What is Charlie Hebdo and why was the magazine targeted?

[Octafish]

From Rupert Murdoch:

What is Charlie Hebdo and why was the magazine targeted?

Wall Street Journal blog, 12:28 PM EST JAN 7, 2015
By Jason Chow

The Paris offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were attacked on Wednesday by armed gunmen, who killed at least 12 and injured seven others. The magazine, part of a French tradition of biting satire, has been the source of constant controversy throughout its history. A primer on the magazine and its past.

What is Charlie Hebdo?
Charlie Hebdo is a satirical magazine, published every Wednesday, that was founded in 1969 though it stopped publishing between 1981 and 1992. Known best for its illustrations and provocative imagery, the magazine aims to mock all forms of authority, from politicians to religion to the military. Its ideological roots are left-wing and atheist—with religion in all its forms a constant target. In its Dec. 20 edition, the newspaper published a cartoon of the Virgin Mary giving birth to a pig-faced Jesus.

What has Charlie Hebdo done to anger Muslims?
In 2006, the paper reprinted images of the Prophet Muhammad that had appeared in a Danish magazine a year before. The next year, it published a picture of Muhammad crying, with the tagline “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.” Many Muslims view visual depictions of Muhammad as provocative or even blasphemous. The Grand Mosque of Paris and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, among other similar religious bodies, filed slander charges at the time, but a French court cleared the paper.

How was the magazine targeted in the past?
The magazine’s offices were set on fire by a Molotov cocktail in November 2011 after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad saying “100 lashes of the whip if you don’t die laughing.” The firebomb forced the publication to relocate to their current offices in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Editorial staff were often threatened: The magazine’s director, Stephane Charbonnier (better known to readers under his illustration pen name of Charb), had a personal bodyguard. A French man was arrested in 2012 after he called on a jihadist site to have Mr. Charbonnier decapitated. Mr. Charbonnier was among those killed Wednesday.

What has the magazine published recently that might have provoked the attack?
It’s unclear, though the magazine hasn’t relented on its critiques of radical Islam. In the last edition, Charb drew a foreboding cartoon. Under a headline “Still no terrorist deaths in France,” he depicted a jihadist soldier carrying an AK-47 rifle saying, “Wait! We’ve until the end of January to present our wishes.”

SOURCE: http://blogs.wsj.com/briefly/2015/01/07/what-is-charlie-hebdo-and-why-was-the-magazine-targeted-the-short-answer/

Want everyone on DU to get a heads-up: Charlie Hebdo went after every religion.

[Mass]

1. Thanks, and you are perfectly correct - Charlie Hebdo is an irreverent left wing paper, not

Here is a drawing of Cabu, one of the cartoonists who died today (as you can see, very anti-religious authorities, but each religion).

[Octafish]

3. It is Black Wednesday: 12 Journalists -- including 4 cartoonists -- were murdered.

I heard Steve Inskeep on NPR report that the murderers called out targeted employees over the Public Address system. Something in his inflection bothered me, as if he was emphasizing an angle that will be re-emphasized and catapaulted in the coming days -- the methodology of terrorism is there, so we need to crack down on freedom here.

[msongs]

2. weak religions and people insecure in their faith lash out at any criticism nt

[Octafish]

4. Excellent observation.

Here's an excellent source of nutrition I heard online yesterday, a program from Krista Tippett "On Being":

Sharon Salzberg and Robert Thurman: Embracing Our Enemies and Our Suffering

The last couple of years or so have been tough...

[uppityperson]

5. Rude Pundit has more on recent cartoons.

http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2015/01/in-brief-conservatives-need-to-be.html


There is no excuse, but there is more to recent cartoons. No excuse for these murders

[Octafish]

6. Thank you. The religious folk I know, including those in the Big 3, like to talk...

...Same for the non-religious folk I know.

Violent types often don't take all that well to discussion. Here's art from another era, a work actually admired by one of its subjects, a conservative with a truly violent approach to international relations:



Glorious Victory: The famous mural depicts the Dulles brothers, the American ambassador Peurifoy, and Eisenhower’s face on a bomb greeting Castillo Armas. Armas seized power in Guatemala in a CIA-orchestrated coup in 1954, by Diego Rivera, 1954.

SOURCE: http://imgur.com/r/PropagandaPosters/clyfecP