Protecting French Synagogues and ... Mosques
"What made (Charbonnier) feel the need to drag the team into overdoing it. [He was responsible for] dragging the team [into a firestorm of Islamist vengeance and death]."
"He shouldn't have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012."
"I really hold it against you [Stephane Charbonnier]."
Henri Roussel, 80, founding editor of Charlie Hebdo
"Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do than to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him. My disappointment is immense."
Richard Malka, Charlie Hebdo lawyer
US Navy The Charles de Gaulle, France's first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.The satirical magazine that had more critics, disgusted at its sophomore-level crude depictions of lampooning what the journalists and cartoonists felt were over-egoed and hypocritical figures attached to political parties, celebrities, religions, ideologies and any element of society that happened to raise their collective ire, has suddenly been transformed into a heroic, liberty champion of free speech and secular rights.
Their usual readership numbering in the tens of thousands for one of their regular printing runs, now under duress with the catastrophic loss of personnel and office space, they managed to produce, in donated space and equipment an astonishing print run of tens of millions of copies, sold out before they hit the stands, people waiting eagerly in line before dawn to capture their celebrated copy of the magazine.
Charlie Hebdo in! Charlie Hebdo is both bitter and triumphant. Their stinging bravado has cost them dearly, those who have been lost to them will never be replaced. Those who are left, though defiant, will be exceedingly aware and perhaps more careful; the first cover of the post-atrocity issue means different things to different people, but some might construe the weeping image of Mohammad and the forgiving caption as a sell-out.
To the Islamists everywhere the cartoon image of their sacred figure remains an intolerable sacrilege, irrespective of the message. Just as much because Islamists love to be outraged and raging against the defiling of their Prophet by the Infidel has become their default position. Rage turns to threats, and threats inevitably are transformed by the warriors of Islam into violence begetting an invitation to the Grim Reaper to prepare to welcome unfortunates into his deep dark Hades.
So, now that France is effectively in lock-down, and its citizens are by turns defiant and fearful, its government is prepared to return the finger that the Islamic State proffered by dispatching an aircraft carrier to the U.S.-led air alliance flying over Syria and Iraq. The situation in the Middle East, stated President Francois Hollande, aboard the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier "justifies the presence of our aircraft carrier."
As in Mali, France is capable of joining a coalition or going it alone; it will not be cowed into submission by a passel of fanatics flying the black banner of Islamist hatred of the West. The crowing triumph of Yemen's al-Qaeda that the massacre at Charlie Hebdo represented "vengeance for the Prophet", only spurs France on to face its enemy head on. Better, after all, that it do so in Syria and Iraq than in France.
But it is prepared to do so in France as well, with its deployment of ten thousand troops and 120,000 security forces to protect its sensitive sites vulnerable to further Islamist attacks: Jewish schools and synagogues, travel hubs and ... mosques? Why yes, of course, mosques.
Labels: France, Islamism, Terrorism
posted by Pieface @ Saturday, January 17, 2015
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