10 Years after Charlie Hebdo

The Fight for Free Speech Continues

10 years ago, the Charlie Hebdo attack shook the world. In this video, we dive into the events of that day, the battle for free speech, and the lasting impact on how we talk about religion, censorship, and tolerance. Let’s unpack the hypocrisy, the bravery, and why this fight still matters today.

Transcript:

10 years ago today, 12 people were killed in Paris at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine that, following a proud French tradition, likes to mock everything and everyone.

They died because, in the eyes of extremists, Charlie Hebdo had done the ultimate crime: They had treated Islam like any other idea.

Some minimal background. According to some Muslims, images of Mohammed, let alone mockery of Mohammed, are absolutely prohibited.

You probably think that now I’m gonna say something about why this reading of Islamic rules is incorrect. After all, the Quran doesn’t say anything about portrayals of Mohammed, and Islamic scholars debate the extent and meaning of the rules contained in the Hadiths.

But I’m not going to.

Because it doesn’t matter. Who cares if Islam actually prohibits pictures of Mohammed? It’s like debating Santa Claus’ favorite cookies.

These rules are only relevant for the people who want to be subjected to those rules because they are members of that particular faith.

If you consider yourself a Muslim, and you think god prohibits drawing pictures of Mohammed, don’t draw pictures of Mohammed, don’t buy magazines that include pictures of Mohammed. The rules of a religion should only dictate the lives of the people who voluntarily want to follow them.

So, the attack against Charlie Hebdo was wrong not because the murderers had the wrong understanding of Islam, but because they demonstrated an expectation that everyone should follow the same delusional rules that those extremists embraced for themselves. And this isn’t a guess. Because the massacre wasn’t exactly unexpected. It didn’t happen in a vacuum.

For years Islamic extremists had tried to present themselves as THE representatives of Islam, and dictate how people talk about their religion. That’s why Salman Rushdie spent years in hiding after the publication of the Satanic Verses (I made an entire video on the Satanic Verses affair, there’s a link in the description), and why Danish embassies were attacked after the Danish magazine Jyllands Posten published cartoons of Mohammed. Or why Theo Van Gogh was stabbed to death in the streets of Amsterdam, after making a short film that criticized the treatment of women in Islam.

So this is something that went back decades. And in that time, plenty of people sided NOT with the writers and artists who were being targeted, but instead with the fundamentalists that kept attacking them. Seeing themselves as virtuous and tolerant, people came up with the idea that mocking the beliefs of Islam was the same as having a problem with Muslim human beings.

“Islamophobia” was used to discredit any criticism of the human rights violations in Muslim-majority countries, the situation of women immersed in Muslim societies, or the illiberal values that were being pushed by extremists embedded in some of these communities.

As European and American cities saw people marching with signs calling for the beheading of those who disrespected Islam, useful idiots came out to help them, weaponizing accusations of “racism” to silence critics of this religion, even though the vast majority of the victims of Islamic fundamentalism, are other Muslims.

And so we ended up in a situation where a leftist magazine like Charlie Hebdo, used to attacks from the French far-right, suddenly found itself also being attacked by so-called leftists who, focusing only in identity politics, could not conceive immigrant values and ideas being mocked and satirized in the same way that French and European values and ideas were mocked and satirized.

The massacre in 2015 wasn’t even the first time that they were physically attacked. Back in 2011, after years of dealing with the kind of pathetic lawsuits and criminal complaints that are possible under France’s absence of true free speech, the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed. They had just published an issue criticizing the treatment of women in Islamic nations, and mocking fundamentalism. Their cover showed a picture of Mohammed saying “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter!”… so obviously the reasonable response was to burn down their offices.

Because when somebody calls you a violent zealot, a Molotov cocktail definitely shows that they’re wrong.

It is with that background in mind that we need to go back to the morning of January 7, 2015, as the staff of Charlie Hebdo gathered for an editorial meeting.

They were at their offices located at Nº10 Rue Nicolas-Appert. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you wouldn’t have known that Charlie Hebdo were there. After the firebombing, and finding a new location, it was unthinkable to have sign. That’s why the two cowards first went into the wrong building, before finally making their way to Charlie Hebdo.

They ran into Coco, one the cartoonists at the magazine, and who was right outside with her daughter. At gunpoint they forced her to type in the code, and opened fire through the door as soon as it opened.

It’s a testament to their pointless savagery that the first person they killed was a completely innocent bystander.

Frédéric Boisseau, a 42 year old father of two, a maintenance worker sitting at the reception, and who probably didn’t even realize what happened.

The two shooters then took Coco upstairs, and went with her to the meeting room.

They first shot Franck Brinsolaro, the police officer tasked with protecting Stephane Charbonnier, better known as Charb, and who was the editor of Charlie Hebdo.

Then they called 5 cartoonists by name: Charb, Cabu, Wolin, Tignous, and Honoré

And shot them one by one.

Then they just kept shooting.

They killed columnists Bernard Maris and Elsa Cayat. Copy editor Moustapha Ourrad,and Michel Renaud, who was only visiting the offices as a guest.

By sheer luck, hiding under a table during the chaos of those 5-10 minutes of constant shooting, some of the people present, Coco included, survived.

As the shooters were leaving, a police car showed up. That’s when they killed their last victim. A Muslim. Police officer Ahmed Merabet.

A couple of days later the scum who shot up the Charlie Hebdo offices, died like cowards, hiding behind hostages.

Parallel to all of this, an associate of theirs had also gone into action.

He murdered Clarissa Jean-Philippe, a 27-year old policewoman who had been on the job for two weeks.

Then he took hostages at a Kosher supermarket, where he went on to kill 4 more people after he identified them as jews:

Philippe Braham, a 45 year old sales executive.

Yohan Cohen, a 22-year old student who worked at the supermarket,

Yoav Hattab, a 21 year old student from Tunisia,

And Francois-Michel Saada, a 64 year old retiree.

Then, for the first time in his life, the scum who killed these four innocent people did the first useful thing he ever did. And died.

Right after the attacks, people pretended to unite around the cause of free speech.

And I say “pretended”, because they didn’t really mean it.

While people were marching through France with “Je suis Charlie” signs, others were being arrested for facebooks posts in which they expressed support for the attacks. The French comedian Dieudonné, who is very pro-Islam, and a huge critic of Israel, sometimes offensively so, was charged with “supporting terrorism” for making a joke on Facebook at the expense of the victims of the attack.

Now, as someone who supports Charlie Hebdo, and who has shown the drawings of Mohammed in this video, it’s not nice to know that, before the bodies were cold, there were people justifying what happened, or mocking the victims. But the idea that their expression of those views should get them imprisoned is obscene. And any system that tolerates these punishments for speech, simply doesn’t have freedom of speech.

And the French government wasn’t unique in this hypocrisy. In fact, the private photo-ops done by government officials after the massacre, supposedly in support of free speech and diversity of ideas, were filled with representatives of countries that had no respect for free speech whatsoever before the attacks, and who didn’t exactly suffer a dramatic change of heart after the massacre.

Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, Algeria… even Turkey was there. Which is funny when you consider that that same government would later start a criminal process against Charlie Hebdo for mocking Erdogan, the president of Turkey.

And that’s not all. When in 2020 Samuel Paty, a French school teacher, was beheaded for showing his students a cartoon of Mohammed during a class about free speech, what the Turkish and the Pakistani governments did was to blame the French. Not because they cared about Muslims (after all both of them have no problem with the genocide of Uighur Muslims carried out by China) but because, like all authoritarians, they could exploit religion for political gain.

And let’s not forget many of the “classical liberal”, “free speech warriors”, “facts don’t care about your feelings”, gaggle of assholes, who love to talk about “cancel culture”, censorship and “wokeism”, but who have openly embraced and promoted the silencing and censorship of people criticizing the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. And that’s because, for them, free speech only mattered when the things they wanted to say were in jeopardy.

So with the benefit of hindsight, what can we learn from what happened in France?

Considering my dislike of religion in general, and Islam in particular, you might think that I see it as a confirmation of all of my thoughts about religion. And to an extent it is, after all, you don’t get religious killings without religion.

Religion is always going to make people believe irrational things. By definition; I mean, faith is belief in the absence of proof. So it should never be the business of the government or society to protect those beliefs at the expense of those who don’t share them.

If I worship my dog, and believe that he is a holy and should never be insulted, I shouldn’t have the right to demand that you also comply with that belief.

His Holiness

But that’s exactly what’s pushed by the people who support censorship and “hate speech” laws protecting “religious feelings”.

Because these laws, and their supporters, elevate religion into a special category of ideas that cannot be challenged, or ridiculed.

If you’re a Marxist, there is NOTHING you can do if I write an entire book attacking Marx. I can call him a rapist, racist, pedophile, war criminal, and nobody who’s offended by that can do anything… except explaining why or how they believe I’m wrong. And I say Marx, but you can replace that with Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Darwin, or Jefferson. Basically nobody is under an obligation to protect your feelings about your own ideas.

But if you call Mohammed a pedophile, even by referencing the widespread belief that he married a 9 year old, there are Western nations where you can be convicted of a crime. Like Austria, which convicted a woman for saying precisely that. And then the European Court of Justice confirmed that horrendous decision.

I guess telling extremists: “Don’t worry guys. We’ll take it from here” is one way to deal with extremism.

Because what they’ve done is to allow the punishment of blasphemy.

And it’s not just Islam.

It’s the same thing done by the Catholic Church in Poland against “blasphemers”.

BUT… it’s not just religion. At their core, many people, many of whom are not religious, share the totalitarian idea that some things just cannot be said.

It’s a widespread understanding, not only in the Arab world, but everywhere, that we simply should not have freedom of speech. More and more people, from all races and creeds, from all political stripes, support the idea that sometimes speech = violence, so that censorship and repression are the only solution. And even though Americans have the 1^st Amendment to the constitution guaranteeing Free Speech, they definitely shouldn’t take a victory lap here. US politicians propose, and often pass, incredibly restrictive, laws against freedom of speech, and it’s only thanks to litigation that many of those laws end up being struck down. They’re not even unpopular laws.

The upcoming Trump administration has already expressed their desire to criminalize flag burning, and him, and many other US politicians, both from the left and the right, have supported laws against expressions of so-called “anti-semitism”, in an attempt at shutting down pro-Palestinian activists.

In fact, it’s really fascinating to hear how the same people who criticized the censoring or banning of images of Mohammed, scoffing at the idea that they were racist or “Islamophobic”, and who feign indignation at the idea that someone would be criminally convicted for insulting Mohammed, use almost the exact same arguments to justify punishing people who call Israel an apartheid state, or who argue Zionism is a racist ideology.

Let me tell you about Zineb El Rhazoui.

She is a former member of the Charlie Hebdo staff, and she avoided the massacre by coincidence, because she was on holiday that day. After the massacre, because of her activism for human rights, particularly for Muslim women, the French government gave her the Simone Veil Prize, in recognition for her fight for women’s rights.

In 2023, when Zineb’s commitment to human rights made her focus her attention on the situation of Palestinians in Gaza, and she used her social media presence to expose the extent of the war crimes committed by Israel, the award was withdrawn.

And it’s not just about losing awards. People in the UK, Germany, France, Australia, and, of course, the United States, have all been targeted either legally, or through harassment, for expressing opinions about Israel that some believe NOBODY should have the right to say. And they want to make sure that the people who do express those views, act as a warning for the rest.

Because FEAR is what is all about.

The cowards who carried out the massacre knew full well that they would never be able to kill EVERYBODY who mocks Mohammed, or who draws pictures of him. They just knew that they needed to kill enough people to scare the rest into submission. .

But violence isn’t the only way to scare people into silence.

Even in countries where you have a good chance of not being convicted for these “speech crimes”, or where the sentences are small, the process itself is the punishment. It keeps other people in line. They know that you can beat the wrap, but you can’t beat the ride, and nobody wants to risk spending years of their life, and thousands of Euros in attorney’s fees, just to have a Pyrrhic victory at the end telling them that they were right all along.

And I know that you might think that this is different, because the legal process and a criminal sentence are not the same as a terrorist act or a murder. And yes, obviously, being shot is worse than being incarcerated, but at that point we’re only debating about how drastic the punishment should be, and not about whether the punishment should exist to begin with.

That’s why what the surviving staff of Charlie Hebdo did after the massacre was so important. They had been on the receiving end of lawfare and warfare, and they knew that once #JeSuisCharlie was no longer fashionable, they’d be once again left at the mercy of extremists. But they refused to bow down.

With Mohammed in the cover, saying “All is Forgiven”, the staff of Charlie Hebdo showed that while rebels might die, rebellion will not.

They poked fun at the killings, and even called out the fact that this small massacre had received much more coverage than the deaths of hundreds of Nigerians at the hands of Boko Haram.

They couldn’t overlook the fact that, in the eyes of the world media, the lives of a handful of lefty French cartoonists dying at the hands of Islamic extremists, was much more tragic than the deaths of hundreds of Nigerian civilians, also at the hands of Islamic extremists.

In her famous essay on the Russian Revolution, criticizing the abuses she witnessed in the Soviet Union, Rosa Luxemburg wrote the most concise and straightforward explanation of what our understanding of freedom should be:

“Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. “

And that’s really the lesson that we have to learn not just from that savage attack 10 years ago, but also from all of the repression that continues to this day, even if it’s not always as bloody.

When you accept censorship, restrictions on your ability to receive or express ideas, you are sharpening the blade of your own guillotine. Because even if you dislike the ideas that are being censored, it is only a matter of time before that repression targets something close to you.

But there is hope.

Nothing destroys authoritarians like laughing at them. Laughter demolishes the house of cards that supports tyranny. And although violence and repression are powerful weapons, they are nothing compared to the will of a free people.

If we look back in history, one of the things that were most shocking about the rise of the nazis, long before the war and the extermination started, was their embrace of obscurantism. By publicly burning books, they were showing the world that from that point on, only one view of the world would be accepted, and everything else would disappear. Heinrich Heine’s famous line from Almansor, “Where they burn books, they will end up burning human beings”, written in 1823, ended up being truly prophetic.

So in 1942, in a letter to the book sellers of America, in the midst of the bloodiest war the world has ever seen, FDR used those demonstrations of barbarism to explain why, in the end, the barbarians were doomed in their crusade.

“People die, but books never die. No man and no force can take from the world the ideas that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny of every kind.”

Books are weapons in the war of ideas.