Teacher suspended over use of Charlie Hebdo cartoons

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Charlie Hebdo shooting
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Charlie Hebdo shooting
Part of the January 2015 Île-de-France attacks
Charlie-Hebdo-2015-11.JPG
Police officers, emergency vehicles, and journalists at the scene two hours after the shooting
Location 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert, 11th arrondissement of Paris, France[1]
Coordinates 48.85925°N 2.37025°ECoordinates: 48.85925°N 2.37025°E
Date 7 January 2015
11:30 CET (UTC+01:00)
Target Charlie Hebdo employees
Attack type
Mass shooting
Weapons

Zastava M70 AB2 rifles
Škorpion vz. 61 submachine guns
Grenade or rocket launcher
Tokarev TT pistols[2]
Pump action shotgun[3]

Deaths 12
Injured 11
Perpetrators Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula[4]
Assailants Chérif and Saïd Kouachi
Motive Islamic terrorism

On 7 January 2015 at about 11:30 a.m. CET local time, two French Muslim brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Armed with rifles and other weapons, they killed 12 people and injured 11 others. The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which took responsibility for the attack. Several related attacks followed in the Île-de-France region on 7–9 January 2015, including the Hypercacher kosher supermarket siege where a terrorist-held 19 hostages, of whom he murdered four Jewish people.

Charlie Hebdo (French pronunciation: ​[ʃaʁli ɛbdo]; French for Charlie Weekly) is a French satirical weekly magazine,[4] featuring cartoons,[5] reports, polemics, and jokes. Stridently non-conformist in tone, the publication has been described as Anti-racist,[6] sceptical,[7] secular, and within the tradition of left-wing radicalism,[8][9] publishing articles about the far-right (especially the French nationalist National Front party),[10] religion (Catholicism, Islam and Judaism), politics and culture.

It's been just about a year since two terrorists, two brothers, stormed into the editorial meeting of Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine. They killed 12 men and women, including a police officer and set off three days of terror throughout France, including the killing of four people in a kosher market. In the wake of the deaths of the satirists, Je suis Charlie, I am Charlie, became a slogan of solidarity for free expression around the world. Stephane Charbonnier, the editor of Charlie Hebdo - known as Charb - had just completed an open letter, which has now been published as a posthumous manifesto - "Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, And The True Enemies Of Free Expression." The book's forward is by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker, a famous chronicler of Paris. And he joins us from New York. Thanks so much being with us.

‘Open Letter’: Free-speech manifesto from late Charlie Hebdo editor

Freedom of expression is under fire. College students, swollen with umbrage, agitate on campus to stifle dissent. Near-record numbers of journalists are imprisoned around the world. Tyrants, drug lords and religious fanatics abroad react to "objectionable" speech by murdering the offending speaker.

Such was the fate of Stéphane Charbonnier, editor-in-chief of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, who was slain with 11 others by Islamic terrorists on Jan. 7, 2015, at the publication's offices in Paris. Charb, as the editor was known in print, now speaks to us from beyond the grave with a brief and impassioned manifesto on behalf of his blasphemous worldview and the freedom of expression that seems so widely imperiled.

Charb's essay, a scant 80 pages preceded by Adam Gopnik's poignant foreword, is on the surface a defense of the Charlie Hebdo worldview, with its powerful anticlerical bent, intolerance of cant and willingness to take on the most sacred possible cows in the most provocative possible way. Yet the pamphlet's message will reverberate far beyond France, because the enemies of free speech have been busy here and elsewhere exploiting their supposed piety (on the right) and oppression (on the left) to silence critics and insulate themselves from troublesome facts and ideas.

And Charb's message is anything but parochial. Central to his argument is his insistence that we distinguish between criticizing or mocking a religion, which he sees as just another "ism" open to any sort of abuse, and the kind of racism that condemns individuals on the basis of religion. "Sticking a clown nose on Marx," Charb insists, "is no more offensive or scandalous than popping the same schnoz on Muhammad."

Many will beg to differ, of course, but that gives them no right to start shooting. One big problem, in Charb's view, is the term "Islamophobia," which he calls a misnomer for the racism against Muslims (if racism can be used to describe prejudice on the basis of religion or ethnic origin) that he condemns as the province of "morons." On the other hand Charb and his colleagues seem to be phobic about religions of all kinds. And he was certainly right to fear Islamic extremism, which ultimately took his life.