The cartoonists of Charlie were not allowed to rest in peace for very long.
Bells toll at Notre Dame, in honor of a newspaper that was radically anti-cleric. A chant of war, the Marseillaise, was sung, in honor of people who were deeply pacific. Millions of dollars were donated to a newspaper that held its financial independence higher than any other principle. On the brink of bankruptcy just a week ago, Charlie finds itself flooded with cash at the very same time its fangs are removed.
The murder of innocents is denounced by people in whose direction guns will never be drawn: neo-fascists, far-right writers and intellectuals disguising their islamophobia in a thin veil of free speech. Once dedicated to deconstruct and mock symbols, Charlie has itself become an idol. On Saturday, one French newspaper titled ‘Justice was served’ when there is nothing further from the truth. Though regrettable, this outcome was almost inevitable.
Luz, one of Charlie’s cartoonists who escaped the massacre, said they would have hated that. “They were just guys sitting in a corner, making drawings.” As to put back things in perspective – real people lost their lives. It’s personal. You can’t bury a symbol in the ground but their bodies will soon rest there.
When interviewed over the phone on the morning of their deaths, the perpetrators said themselves they murdered no innocents, they only eliminated targets. To their eyes, their actions are entirely legitimate and they showed no remorse whatsoever. This violence wasn’t blind. Journalists, police officers, jews – the problem is not where this list begins, it’s that it is conceivably endless. The killers are free to arbitrarily direct their wrath to anyone they perceive as an enemy. How that label is applied follows no reason or logic.
It’s been said, by many and by me, that Charlie’s satire was undirected – that it hit all religions and political and financial powers equally. And that as such, it also targeted oppressed and vulnerable minorities in France and elsewhere. In this instance, Muslims. Let it be very clear: Arabs in France are, and have been for decades, subject to a systemic violence and discrimination. It existed long before France faced attacks from extremists supposedly acting in the name of a religion. Without becoming any kind of excuse for it, poverty and ghettoization are undeniably elements in which extremism has the potential to fester.
But reducing French Arabs to a theorized atomic Muslim identity is as idiotic as turning Charlie Hedbo into of symbol of anything. From Yemen to Syria, it’s painfully obvious the Muslim civilian population is the first victim of religious extremism. Those victims are oppressed and murdered by the same people Charlie was mocking – the same people who executed those cartoonists, cops and jewish shoppers.
I wrote it would be hard to describe the magnitude of this event to people who never lived in France. On this day, up to 2 million people marched in the streets of Paris and about 2.7 millions throughout the rest of France. This is unheard of: the single largest demonstration in the History of France, bigger even than when Paris was liberated from the Nazis. Well over a thousand people gathered at the Civic Center Plaza in San Francisco. With the exception of a single asshole carrying an anti-Islam sign, the gathering was peaceful and honorable. To an extent, it was somber. But to another, it was glorious.