There was a blood-chilling irony in a sketch that appeared in this week’s edition of Charlie Hebdo, which went on sale on Wednesday morning just hours before the murderous attack on the satirical magazine's offices in north-central Paris. The sketch (see below) was by Charb, the pen name of Charlie Hebdo's editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, who was among the 12 people shot dead during the attack. Below the line reading “Still no terrorist attacks in France”, which referred to the tension that built up over fears of a possible attack during the festive season, it shows an armed jihadist who says: “Wait, one has until the end of January to present New Year’s greetings”.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre on Wednesday which left ten of the magazine’s staff and two police officers dead, and four other people seriously wounded, the motives of the killers was not precisely clear. However, in a video recording of the attack made by press agency Première ligne, whose offices are close to those of Charlie Hebdo, two of the gunmen, in the street outside, can be heard shouting “god is great” in Arabic.
There is a strong suspicion that the killers were Islamic extremists, given the magazine’s position, for almost nine years now, at the centre of numerous controversies over its irreverent cartoons regarding the symbols of Islam. Charlie Hebdo has always made a point of honour of targeting the three monotheistic religions, with a certain proud below-the-belt approach, but the space it has given to its sketches about Islam has both dragged it into the centre of a fierce debate in France, and led to a firebomb attack on its offices little more than three years ago.
It was in the early hours of November 2nd 2011 when a Molotov cocktail was thrown into its Paris offices, destroying two thirds of them. Later that day, its website was hacked twice.
The police investigation into the firebomb attack failed to determine who was behind it, but for the magazine’s editor, Charb, there was no doubt. Like the murderous attack by gunmen on January 7th, the arson attack was on a Wednesday, when the weekly publication hits newsstands. That published on November 2nd 2011 was a special edition in which the magazine sub-named itself Charia Hebdo (Sharia Weekly), a rhyming play of words on Charlie Hebdo, with a full page sketch on the front cover of the Islamic Prophet Mohammad (see right), presented as the guest editor and who promised “100 strokes of the whip if you don’t die laughing!”.
The magazine had earlier issued a statement explaining its decision. “In order to properly celebrate the victory of the Ennahda Islamic party in Tunisia,” it read, “and the pledge by the president of the [Libyan National Transition Council] CNT that the sharia will be the principal source of legislation in Libya, Charlie Hebdo has proposed to Mohammad that he be the guest editor of its next edition.”
In an interview with BFM TV news station after the firebomb attack (see below), Charb said a number of threats had been received via Twitter and Facebook, which the magazine was preparing to pass on to the police.
Interviewed also by news website Rue89, he said: “What means of expression can be used to reply to these people? True Muslims don’t burn down newspapers. The worst thing is that these three pricks are going to pass off all French Muslims as integrists.”
Following the November 2011 firebomb attack, the magazine took a temporary home in the offices of French daily Libération. François Hollande, then candidate for the presidential elections of 2012, spoke of his “indignation” over the attack, noting that “the fight for freedom of expression remains, alas, a sorry current current issue”. Meanwhile, Claude Guéant, the then-interior minister (under president Nicolas Sarkozy), speaking just after the arson attack, declared: “Whether one likes or dislikes Charlie Hebdo, everyone, all French people must this morning feel themselves to be in solidarity with a publication that, by its existence and its manner of being, expresses the freedom of the press.”
Sylvie Coma, Charlie Hebdo’s deputy editor, told French daily Le Monde: “We are most certainly going to be supported by [far-right Front National party leader] Marine Le Pen and [anti-Islam website] Riposte laïque [meaning Secular Response]. We deplore it but we’re not going to censor ourselves because of that […] For us, as soon as religion becomes a political instrument, we’ll criticise it.”
Coma’s prediction proved true. In a statement headlined “Is the sharia untouchable in France?”, Bertrand Dutheil, advisor on secular issues to far-right leader Marine Le Pen said “the attack against Charlie Hebdo is both an attack on freedom of the press and an act of aggression against secularism”. The left-leaning satirical weekly also drew support from Yvan Rioufol, a right-wing essayist and journalist, who denounced the firebombing as the work of a “new fascism” and “obscurantist regression”.
'We refuse to hide behind our little finger'
It was in February 2006 that Charlie Hebdo began to be clearly identified as an enemy by a certain section of Muslims, both in France and abroad. That was when the magazine found itself at the centre of the fierce controversy caused by the publication of sketches of the Prophet Muhammad by Danish magazine Jyllands-Posten, which included one of the Prophet wearing a bomb as a turban. Charlie Hebdo was the first publication to reproduce the Danish cartoons in France, and its offices were placed under police protection after it received threats of retaliation.
The special edition dedicated to the Danish cartoons included a sketch depicting the Prophet Mohammad who complains “It’s hard being loved by blockheads”. Several Muslim associations, including the Union of Islamic Organisations of France (UOIF), the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM) and the management of the Paris Great Mosque (Grande Mosquée de Paris), launched lawsuits against the magazine. Nicolas Sarkozy, then interior minister, spoke of the right to freedom of expression, and the lawsuits were eventually rejected by the courts.
Speaking on Wednesday after the murderous shooting attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, French political sciences researcher and essayist Jean-Yves Camus, who is close to the magazine’s editorial team, told Le Monde: “We have never seen, in the history of our country, a press organ be methodically decimated with a military mode of operation. No newspaper has been thus attacked, because there is a principle which is that of freedom of the press, which was until now respected. It is an unimaginable level of escalation. The people who worked at Charlie Hebdo have no feeling of hate towards anyone at all, above all not towards Muslims. They are in the position of criticizing religions. Those who committed these attacks have understood nothing. We are in [a situation of] absolute hate, the total negation of thought.”
Enlargement : Illustration 5
But in the past, the leftist magazine has been accused of stirring anti-Muslim prejudice, and notably by some on the Left. Back in November 2011, the Left-leaning monthly magazine CQFD published a fierce attack on Charlie Hebdo by one of its former journalists, Olivier Cyran, who worked at the weekly for ten years until 2001. “To sneer at Muslims is no longer just good commercial business, the spiritual equivalent of the naked woman on page three of the Daily Mirror, it is now a proof of belonging to the Left, and even the Left of the Left,” he wrote. “We must recognise the facts: ideologically, the life and souls of the party at Charlie Hebdo have won the day. Ten years of obsessive jokes and hateful whining against Islam, consecrated by the ‘Danish caricatures’ and a voluptuous climbing of the stairs at the Cannes [film] festival alongside [right-wing French thinker and outspoken anti-fundamentalist Bernard-Henri Levy] BHL, have diffused their little poison into the skulls of the most finely-educated.”
Two years after that text was published, a song attacking Charlie Hebdo was composed for the soundtrack of the film La Marche, which was about a nationwide march in 1983 calling for equality for France’s population of North African origin. The song (click below to listen), composed by leading French rap singers but which was eventually dropped from the film’s soundtrack, notably included a line sung by Nekfeu from the rap group 1995, which ran: “I demand a book-burning for those Charlie Hebdo dogs.”
Charlie Hebdo subsequently issued a statement denouncing the “violence” of the lyrics, expressing its surprise that the song employed “the speech that is usually made by the Muslim far-right”. On November 20th, Le Monde published an opinion article entitled “No, Charlie Hebdo is not racist”, co-signed by Charlie Hebdo editor Charb and one of the magazine’s journalists, Fabrice Nicolino. “We refuse to hide behind our little finger, and we will continue, of course. Even if it’s less easy than in 1970, we will continue to laugh at priests, rabbis and imams, whether that meets with approval or not. We are in a minority? Maybe, but proud of our traditions in any case. And let those who pretend, and who will pretend tomorrow, that Charlie [Hebdo] is racist at least have the courage to say it out loud, and in their name. We will know how to reply to them.”
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- The French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse