Charlie Hebdo

Charlie Hebdo: In trying to figure out what the Charlie Hebdo massacre means, shouldn't we be interested to know how the killers made sense of their actions? Isn't their motivation relevant? Many will say that we shouldn't dignify the killer outlook by paying attention to their beliefs religious and otherwise . I shouldn't have to point this out but, given the horror of what the Kouachi brothers did, I have no doubt that I need to say it: trying to see how they made sense of their actions does not in any way excuse or mitigate the horror of what they did. Rather, if we are to understand the meaning of the event, factoring-in the outlook of the killers is a necessary piece of the puzzle, according to Rabble. It is not an accident that, once the massacre has been fully condemned, many Muslims and others in France and throughout the world share the brother outrage at Charlie Hebdo treatment of Islam: the revulsion of the brothers at this treatment, far from being idiosyncratic or indeed lunatic, is deeply embedded in the reverence that Muslims have for the Prophet Muhammad and, as such, it is easily understood. How they chose to act upon it, of course, is another matter entirely. In this respect, many reactions of Muslim children and teenagers in Paris suburbs to last week events are telling: whatever they thought of Cherif and Said Kouechi actions, they believed that Charlie Hebdo had been wrong to disrespect the Prophet -- and therefore their religion and their own community. But such concerns tend to be easily dismissed, if they are even heard at all: coming from embattled French Muslims, they are not granted the kind of attention that would inform our analyses and Two jihadists, the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo on January 7, and killed ten of its staff members and two police officers. This much is clear, undebatable, and unquestionably horrible. Then what? It is an attack on freedom of expression, we all say. Many add that it is an attack on journalism. Rick Salutin counters that, no, it is not an attack on journalism but rather on satire. Before asking whether Salutin has it right or wrong, there is a first point to be made, which his analysis illustrates and on which it depends along with all others, including this one : the meaning of the event is not self-evident, transparent, pre-given, but rather it emerges from how the event is analyzed. But how do we decide what it means? What features of the event deserve to be taken into account in our analysis? And who is "we," doing the deciding? At a very basic level, the Kouachi brothers attacked Charlie Hebdo because they believed what they believed; and they came to hold these beliefs through their lifetime of social and political interactions. It is in fact obvious that they didn't give a damn about journalism or satire as such: Charlie could have satirized viciously the Catholic Church and French politicians until the end of time, and the brothers would have been blissfully indifferent. What offended them deeply was a specific thing that Charlie printed, and against which they acted: in their own words, they aimed to avenge the Prophet of Islam. So, they weren't attacking journalism or satire, but rather they were striking back against blasphemy -- but, again, not blasphemy as such, for they couldn't have cared less about blasphemy against some tenet or other of Hinduism or Catholicism. It is, specifically, Charlie blatant disrespect for Islam at least as they understood it that marked it as their target. The fact that Charlie Hebdo also has no respect for other religions is as undeniable as it is irrelevant to the killer motives. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.