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It's been another exciting year for international law at Oxford University Press. We have put together some highlights from 2015 to reflect on the developments that have taken place, from scholarly commentary on current events to technology updates and conference discussions.

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In 2016, Little, Brown will publish a manifesto about free speech by Stephane Charbonnier, the slain editor of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Charbonnier, known as “Charb”, had finished the work just days before he was killed in an attack at the publication’s offices in Paris. Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia and the True Enemies of Free Expression will include a preface by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker.

“Freedom of speech is the foundation of our business, and Stephane Charbonnier was one of free speech’s great proponents,” said Michael Pietsch, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, parent company of Little, Brown, in a statement. “We’re proud to publish this vital book.”

An effective counter-terrorism policy requires the identification of domestic or international threats to a government, its civil society, and its institutions. Enemies of the state can be internal or external. Communist regimes of the twentieth century, for example, focused on internal enemies.

The post The ideology of counter-terrorism appeared first on OUPblog.

Graphic novels have a lot more prizes than they once did, including literary awards that help validate the medium. Awards season is well upon us, and I’ve been way behind in noting some of the most important.

§ This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki continued to barnstorm all the honors by winning the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize, perhaps th emost prestigious stand-alone comics prize in the US. The jury cited the book thusly

“This One Summer,” says the jury, “is a beautifully drawn, keenly observed story. It is told with a fluid line and a sensitive eye to the emblematic moments that convey character, time, and place—the surf at night, the sound of flip-flops, a guarded sigh—all at the meandering pace of a summer’s vacation. The Tamakis astutely orchestrate the formal complexities of the graphic novel in the service of an evocative, immersive story. At first blush a coming of age story centered on two young girls, the book belongs equally to all its cast of characters, any of whom feel realized enough to have supported a narrative in their own right. Striking, relatable, and poignant, this graphic novel lingers with readers long after their eyes have left the pages.”

Richard McGuire’s Here was named an Honoree:

Of “Here” the jury says, “Making literal the idiom ‘if these walls could talk…’ McGuire’s ‘Here’ curates the long history of events transpiring in one location. Through the subtle transposition of objects and individuals in a room, the book teaches us that space is defined over time. … Evoking our longing for place, the book performs this cumulative effect for the reader, by layering people, experiences, and events in the context of a single environment.”

The Prize is presented by Penn State and is named after the author of what are now accepted to be early example of standalone graphic novels. (Ward donated his papers to the university.) This year’s jury consisted of Joel D. Priddy, Veronica Hicks, Brandon Hyde, Brent Book and Jonathan E. Abel. MOre information on the prize, the jury and past winners can be found here.

§ The Cartoonist Studio Prize, presented by Slate Magazine and the Center for Cartoon Studies, was also presented a while back. And the graphic novel winners Here by Richard McCguire. (Do you sense a pattern here?) The webcomic prize was won by Winston Rowntree for Watching. The prize comes with a $1000 cash award for each. This year’s jury consisted of Slate Book Review editor Dan Kois; CCS fellow Sophie Yanow; and guest judge, cartoonist Paul Karasik. You can see all the runners up in the above link.

(This result has been sitting in my links for a month; apologies and congratulations to the winners.)

§ While This One Summer and Here have scooped up a bunch of prizes, you must be wondering about the third most honored graphic novel of 2014, Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant. Well, Chast won the Heinz Award, which is present to six “exceptional Americans, for their creativity and determination in finding solutions to critical issues.” Along with glory, the prize includes $250,000 in cash.

” ‘Floored’ does not begin to describe it,” Chast says of her reaction. “I don’t think I’ve fully absorbed it yet.”

§ As you may have heard, the PEN American Center, a literary organization that promotes free speech, presented French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with the PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award, and all hell broke loose. Many prominent authors protested the award on the grounds that Charlie Hebdo is offensive. You can read many of those comments here. Other authors, including Neil Gaiman, Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and Salmon Rushdie filled the tables at the awards gala vacated by the protesters, and defended Charlie Hebdo as an equal opportunity satirist. You can read all about that here.

While no one in the kerfuffle seems to think that being offensive deserves death, the dissenters felt that giving Charlie Hebdo an award intensified “the anti-Islamic,
anti-Maghreb, anti-Arab sentiments already prevalent in the Western world.”

The pro-Charlie group felt that, as Gaiman put it, “The Charlie Hebdo cartoonists are getting an award for courage. They continued putting out their magazine after the offices were firebombed [in 2011], and the survivors have continued following the murders.”

There aren’t any easy answers here. Terrorists acts are committed to create terror and confusion and turn ordinary people on both sides into radicals. In this goal, at least, the Hebdo attacks were a rousing success.

In the above photo Charlie Hebdo Editor-in-Chief Gerard Biard accepts the award as Alain Mabanckou looks on. AP photo by Beowulf Sheehan

And another event, this one a screening of a documentary about one of Charlie Hebdo’s earlier controversies followed by a talk with Art Spigelman and Francoise Mouly:

With TOUGH BEING LOVED BY JERKS, director Daniel Leconte (Fidel Castro: L’enfance d’un chef) offers a real-time account of one of the most important trials in the 21st century and dives deep into the political, ideological and media-related stakes of the trial with all key participants. The film features lawyers, witnesses, the media, editorial conferences, demonstrations of support, as well as the reactions of the prosecutors and of Muslim countries. Given new relevance after the January 7, 2015, attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices, which left 12 dead and 11 wounded, TOUGH BEING LOVED BY JERKS also features candid interviews (and rarely seen behind-the-scenes moments) with acclaimed Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, such as Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Wolinski, who died on January 7. (C) Kino Lorber

 Followed by a conversation with Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos.

Location:
SVA Theater 
333 West 23rd Street between 8th and 9th Ave. 
Click here for directions

On 6 January 2015, I led a major event in the British Parliament at Westminster to launch and promote a recently completed survey of academic analysis and its policy implications, Religion, Security, and Global Uncertainties. The following day in Paris, the Houachi brothers shot dead twelve people in their attack on the magazine Charlie Hebdo, professedly to avenge its alleged insults to the Prophet Muhammad.

The post Religion and security after the Charlie Hebdo shootings appeared first on OUPblog.

In the days following the terrorist attack in Paris on 11 January, thousands of people took to the street in solidarity with the victims and in defense of free speech, and many declared ‘Je suis Charlie’ on social media around the world. The scene is familiar with what we have seen in several other countries in the aftermath of major terrorist attacks.

The post Trust in the aftermath of terror appeared first on OUPblog.

The recent attacks on Charlie Hebdo, the siege in Sydney, and the Canadian parliament attack have heightened fears of the type of home-grown security threats that had been realised earlier in the July 2005 London bombings. Looking to the future, security agencies and governments have warned grimly of battle hardened jihadists returning home from Middle Eastern and North African theatres of war. For better or worse, robust internal security, heightened surveillance, and preventative law enforcement targeting suspect individuals and communities have been presented as unavoidably necessary for democratic states the world over. But in searching for security, these liberal democracies are now confronted with difficult questions about how to provide public safety and state security within the framework of the rule of law. If there are enemies within, how can they be dealt with while still preserving the civil liberties and rights of all citizens? Can the state zero in on a particular segment of the population without actively and illegally discriminating against them? One particularly thorny issue is what to do about those returning from jihadist wars. Can they be stripped of their citizenship and barred from re-entering their old homeland? Is citizenship a privilege to be revoked at will, or does the state have a responsibility to all of its citizens, no matter how unsavoury? Do seemingly exceptional times permit legally exceptional measures?

While the reality of today’s terrorist violence has upped the stakes, these legal dilemmas are not new. Prior to World War I, European states also tussled with the dilemma of what to do with citizens they suspected of disloyal or treasonous intent. One of the central preoccupations of nineteenth century Germany, for example, was what to do with elements of the population viewed as internal enemies of the state, so-called Reichsfeinde. The communities coming under suspicion then might seem surprising today; Catholics, socialists, French, Danes, and Poles. Individuals from these groups who weren’t citizens were simply expelled from the country, but for those who had the rights of a citizen, the situation was far trickier. Germany prided itself on its reputation as a state governed by the rule of law, and the law explicitly forbade capricious measures like expelling citizens. How could a constitutional state find legal ways to put pressure on its internal enemies?

To deal with these domestic threats, German authorities had to be far more inventive, using a host of strictly speaking legal but nonetheless punitive measures to harass suspect populations. Irredentists Danes in the North with German citizenship were targeted for economic ruination; French-speaking Germans were shifted out of their jobs in the militarily sensitive railways of Alsace-Lorraine; Protestant German colonists were sent to dilute the Polish complexion of the east; Jesuits were banned from the Catholic Ruhr; and socialists were pushed out of Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig into the countryside. New laws were passed and existing laws were reinterpreted to allow for new repressive uses. The custodians of the German Rechtsstaat sought safety not by side-stepping the law, but by passing and enforcing coercive laws that affected broad segments of the population, in the hope that the actual targets of the laws would be amongst the number affected.

Did these rather blunt internal security measures work? No. In fact, all of this was highly counterproductive. The attitude of Germany’s Danes, Poles, and French towards the German state hardened after being targeted by these legal forms of oppression, while both the socialist and Catholic political milieux went from strength to strength as a result of the experience of being suppressed. Frustrated in particular by his lack of success against the socialists, Bismarck even sought to have their citizenship revoked in the hope of forcing a definitive reckoning with those he saw as dangerous revolutionaries. But this didn’t lead to the destruction of German socialism, but to Bismarck’s own political downfall. The German constitutional state, flexible enough to offer its own forms of legally sanctioned persecution, always baulked at attempts to use unlawful or exceptional measures, despite the air of crisis that surrounded them. Even the measures they did take did little except alienate the broader population.

In their willingness to use violence to pursue their political goals, the jihadists of today are unlike the perceived threats of nineteenth-century Germany. Yet the response of constitutional states bears a remarkable resemblance to these earlier measures. No rolling state of exception or martial law has been declared. Instead, new laws are passed and old ones have been retooled to deal with newly arising threats. Now, as then, the constitutional state, governed by law, has found its own ways to apply pressure to its domestic enemies. Bespoke law, some of it good, some of it horrifying, has stretched but has not severed the commitment to legal and constitutional limits. Warts and all, the liberal constitutional state has shown itself capable of mounting its own stiff defence.

Headline image credit: Security fence by cobalt123. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr

The post Fighting the threat within appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Since the attacks on Charlie Hebdo on 7 January, the saying (wrongly attributed to Voltaire), “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” has become a motto against radicalism. Unfortunately, this virtuous defense of freedom of speech is not only inefficient but is backfiring, as demonstrated by protests in Muslim countries against the latest issue of Charlie Hebdo, which was released in the aftermath of the attacks.

The challenge of global jihad in Europe is broader and is the result of the lack of symbolic integration of Islam within liberal democracies, as well as the preeminence of a global theology of intolerance which Al Qaida and ISIS have used to build their political ideology.

First, symbolic integration of Islam is different from socio-political integration of Muslims. European politicians have addressed the former through different educational and socio-economic policies, without paying attention to the latter, which refers to the recognition of Islam as part of the respective national culture and history of European countries. This lack of symbolic integration has translated into increasing discriminatory policies vis-à-vis a number of religious practices, from the use of the hijab and the building of mosque minarets, to circumcision and halal food, all deemed “illiberal” and “uncivic.” This discrimination leads a lot of Muslims, even the secular ones, to think that they are not accepted as full members of European societies. This amplifies anti-Islamic discourse, which is no longer the monopoly of extreme right wing movements, but comes to be shared by all political actors from the right to the left.

Islam is presented as an external religion that threatens the core liberties of European democracies and therefore needs to be limited or circumvented. At the same time, since World War II, most European democracies have limited freedom of speech and press when it propagates racial hatred and negation of the Holocaust. That is why, since the Danish cartoons controversy of 2006, some Muslims have argued they should be protected by these same laws, drawing a line between legitimate critique and insult.

Although the distinction can be blurry, Charlie Hebdo satires have not always been funny critiques but blatant insults to the basic creeds of Muslims. This incapacity to differentiate between critique and insult has been played out by radical groups like Al Qaida and ISIS, both of whom seek to recruit members from Western democracies. Both justify global jihad for the sake of Islam, which must be saved from the decadent western enemy. Because this “us versus them” mentality is very accessible to young Muslims everywhere, through the internet and other social media, it is no surprise that this rhetoric resonates with their daily experience in European societies and therefore make some of them easy recruits for global jihad.

In this regard, the preeminence of Salafi-jihadi discourses, which have monopolized the debate on “true” Islam, not only among Muslims but also in the eyes of the general population across Europe, reinforces the antinomy between the West and Islam. This discourse operates on the conceptualization of the “West” as a threat to Islam, not only through military means, but most importantly through attacks on Islamic creeds and practices.

As an inverted image, “Islam” in the eyes of most Europeans is perceived exactly in the same terms: a religion that is a threat to western values. In this sense, the clash is not between civilizations but between negative, inverted perceptions of Islam and Muslims. It will require courage on the part of European politicians, media, and public intellectuals to address Islam as a legitimate part of national communities in order to diminish the sense of alienation that can make some Muslims more vulnerable to the strategy of Al Qaida or ISIS.

The second reason why freedom of the press is irrelevant in the fight against global jihad is the powerful presence of the Salafi version of Islam in the religious market of ideas. This is problematic because, even as most Muslims in the West are not Salafis and the majority of Salafis are not jihadists, groups like Al Qaida and ISIS have a Salafi background. It means that their theological view comes from a particular interpretation of Islam rooted in Wahhabism, an eighteenth-century doctrine adopted by the Saudi kingdom.

In the West, Salafis incite people to withdraw from mainstream society, which is depicted as impure, in order to live by strict rules. These reactionary interpretations do contain similarities with jihadist discourse. So even if Salafism is, in itself, no root cause of radicalization into violence, it serves as the religious framework of radical groups such as ISIS. While there is no doubt that the majority of Muslims do not follow this radical strategy, it is difficult to demystify this theology of intolerance from a traditional Islamic perspective.

In other words, there is an urgent need for Muslim clerics everywhere to systematically overpower the influence of politicized interpretations of Islam, whether through employing the Internet, social media, or other educational tools.

Addressing the need for the symbolic integration of Islam, as well as the global revival of the Islamic tradition, requires Muslim leaders, secular politicians, and lay citizens to share responsibility and common action to overcome the “us versus them” mentality which is at the foundation of all extremism.

Regretfully, the political and religious consensus that dominated the demonstrations against terror in France could have been a symbolic first step in this direction, but is rapidly dissipating.

Image Credit: “Islam.” Photo by Firas. CC by NC-SA 2.0 via Flickr. 

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A few notes on Charlie Hebdo related matters, aside from the ongoing sorrow and tumult. Noah Berlatsky has a very fine analysis of the past year’s covers in terms of how much they mock religions and their satirical intent. Suffice to say that a lot of the satire goes right over non-French people’s heads. Of course satire that localized is easy to misinterpret or interpret according to local standards. It’s complicated.

Also, Publishers Weekly (disclosure: where I work as an editor) has made this week’s issue free to read and it includes a section of publishers showing support for free speech. In a statement the magazine said “Freedom of expression is core to our values and fundamental to the world of books. Whether publisher or author, bookstore or library, agency or citizen of the world: Nous Sommes Tous Charlie.”

Signal crimes change how we think, feel, and act — altering perceptions of the distribution of risks and threats in the world. Sometimes, as with the recent assassinations and mass shootings in France, sending a message is the intention of the criminal act. The attackers’ target selection of the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine, and that of taking and killing Jewish hostages, was deliberately designed to send messages to individuals and institutions.

Researchers examine social reactions to different kinds of crime events and the signals they send to a range of audiences. The aim is to determine how and why certain kinds of incidents and situations generate fear and anxiety responses that travel widely and, by extension, how processes of social reaction to such events are managed and influenced by the authorities.

The murder of Lee Rigby in London in 2013 can be understood as a signal crime as it triggered concern amongst the general public and across security institutions, owing to the macabre innovation of the killers in undertaking a brutally simple form of assault. Analysis of the crime has identified a number of key components to the overarching process of social reaction. Observing how events have unfolded in France, the collective reactions have followed a similar trajectory to what happened in London.

In the wake of both incidents there was ‘spontaneous community mobilisation’ as ordinary people sought to engage in collective sense-making of what had actually happened, coupled with collective action ‘to do something’ to evidence their opposition. Widespread use of social media platforms helped spread rumours as attempts were made to follow updates in the story; rapid moves were made to secondary conflicts as acts of criminal retaliation were committed against symbolic Muslim targets.

One prominent type of intervention evident in both cases has been a call from senior figures within security institutions and governments to urgently provide the authorities with enhanced legal powers, especially for digital and online surveillance. This is part of a wider reaction pattern that we might label ‘the legislative reflex’. This term seeks to capture how – following a terrorist atrocity and the public concern it induces – politicians who need to be seen to be ‘doing something’ almost automatically reach for new laws as their principal response. The presence of this reflex is evidenced by the fact that since 9/11, in the United Kingdom we have seen the introduction of a significant number of new laws including:

• The Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, allowing for detention without trial (later overturned by the courts)
• The Terrorism Act 2006, which extended the detention of suspects without charge from 14 to 28 days
• The Counter-Terrorism Act 2008, under which police were permitted to continue questioning suspects after charge
• The Terrorist Asset-Freezing Act 2010
• The Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, which is currently being debated by peers in the House of Lords

What we can detect here is how fear of not being able to protect against potential attacks is being mobilised to justify new preventative anti-terror legislation. In effect, public and political fear is being deployed to shape the reaction to terrorism, where reaching for new legislation has become part of the societal response to terrorist attacks.

However, it increasingly appears that this approach is inadequate and that we are dealing with a social problem that we cannot solve by legal means alone. Indeed, a more nuanced and sophisticated approach to counter-terrorism policy development would probably look elsewhere for solutions. After all, in both the French cases and that of Drummer Rigby, it transpired that the perpetrators were well known to the authorities as presenting a risk. Rather than creating legislative fixes to collect more intelligence, research suggests the focus must be on finding effective policy solutions to three inter-linked ‘wicked problems’ that have been identified in issues of radicalization and home-grown extremism.

The first of these, mentioned earlier, concerns the ability of the politics of counter-terrorism to resist the allure of introducing new security measures that might corrode levels of integration and cohesion. Over the long-term, over-reaction to terrorist provocations can be as harmful as the initial act itself.

This connects to the second ‘wicked problem’: tension between the tactical and strategic response to countering violent extremists. The police and security services focus upon stopping violent acts, often engaging with individuals whose ideas are not coherent with liberal democratic traditions. Preventing or stopping these acts does not reduce the longer term influence of these radical ideas.

Thirdly, all plausible theories of radicalisation into violent extremism identify a pivotal role played by ‘non-violent extremists': those who do not engage in violence directly, but whose ideas and rhetoric influence others to do so. These create a ‘mood music’ of ideas, values, and beliefs that presents violence as a permissible means to an end. In the wake of the killings in France, there has been a widespread call across Europe to protect the right to freedom of speech. However, this freedom will also be used by those motivated to undertake mass killings. Current counter-terrorism policy struggles with what to do with individuals who steer and propagate the radicalisation of others by engaging in activity that is troublesome and unpleasant, but not necessarily illegal.

One of the principal institutional effects of high profile signal crimes is to implant a political imperative to consider what can be done to predict, pre-empt, and prevent similar atrocities in the future. However, it is increasingly clear that it is not going to be possible to prevent all such attacks. Developing a conceptually robust evidenced understanding of how and why our collective processes of reaction occur in the ways they do, and the institutional effects that such assaults induce, seems vitally important if we are to collectively manage our reactions better when the next attack comes.

Headline image credit: Paris rally in support of the victims of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting, 11 January 2015. Photo by “sébastien amiet;l”. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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Brought to you by Publishers Weekly, it’s More To Come, the weekly podcast of comics news, interviews and discussion with Calvin Reid, Kate Fitzsimons and The Beat’s own Heidi MacDonald.

In this week’s podcast, the More to Come crew discuss Charlie Hebdo, the attack on its offices and its cultural context as well as comics publisher IDW purchasing Top Shelf, Reed Pop buying Emerald City Comic Con and much more on PW Comics World’s More To Come.

Download this episode direct here, listen to it in streaming here and catch up with our previous podcasts on the Publishers Weekly website, or subscribe to More To Come on iTunes

The Charlie Hebdo murders, and the subsequent shoot outs and man hunts, have led to an unprecedented discussion over the role of satire, art and cartooning. It is also, of course, a horrific event that will change tactics against terrorism within France and elsewhere. Much has been written, and while it has often seemed the occasion for airing out whatever personal feelings many commenters already had, there also been much that is thoughtful and worth examining. The “Je suis Charlie” show of solidarity remains controversial and widespread—at the Golden Globes Jared Leto gave a clumsy reading while George Clooney gave it a more nuanced shout out, if that’s possible.

People are struggling to deal with this, and as they struggle they show their work on the internet. And here’s some of it.

§ in France, more than a million people marched to protest terrorism.

Responding to terrorist strikes that killed 17 people in France and riveted worldwide attention, Jews, Muslims, Christians, atheists and people of all races, ages and political stripes swarmed central Paris beneath a bright blue sky, calling for peace and an end to violent extremism.The Interior Ministry described the demonstration as the largest in modern French history, with as many as 1.6 million people. Many waved the tricolor French flag and brandished pens in raised fists to commemorate those killed Wednesday in an attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, as well as four others killed at a Jewish supermarket on Friday. Thousands hoisted black and white signs bearing three words that have ricocheted through social media as a slogan of unity and defiance: “Je suis Charlie.”

 

§ Probably the most seen cartoonist reaction was R. Crumb’s, above, (followed by Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s).

And, in a perfect example of the long-simmering axe grinding I alluded to above, Crumb used his cartoon as the chance to rag on animator Ralph Bakshi, whose cartoon adaptation of Fritz the Cat back in the day did not please Crumb. Anyway, this was followed by a long interview with Crumb in the Observer. MUST READ!

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?” It’s a French thing, yeah, and they value that very highly here, which is why there’s like a huge amount of sympathy for the killing of those guys, you know, huge demonstrations and crowds in Paris – people holding up signs that say, “Je suis Charlie.” Even here in the village where I live, we had a demonstration yesterday out in front of the town hall. About 30 people showed up and held up “Je suis Charlie” signs. Were you there? Yeah, I went to it, sure. Since I’m the village cartoonist, I had to go. [Laughs.]

Related, Crumb’s old publisher Ron Turner, stands up for satire’s right to be offensive.

§ For a reaction even closer to the scene, sometime Hebdo contributor Dutch cartoonist Willem came out with a very colorful reaction, namely “We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends.”

“We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. It really makes me laugh,” Bernard Holtrop, whose pen name is Willem, told the Dutch centre-left daily Volkskrant in an interview published Saturday. France’s far-right National Front leader “Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place,” said Willem, 73, a longtime Paris resident who also draws for the French leftist daily Liberation.

The 72 year old Willem added “I never come to the editorial meetings because I don’t like them. I guess that saved my life.”

Personal note: It’s encouraging to see an old guy like Willem defiant and subversive down the wire. He was the Grand Prix winner for the Angouleme festival I attended last year, and, he’s quite a character.

§ Current Charlie Hebdo staffer Luz was late to the editorial meeting that day and that saved his life. He was interviewed by a French paper.

When I started drawing, I always thought we were safe, as we were drawing pseudo Mickey Mouse. Now, after the deaths, the shoot outs, the violence, everything has changed. All eyes are on us, we’ve become a symbol, just like our cartoons. Humanité headlined “Liberty has been assassinated” above the cover I did on Houellebecq that, even if there’s some substance there, is a quip at Houellebecq. A huge symbolic weight, that doesn’t exist in our cartoons and is somewhat beyond us, has been put on our shoulders. I’m one amongst many who’s finding that difficult.

§ Cynthia Rose was visiting Paris last week and has a moving account of her experiences.

§ Joe Sacco’s cartoon in the Guardian warning against the dangers of reinforcing bigotry through satire has been widely seen and quoted. It’s a powerful argument against the anything goes attitude that Charlie Hebdo engaged in—an attitude which make many uncomfortable with the “Je suis Charlie” line.

§ Ruben Bolling responded with a call for context:

But I was especially disappointed in the final three panels, in which he asks us to consider why Muslims can’t “laugh off a mere image.”  Well, just as it’s hard for us to know the full editorial intent of Charlie Hebdo from a few re-published out-of-context cartoons, it’s even more difficult to know whether or not Muslims are unable to laugh off these mere images.  

It was not the Muslim community that killed those twelve people, it was two gunmen.  I don’t know how outraged Muslims were at Charlie Hebdo, but I would imagine their responses would be as greatly varied as they are irrelevant to the murders.

One thing that has emerged as more views have been aired is that it is difficult for mere bystanders to understand the place that Charlie Hebdo held in French society. Arab satirist Karl Sharro works his way through this at The Atlantic:

The culture-clash interpretation of the horror in Paris transcends political divides in the West. On the right, some claim that Muslims’ beliefs are incompatible with modernity and Western values. On the left, some construe the attack as a retaliation for severe offenses, essentially suggesting that Muslims are incapable of responding rationally to such offenses and that it is therefore best not to provoke them. The latter explanation is dressed up in the language of social justice and marginalization, but is, at its core, a patronizing view of ordinary Muslims and their capacity to advocate for their rights without resorting to nihilistic violence. This outlook also promotes the idea that Muslims and other people of Middle Eastern origin are defined primarily by their religion, which in turn devalues and demeans the attempts of Arab and Middle Eastern secularists to define themselves through varying interpretations of religion or even by challenging religion and its role in public life. By seeking to present religion as a form of cultural identity that should be protected from offense and critique, Western liberals are consequently undermining the very struggles against the authority of inherited institutions through which much of the Western world’s social and political progress was achieved.

§ French satirist Oliver Tourneau has written On Charlie Hebdo: A letter to my British friends which attempts to contextualise Charlie Hebdo for those of us who don’t quite get now it fits in to the very active place of intellectualism in French life and politics. Charlie Hebdo was considered very leftist and PRO diversity…some of its most shocking images were apparently Stephen Colbert-like exaggerations of other trains of thought:

Firstly, a few words on Charlie Hebdo, which was often “analyzed” in the British press on the sole basis, apparently, of a few selected cartoons. It might be worth knowing that the main target of Charlie Hebdo was the Front National and the Le Pen family. Next came crooks of all sorts, including bosses and politicians (incidentally, one of the victims of the shooting was an economist who ran a weekly column on the disasters caused by austerity policies in Greece).  Finally, Charlie Hebdo was an opponent of all forms of organized religions, in the old-school anarchist sense: Ni Dieu, ni maître! They ridiculed the pope, orthodox Jews and Muslims in equal measure and with the same biting tone. They took ferocious stances against the bombings of Gaza. Even if their sense of humour was apparently inacceptable to English minds, please take my word for it: it fell well within the French tradition of satire – and after all was only intended for a French audience. It is only by reading or seeing it out of context that some cartoons appear as racist or islamophobic. Charlie Hebdo also continuously denounced the pledge of minorities and campaigned relentlessly for all illegal immigrants to be given permanent right of stay. I hope this helps you understand that if you belong to the radical left, you have lost precious friends and allies.

§ Finally, splitting the difference, here’s an overview called The Problem With #JeSuisCharlie by Chad Parkhill.

§ And Asterix co-creator Albert  Uderzu came out of retirement to show his solidarity with eh slain cartoonists:

§ Now, shifting gears into a very alarming direction, it seems that there has been an increase in threats against cartoonists since the murders. Cartoonists Rights has a frightening round-0up:

A newspaper in Germany which had reprinted several of the controversial Charlie Hebdo cartoons was firebombed Sunday January 11 in possible retaliation.

And in Turkey, journalist Pinar Tremblay of Al-Monitor reports of threats referencing the Hebdo killings targeting that country’s cartoonists and satirical magazines. One satirist reports being told to watch the news coverage of Charlie Hebdo’s slain cartoonists “to take a sneak peak at my own future.”

The Istanbul-based satirical magazine Leman, which is planning a tribute issue commemorating its Charlie Hebdo colleagues, received a tweet saying “The number of heads to be taken out in Leman magazine is more than 12.”

§ And there was an ugly incident involving the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris last week Haaretz published a daring cartoon juxtaposing journalists* killed in Gaza by Israel during the brutal summer slaughter with the journalists killed at the office of the satirical magazine in Paris. This set off a chain reaction which ultimately led to calls for murdering Haaretz journalists after Ronen Shoval, founder of the neo-Zionist and proto-fascist  Im Tirtzu movement, called for an investigation of the newspaper’s editors.

§ While everyone is now a defender of free speech, many calling for it have spotty track records in their own countries.

§ Wrapping this up, Tom Spurgeonhas a round-up of videos related to the killings.

§ And finally, on Tuesday, the New York Comics Symposium will represent a discussion of Charlie Hebdo.

Eddy Portnoy will revisit his 2012 presentation on “Cartoon Provocateurs: the non-existent red lines of Charlie Hebdo,” in light of this week’s deadly attack on the offices of the French satirical weekly. Also, a screening of documentary clips concerning the events surrounding the reprinting a set of 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that had originally appeared in the Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten in 2006, in addition to some of their own. Sued in 2007 for defamation of a religious community by the Great Mosque of Paris, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France and the World Muslim League, Charlie Hebdo mounted a vigorous defense and was ultimately absolved of any wrongdoing. A discussion will follow.

Be there and lets all learn more together.

Today many are asking why Parisians have been attacked in their own city, and by their own people. But for many years the question for those following the issues of foreign policy and religion was why France had suffered so little terrorism in comparison to other European states. After the bombs on the Paris Metro and a TGV line in 1995, there were no significant Islamist attacks until the fire-bombing of the Charlie Hebdo office in November 2011, and the killings of three French soldiers (all of North African origin) and three Jewish children (and one teacher) by Mohamed Merah in Toulouse four months later. These attacks turn out to have been a warning of things to come.

But why was France free of such attacks for over fifteen years, when Madrid and London suffered endless plots and some major atrocities? Given the restrictions placed by successive governments on the foulard (headscarf) and the burka, together with the large French Muslim population (around 10% of the 64 million total), the country would seem to have been fertile ground for fundamentalist anger and terrorist outrages.

One view is that the French authorities were tougher and more effective than, say, the British who allowed Algerian extremists fleeing France after 1995 to find shelter in the Finsbury Park Mosque — to the fury of French officials. Another line is that the French secular model of integration, with no recognition of minorities or enthusiasm for multiculturalism, did actually work. Thus when riots took place in 2005 the alienated youth of the banlieues demanded jobs, fairness, and decent housing — not respect for Islam or Palestinian rights.

A third possible explanation of the long lull before this week’s storm is that French foreign policy had not provoked the kind of anger felt in Spain and Britain by their countries’ roles in the Iraq war, which France, Germany, and some other European states had clearly opposed. Although France had an important role in the allied operations in Afghanistan, its profile was not especially high. Given the slow-changing nature of international reputations the image of France as a friend of Arab states and of the Palestinians endured, while Britain drew hostile attention as the leading ally of the United States in the ‘war against terror’. France, again unlike Britain and the United States, has tended to be pragmatic in negotiations with those who have taken its citizens hostage abroad, facilitating the payment of ransoms and getting them home safely. Its policy was that payments, and the risk of encouraging further captures, were preferable to providing the Islamists with global publicity.

Naturally no single explanation can account for the French exception, which has now come to such a dramatic end. It was a combination of factors that kept the domestic peace. Strong security measures put many jihadists in gaol, or forced them abroad. Civic nationalism emphasising Frenchness and discouraging the overt celebration of different languages and ways of life meant that unrest over deprivation never morphed into what Olivier Roy called an intifada. An adroit foreign policy emphasising distance from the United States despite quiet cooperation on many issues kept France out of the front line of Islamist anger. If any one of these three factors had been absent, things could have been very different.

So what has changed now? It may be that the security services simply got complacent. This seems unlikely given that when French counter-terror sources have always talked of an attack they have said ‘it is not a question of if, but when’. They are aware that the nature of jihadism is to plant operators wherever they can be hidden, without discriminating between good and bad societies – although it is notable that there have been relatively few attacks in Scandinavia, or in countries like Ireland, Italy, or Portugal.

France must expect more plots, of which some will probably come to fruition. The threats may be increasing because of the lagged effects of alienation among those second and third generation young people, French by nationality but North African by family origin, who feel that the country has not lived up to the ideals of fraternity and equality, thus depriving them of the opportunity to get jobs, decent housing – and respect. A significant proportion of these youngsters, living well away from the stylish ‘centre villes’ admired by foreign tourists, have come to find their identity not in French secularism, as the official theory runs, but in Islam. And some, especially those with few personal or family strengths to hold on to, have found self-validation in radical, even violent, fundamentalism. It requires very few to take this path, in a Muslim community of around six million, to represent a serious threat.

But whom would they wish to attack, and why? It is to be doubted that they are like the Red Army Faction in Germany forty years ago, aiming to overthrow a whole decadent society and replace it with something radically different – even if they probably would like to live under Sharia law. However horrifying they seem they are not, with isolated exceptions, mad or merely criminal. To be sure they are capable of acts of violence against unarmed people, which most regard as psychotic, and they have to be dealt with under the criminal law – unless killing them is the only way to save other lives. But they are, in their own terms, rational actors. The Kouachi brothers said during their flight from the police that ‘we do not kill civilians’, despite having murdered twelve people working in the Charlie Hebdo offices, among them a maintenance man and a visitor. This was disingenuous and self-serving, but it revealed not only the familiar trope of the disaffected young that the police are their enemy, but also a consistent world view in which Charlie Hebdo had declared war on Muslims, and had to be ‘neutralisé’, in the euphemism employed by French ministers during the crisis.

This is where foreign policy comes in. Many Muslim citizens of European states are deeply offended, not only by what they see as the insulting blasphemy of Salman Rushdie or Charlie Hebdo, but also by the actions of Western governments in the Middle East. It is bad enough (in this view) that they effectively take Israel’s side against the Palestinians, but the launch of military attacks in Muslim countries that inevitably kill civilians, often in large numbers and with powerful images disseminated rapidly around the world, requires a response.

Most people, of course, of any religion and none, do nothing about the foreign policy events they see on television. A minority will engage in passionate but legal protest. A very small minority takes matters into its own hands, travelling to battlefields, receiving training in the use of arms or terrorism, and sometimes acting as sleepers in Western societies until they or some controller judges the moment to be right. By this point the values behind their view are beside the point; they see themselves as at war.

For some years France did not attract this kind of hostility, or if it did, the reactions took time to mature, and have only come to light since 2011. But in recent years both Sarkozy and Hollande have pursued a more ‘forward’ foreign policy, intervening first in Libya, then against Jihadists in Mali (after which one Malian jihadist said that ‘blood will run on the streets of Paris’), and in 2014 becoming involved in the bloody conflict which has engulfed Syria and parts of Iraq. This, perhaps together with the way the Arab Spring exposed France’s ties to autocratic Arab regimes, has predictably attracted attention from those whose targets had previously been other western states. France was the first US ally to join in air strikes against ISIL in September 2014, when Interior Minister Cazeneuve responded to threats to kill French citizens in retaliation by saying that the government was ‘not afraid’ and would protect its citizens.

Unfortunately no government can protect all its citizens all of the time. Furthermore the existence of a diverse, mobile, and fragmented society, containing groups sufficiently alienated to find identity in religion and a global movement of resistance rather than in the culture of their land of birth, represents a major source of vulnerability for France, as it does for Britain and others. When we add to the mix the seemingly endless wars in Muslim countries in which our governments are intervening, it becomes less strange that turbulence should boil over into tragedy.

The post Charlie Hebdo and the end of the French exception appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson

If I had my druthers I would mostly live in a Jane Austen world. I say mostly because of course it would be necessary to be wealthy and male, from a proper upper class family with good social standing and white goes without saying. I prefer gentility, good manners and pleasant behavior. I don’t like crass, vulgar, adolescent immature anything. So what am I doing in the world of comics?

Here’s my true confession—I can’t stand most of the overdrawn huge busted female protagonists or female tag alongs with their scanty clothing and overly sexual stances in mainstream and some indy comics. I’m not too thrilled with the pervasive violence and the adolescent need to blow up everything in sight including entire universes. It not only bores me to stone but as a woman, much of it, I find offensive. I worry that it helps to maintain a pervasive anti-woman and violent atmosphere not just in comics but also in the world at large.

However, I rarely take a stand on these issues because I also worry a great deal about censorship. Freedom of the press and the right to express oneself is not just an intellectual ideal for me but a passion. I don’t want my worldview censored and therefore I don’t get involved with censoring others. I just don’t look. I click it off, turn off the device and don’t pay my money. Because I do have somewhat of a platform I also don’t promote or encourage things I find offensive but I don’t say anything against them either. If you can’t say something nice…

However, once something moves into hatred and the stated need to physically harm, rape and kill those who with whom one disagrees we’re not in Kansas anymore Dorothy. And that goes for both the right and the left. Physical violence whether it is destruction of property or going to the very limit of humane behavior by harming anyone you disagree with is insane. Attacking people who draw cartoons and killing them with automatic weapons is a show of extreme barbarity. If you cannot use your intelligence to counteract those things with which you disagree and must resort to physical violence then you have already lost.

On January 8, Art Spiegelman spoke on Democracy Now about the recent horrific events in Paris and one of the things he said struck me profoundly. He talked about the visceral comprehension we have when we see a cartoon or visual image. A cartoon tells a story with such immediacy that it crosses all borders and if done well goes to the heart of the matter in a split second. And that is one of the main reasons why yours truly, mostly Mz Jane Austenite, finds herself in the world of comics. I love that sense of the immediate moment of truth whether I agree with it or not.

Honestly, many of the images from Charlie Hebdo are gross and not to my taste. At the same time as much as I try to keep an open mind about different cultural norms I cannot quell the sick feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I am near a woman in full purdah. As much as I wish I could rip the veil off and kick the guy’s behind who’s ambling along in shirtsleeves paces in front of the poor creature sweating under layers of clothing, I don’t. I have no right to impose my belief. It would be intrusive, violent and a little nuts.

Whatever defamation these cartoons represent to some there is no way in any sane world that these images require the horrible and unthinkable sadness of the death of those who drew them. Time for us all to drop our swords and kalashnikovs and find our pens! Je suis Charlie.

It will be a very difficult Angouleme comics festival they year, as the French comics world—and the entire world—deals with the senseless death of five cartoonists. I’m told the festival is planning a memorial and also seeking contributions via their  Facebook page.  While they are asking for “Je suis Charlie” contributions, I’m sure the cartoonists of the world can respond in a way that is in line with their own beliefs, given the controversy surrounding that  hashtag. Contributions can be sent to [email protected].

Cartoonist Matt Madden, who lives in Angoulême, posted his own thoughts, as a father of two young children now afraid that cartoonists can be killed for their drawings, and as a colleague:

As a cartoonist and as a human being this attack has really sent me into a free fall. I’ve been turning in circles all week trying to process it and decide the appropriate way to respond. In one of numerous online discussions I’ve perused I saw my friend Mahendra Singh talking about needing to “cultivate our own gardens” and that phrase from Voltaire’sCandide keeps coming to mind. It’s another pipe dream, but if only people would tend to their own lives and treat those around them with respect and tolerance…

Art by Sarah McIntyre
(http://www.jabberworks.co.uk/)

Nothing can justify the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. Some of the cartoons published by the magazine were offensive and at times deemed Islamophobic, but that in no way legitimates violence. Charlie Hebdo had the right to publish what it did under the protection of free speech. Just as freedom of speech did not guarantee the victims of the attack immunity to criticism, the right to dissent does not include murder.

In the aftermath of yesterday’s killings, the response has been varied. New Yorkers took to Union Square to offer their support in an impromptu vigil. Cartoonists such as Sarah McIntyre and Carlos Latuff, politicians such as Barack Obama and David Cameron, and pundits across the planet have offered their support and condolences to the victims’ loved ones. Among those who have voiced their sadness and outrage are Muslim individuals and organizations from all over the world, such as the Union of Islamic Organizations of France, the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA.

Others’ responses have been of a more combative tenor. Internationally, and on a far too familiar pattern, an imaginary “Islam,” simplistically conceived as a monolithic, murderous, West-hating, and terrorist ideology, has been blamed for the attacks. In some places, the response has not been limited to words but has spilled over into violent acts perpetrated against a number of sacred spaces and places of worship. Several French mosques and Muslim prayer halls have been subject to attacks, placing many innocent worshipers in the line of retaliatory fire for the actions of a select few.

“Islam” did not do this; adherents to a particular, marginal, and extreme interpretation of what Islam is and what it means to be a Muslim did. They do not represent the planet’s more than one billion self-identifying Muslims. Neither the Qur’an nor the traditions attributed to the Prophet of Islam uniformly oppose illustrations nor modern comics and cartooning. Moreover, wherever and however they are published, comics as a medium has no innate aversion to religion but, instead, is a fertile site of opportunity and engagement with all faiths and beliefs. We must conclude that these events cannot be attributed to Islam as a religion nor to comics as a medium. Protecting this art and its artists is just as necessary as protecting Islam and Muslims from reduction to ideological extremism.

These cartoonists stood up against intimidation and fought for their right to freedom of expression. Let us celebrate their victories.

January 7th, 2015 will always be a grim date in for free speech, tolerance and French cartooning. As we all know, 12 people, including 10 staffers and four cartoonists were killed in a terrorist attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo yesterday morning. The attack—which some called the 9/11 for France—left grieving and reeling for those lost and for a world in which such a senseless act could occur. The four cartoonists killed—Georges Wolinski, Charb, Tignous, and Cabu—included one Angouleme Grand Prize winner, Wolinski, who won in 2005. It was a grievous toll.

Some developments: The two gunmen were quickly identified when they left their ID in a vehicle they abandoned. As I write this there are conflicting reports about whether they have been apprehended, but nothing definite enough to link to.

• Rallies were held around the world last night, with thousands showing up at various vigils in France. (Below is from Lyon.) A rally was also held at Union Square in NYC, with Art Spiegelman photographed there.

• The world of editorial cartoonists quickly reacted with many drawing showing their solidarity with those slain in the name of free speech. The Washington Post has a fine round up.

Well, today's #doodleaday was a no-brainer… #JeSuisCharlie pic.twitter.com/2OMAyQIQ1o

— Jamesuary (@RteeFufkin) January 7, 2015

• This cartoon by James Walmesley found a lot of support.

• Craig Yoe sent me this one.

• Comics scholar, and French comics expert Bart Beaty wrote an excellent piece explaining the role that the editorial cartoonist has in France:

Unlike in the United States, where comic strips, comic books, and editorial cartoons are generally regarded as only distantly related wings of the same art form, in France the integration of the three is much closer. Each of the four cartoonists killed today worked not only for Charlie Hebdo, but for other newspapers, and for French comic book publishers. The publishing industry in France is both smaller and more central than it is in the United States. With so many cartoonists living in and around Paris, the overlap between different media are quickly eroded in a context where it can sometimes seem that every working cartoonist knows every other one and works across publishing platforms.

• Controversial editorial cartoonist Ted Rall wrote a fine piece for the LA Times where he recalled meeting the Hebdo staff on a trip to Angouleme, and reiterating the power of editorial cartoons to inflame passions…and even thought:

Not to denigrate writing (especially since I do a lot of it myself), but cartoons elicit far more response from readers, both positive and negative, than prose. Websites that run cartoons, especially political cartoons, are consistently amazed at how much more traffic they generate than words. I have twice been fired by newspapers because my cartoons were too widely read — editors worried that they were overshadowing their other content.

Scholars and analysts of the form have tried to articulate exactly what it is about comics that make them so effective at drawing an emotional response, but I think it’s the fact that such a deceptively simple art form can pack such a wallop. Particularly in the political cartoon format, nothing more than workaday artistic chops and a few snide sentences can be enough to cause a reader to question his long-held political beliefs, national loyalties, even his faith in God.

That drives some people nuts.

• Showing caution, many news outlets did not show the controversial Hebdo covers which led to threats against the magazine.

• For something of an alternative take, Jacob Canfield at The Hooded Utilitarian suggests that Free Speech Does Not Mean Freedom From Criticism and that Hebdo’s cartoons were deliberately provocative, Islamophobic and racist.

• Although Canfield certainly doesn’t suggest this, I did see a bunch of places suggesting that the “Je suis Charlie” show of solidarity around the world should not be used because it supports racist cartoons. I would gently suggest that racism is a horrible and bad thing, but it is not punishable by death, and showing solidarity for people who were murdered for expressing their views in a non violent way is probably not a terrible thing. Just because you supported “Boston Strong” after the Marathon bombing doesn’t make you a Red Sox fan.

• I doubt anything I just wrote will settle this issue.

• Probably the smartest thing I read all day yesterday was by Middle East analyst Juan Cole. (Yes I know he is controversial himself.) Cole writes that the killings were not really about the cartoons at all but rather a recruiting tool for extremism: by ginning up anti-Muslim sentiment in France and around the world, currently non-secular Muslims will be more receptive to recruitment.

The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.

Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, then led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, deployed this sort of polarization strategy successfully in Iraq, constantly attacking Shiites and their holy symbols, and provoking the ethnic cleansing of a million Sunnis from Baghdad. The polarization proceeded, with the help of various incarnations of Daesh (Arabic for ISIL or ISIS, which descends from al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia). And in the end, the brutal and genocidal strategy worked, such that Daesh was able to encompass all of Sunni Arab Iraq, which had suffered so many Shiite reprisals that they sought the umbrella of the very group that had deliberately and systematically provoked the Shiites.

The goal of 9/11 was not to knock down the World Trade Center, or even to shut down state fairs because of terrorist fears. Its well documented goal was to throw the West into such a foment that the entire world economy and established political alliances were destabilized. The plan worked perfectly and bin Laden won. It would be horrible if the Hebdo murder were another triumph for extremist propaganda.

• All that said, cartoonists around the world showed solidarity for their slain colleagues with this “Weapon of Choice” meme. I’ve culled a few from my FB and Instagram feeds…there are dozens more. Here’s a small gallery. Ultimately, art outlives death.

Mark Chiarello

Janice Chiang

Lauren Panepinto

Dave Dorman

Dan Panosian

Cully Hamner

J. Scott Campbell

Denys Cowan

Laura Martin

Derf

Bill Sienkiewicz

Dean Haspiel

In an act of unspeakable horror, three gunman are at large in France after a brief deadly attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French magazine. The attackers shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the attack, and it’s believed to be part of a long running controversy over various depictions of the prophet Mohammed going back to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons in 2007.

Slain in the attack were Charlie d editor/cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier, 47, Cabu, Tignous and Georges Wolinski, shown above. Two police officers and six other staffers were killed. The attack took place during an editorial meeting; cartoonists Luz and Cathering Meurisse were late to the meeting and unharmed according to this tweet from Dargaud’s Thomas Ragon. Charbonnier had been under police protection for years following earlier threats against his life by extremists, and the office was firebombed in 2011.

Just moments earlier, the Charlie Hebo twitter account had sent out the above image of ISIS leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi.

Meilleurs vœux, au fait. pic.twitter.com/a2JOhqJZJM

— Charlie Hebdo (@Charlie_Hebdo_) January 7, 2015

The attack has been condemned by French president Francois Hollande, President Obama and other world leaders.

I’m told Cabu was a  much-loved veteran political cartoonist. Charlie Hebdo—named Charlie for running Peanuts strips in its early days—was a satirical institution in France and the attack is simply devastating to the magazine and the cause of free speech.

The BBC has a thorough report on events; here’s ongoing coverage at the Guardian. Gawker has an account of Charlie Hebdo’s lengthy history of controversy going back to former French President Charles DeGaul. Comics Reporter is running a list of resources and news accounts.

Charlie Hebdo’s website was taken down earlier in the day but has replaced by the words “Je sui Charlie” which has become the hashtag #jesuischarlie to show solidarity for free speech and regard for human life.