Oh Sure, NOW You're Charlie

I confess not to having been familiar with specific humor and political satire magazines of  the world prior to last week's attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris.  However, the name of that magazine rang a bell with me, and now I kind of wonder, as I see a million French people marching in the streets with their "Je Suis Charlie Hebdo" signs, where they had been before the attack.

What I remembered was that a few years back, then-French President Jacques Chirac was terribly critical of the magazine for having reprinted those famous Danish cartoons deemed anti-Muslim.  Now, France doesn't exactly have a sterling record of freedom of speech -- it is actually against the law there to deny the Holocaust, and plenty of francs have been paid in fines by its citizens for saying offensive things about one group or another.

That is how I remembered Charlie Hebdo, and a little searching of past newspapers helped me recall how vigorously the French government had tried to bring it down, and prosecute the magazine, and how hard they had tried to use the absurd anti-insult and anti-free-speech laws of this supposed free country -- to close the same Charlie Hebdo it now tries to defend.

I could point you to dozens of articles of past years documenting the efforts of the Chirac and, now, the Hollande administrations to shut off free speech by using the courts to close Charlie Hebdo for good.  Now, I don't even know if anyone is left at the magazine to publish again.  I know that they're saying things about actually printing their next issue on time, and certainly the world hopes that it can.

But I can't help thinking that whoever those people are, who are left at Charlie Hebdo to show up to work and produce that next issue, they must have looked out at the million Frenchmen who now take the time to get off their French butts and claim loyalty to all that Charlie Hebdo represents and, on looking at the million, said the French equivalent of "Oui, glad you're out there now, but where the %*(#$ were you when Chirac and Hollande tried to prosecute us?"

And I truly hope that when (and if) the next issue appears, their most biting satirical pen points out the irony of Hollande standing strong with the leaders of the free world claiming that he, too, "is Charlie Hebdo", after his government kept trying to silence it.

Oh yeah, not all the leaders of the free world were there.  Obama had two football games to watch.  Maybe he read a translation of Charlie Hebdo at halftime.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton