Le Pen, was savaged on Charlie’s pages.
Still, both shared a fervent belief in straitjacket secularism, which the Front National has deftly used as a weapon to defend France’s cherished Catholic traditions from Muslims. The Jan. 7 attacks are Le Pen’s chance to gloat.
“France, land of human rights and freedoms, was attacked on its own soil by a totalitarian ideology: Islamic fundamentalism,” she wrote in a New York Times op-ed.
With her party’s ideology shaping the debate, there is rising sentiment in France that the onus is now on Muslims to prove they are “moderate,” and not on the side of the terrorists.
“It’s up to them to show that you can be French and Muslim and still respect secular rules,” Le Pen told Al Jazeera English.
Just as Charlie Hebdo’s militant secularism has been exploited by its sworn political enemy, the trauma of the Paris shootings has been used to divide in every possible way.
Everyone had a field day bombarding #JeSuisCharlie, from politicians to the polarized media to naive commentators.
Uninvited to the Paris march, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to the premier of France, advised French Jews that Israel is their home.
Newcomers to Charlie Hebdo, upon seeing its hooked-nose Muhammad caricatures, are calling the cartoonists “racist” or “bigoted,” mistaking an attack on a religion for an attack on race.
The remaining staff at Charlie Hebdo, those free-speech champs, are calling the newspapers that did not reprint their drawings “wimps.”
All of this detracts from the images that should stay imprinted in our minds: the men wearing balaclavas and armed with AK-47s who broke into a weekly meeting of cartoonists; blood splattered in the hallways of a cramped newsroom; a Muslim cop shot execution-style while he was on the ground, face down; a kosher supermarket surrounded by police, with Jewish shoppers held hostage inside; and the 17 killed in two attacks.
We should be united in shock, horror, and a sense of shared loss. Instead, we have focused on what divides us.
By Lalita Clozel
(The Philadelphia Inquirer)
Lalita Clozel is a freelance journalist in Washington. ― Ed.
(Tribune Content Agency)
