Pens, Swords

Attendance was too high to count, said city officials in Paris. Perhaps as many as three million people; the NYT reports over a million.

After much US media consensus that Charlie Hebdo's staff had been irresponsible, Celia Farber thought of interviewing someone who knows the French cartooning scene: ex-pat R. Crumb.

Farber opened the conversation with these observations—

We don't have a context for this tradition here, merciless, political satire. One thing I keep noticing is commentators here are pointing out that the cartoons were very offensive and insulting. It's as if we don’t understand that was by design. Very intentionally offensive, and very clear about why that couldn’t be compromised. That’s the part we don't get, as Americans. It's like, "Why did they have to be so mean?"

These guys were not trying not to offend, and that’s what an American media-conditioned mind cannot understand. The idea that yes, you offend those who abuse power.

American underground comics of the 1970s, said Crumb, took that sort of stance—

... But today, I don't think there’s anything like that now in the US. The thing about Charlie Hebdo is that it started in 1969. The gang of guys that worked for that magazine, they just kept at that for decades. ...The cartoonists are mostly older guys. There is lots of critique of the left also. They say the left is hypocritical, bullshitters and opportunists, and all that. But generally I would say there's a leftish sympathy in Charlie Hebdo. But they just came out with that every week. Every week. And people would just look at it and laugh, "Oh, you know those guys, those crazy guys. They’re outrageous."

Writing from London, Olivier Tonneau posted a long but interesting piece on the French context that British and American media overlook— .

.. the attack becomes all the more tragic and absurd: two young French Muslims of Arab descent have not assaulted the numerous extreme-right wing newspapers that exist in France (Minute, Valeurs Actuelles) who ceaselessly amalgamate Arabs, Muslims and fundamentalists, but the very newspaper that did the most to fight racism. And to me, the one question that this specific event raises is: how could these youth ever come to this level of confusion and madness? What feeds into fundamentalist fury? How can we fight it?
...

...France is home today to many Arabs, some of them Muslims, who were chased away from their home country by fundamentalists as early as the 1960s. They were exposed to racism of course, especially in the workplace – it’s the story that goes back to the Middle Ages of workers who fear the threat of outsiders – and also bullied by the police and treated like second-class citizens. They fought for equality and justice, with the support of many on the left of the political spectrum, for instance during the 1983 Marche des beurs. Believe it or not, none of the protagonists of the march were making religious claims; they were not walking as Muslims but as French citizens who demanded that France truly provides them with Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité.

Tonneau makes this case—

Let us be clear: fundamentalism is not caused by immigration from Muslim countries. It is very easy to demonstrate this: Muslims migrated in France as early as the 1950s and the issue of fundamentalism only arose in the last fifteen years. Moreover, among the young men who enlist to fight for Daesh, many are actually disenfranchised white youth with no familial links to Islam. Fundamentalism is something new, that exercises a fascination on disenfranchised French youth in general – not on Muslims in general. In fact, the older generation of French Muslims is terrified by the phenomenon. After the killing of Charlie Hebdo, Imams demanded that the government take action against websites and networks propagating fanaticism.

Harry Shearer noted how satire and hate speech were conflated by the many Americans convinced that mockery of powerful institutions and people equals stereotyping groups of people. Yet people seem so "confused" as to need reminding that, "When you make fun of religious figures who have sway over millions of people," it's satire, not hate speech.
But considering the unqualified political support received by another recent target of intimidation, Shearer says that instead of being "Charlie," a better bet is to say, "Je suis Sony."