Magazine releases special issue decade after attack

10 years after the terrorist attack that killed many of its writers, France’s Charlie Hebdo has released a special story showing the cause.

The situation changed in France on January 7, 2015, which led to the bloody end of the willful ignorance of the Islamic threat.

Brothers Said and Cherif Kouachi held a meeting at the Paris office of the weekly newspaper, killing its photographers Cabu, Wolinski, Charb and Tignous.

At least 12 people were killed by the brothers, including a Muslim policeman who was on duty outside. Two days later they were cornered and shot by police at a billboard business near Charles-de-Gaulle airport.

On the same day they saw Amedy Coulibaly – who was in prison at the same time as Cherif – kill four Jews in the reception of a supermarket in the east of Paris. Coulibaly – who was shot by the police – killed a police officer the day before.

Over the next ten years, Charlie Hebdo continues to publish a weekly edition and has a circulation (print and online) of around 50,000.

It does so from an office which is hidden, and with employees who are protected by security guards.

But in Tuesday’s memorial service, the paper’s main shareholder said its anti-religious spirit was still alive.

“The desire to laugh will never go away,” said Laurent Saurisseau – also known as Riss – a photographer who survived the January 7 attack with a bullet in his shoulder.

“Sarcastic has one quality that has found us in these terrible years – hope. If people want to laugh, it’s because they want to live.

“Laughter, laughter and caricature are all signs of hope,” he wrote.

Also in the special pages of 32 pages are the 40 winners of the cartoon competition on the theme “Laughing at God”.

One has a picture of a photographer asking himself: “Is it okay to take a picture of someone taking a picture of Muhammed?”

The Charlie Hebdo is Hypercacher attack seen now as a dangerous and deadly time in modern France, where – for a while – the fear of Jihadist terrorism became part of everyday life.

In November 2015, there were gunshots at the Bataclan concert hall and nearby bars in Paris. The following July, 86 people were killed on the march to Nice.

Almost 300 French people have been killed in Islamist attacks in the past decade.

Today the frequency has fallen too much, and the defeat of The Islamic State group it means that there is no more support base in the Middle East.

But the killer, who promoted himself online, remains as dangerous in France as anywhere else.

The original targets of the Charlie Hebdo massacre – cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – are now banned from being published anywhere.

In 2020, a French teacher Samuel Paty he was beheaded outside his school by a jihadist after showing one of Charlie’s cartoons during a discussion about freedom of speech.

And this week a trial is being opened in Paris of a Pakistani man who – shortly before Paty’s murder – seriously injured two people with a butcher’s oven in the Paris offices that are thought to still be used by Charlie-Hebdo (and have been there before. it has moved ).

As with every anniversary since 2015, the question being asked again in France is: what – if anything – has changed? And how – if at all – will it survive the great outpouring of international support, who called clearly in the days after the assassination was Je suis Charlie?

This is where the march of two million people through the center of Paris was joined by the leaders of countries and governments from different countries around the world after being invited by the then President François Hollande.

Today, unbelievers say the war is over and done with. The chances of a satirical newspaper starting to attack Islam – the way Charlie Hebdo used frequently and aggressively to attack Christianity and Judaism – are zero.

What’s worse, for these people, is that parts of the French political left are also distancing themselves from Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of being too anti-Islamic and taking positions from the right.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, who heads the French Unbowed party, criticized the weekly as “a pocket carrier for the (right-wing) magazine Valeurs Actuels”, and Sandrine Rousseau of the Greens said Charlie Hebdo was “cynical and sometimes racist.”.

This has led to accusations on the left that he has betrayed the liberal spirit of Je suis Charlie in favor of electoral support among French Muslims.

But speaking in preparation for the memorial, Riss – who counted the dead among his closest friends and says he never goes a day without remembering the time of the attack – refused to give up hope.

“I think so [the Charlie spirit] it is more ingrained in society than one might think. When you talk to people, you feel that there is life. It is a mistake to think that all is lost.

“It’s part of our collective memory.”