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French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has a long history of doing its best to offend people. English actor and comedian Stephen Fry’s opinion of people being offended is “So fucking what?” Unfortunately, Islamic extremists decided being offended gave them license to murder a dozen employees of the magazine.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: January 7, 2015--
The magazine began in 1960 as a monthly under the name Hari-Kiri and was banned briefly the following year, then banned a few more times. The name kept changing to keep ahead of the banning, and the editorial team finally settled on Charlie Hebdo. (Hebdo is short for hebdomadaire, which means “weekly”).
Nothing is sacred in the magazine. It has lampooned everything from victims of Covid to dead children trying to immigrate to France, to Jewish people, to the pope. Its circulation is small, and most people in France consider the magazine too extreme or just plain disgusting. But they mostly do defend its right to exist cuz freeze peach.
The same opinions are not held by some Islamic extremists. Charlie Hebdo claims not to be anti-Islam, but rather anti-extremism. Its writers rightfully go after intolerance, oppression, and violence done in the name of Islam, but in the process push the limits of France’s hate-speech laws, and many critics state the magazine is against the religion as a whole.
Although not strictly banned by the Quran, many Islamic leaders proclaim that creating images of the prophet Muhammad is blasphemy, and militant members of the religion have sought to enforce a ban. In 2012 Charlie Hebdopublished a series of satirical cartoons that depicted Muhammad in unflattering ways. One cartoon showed him nude on all fours with a star over his ass. There was outcry over the publication, and later, violence.
On January 7, 2015, two Muslim brothers of Algerian descent, whose names I won’t acknowledge, entered the Paris headquarters of the magazine and went on a murder spree. They killed a dozen people and wounded 11 others. During the attack the men shouted Allahu akbar, which is Arabic for “God is great.” Over the next three days there were similar attacks across Paris that killed five more people and wounded 11 others. On January 9, the brothers were killed in a shootout with French Armed Forces.
A week after the shooting Charlie Hebdo published “the survivors’ issue.” Normally the magazine’s print run was 60,000, but demand was so high they ended up printing five million copies. Revenue from the issue went toward the families of the victims. After the attack, the phrase Je suis Charlie (I am Charlie) became a rallying cry for freedom of expression.
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