A Paris court has handed jail terms ranging from four years to life to more than a dozen people convicted of helping gunmen who massacred cartoonists at satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and customers at a Jewish supermarket in January 2015.

Lawyers for the victims and activists hailed Wednesday’s verdict that they said was a victory for justice and freedom of speech after a sometimes traumatic three-month trial, repeatedly delayed because of the coronavirus pandemic, that had revived the horror of the killings.

Among the 14 was Hayat Boumeddiene, former partner of Amedy Coulibaly who killed a policewoman and then four people in a Jewish supermarket.

One of three suspects to be tried in absentia, Boumeddiene was found guilty of financing “terrorism” and belonging to a criminal “terrorist” network. She is thought to be alive and on the run from an international arrest warrant in Syria, where she joined ISIL (ISIS).

Coulibaly was himself an associate of the gunmen behind the deadly attack at the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.

The accomplices were found guilty on different charges, ranging from membership of a criminal network to complicity in the attacks. Terrorism-related charges were dropped for several of the defendants who were found guilty of lesser crimes.

The trial has reopened one of modern France’s darkest episodes, with the attacks marking the onset of a wave of violence that has killed scores more since.

The three days of attacks in Paris began on January 7, 2015, with the killing of 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, which had published derogatory cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

The assault at the weekly satirical magazine was followed by the shooting of a French policewoman on January 8, and an attack on the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, in the south of Paris, a day later.

The three attackers had links with al-Qaeda and ISIL and were shot dead by police in separate standoffs.

Christophe Deloire, the head of press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF), said he welcomed the verdict.

“It is proof that violent extremists don’t have the last word. Thanks to justice, it is freedom that has the last word,” he wrote on Twitter.

On the cover of its new issue to mark the verdicts, Charlie Hebdo in typically provocative style published a picture of God being led away in a police van with the title “God put in his place”.

“The cycle of violence, which had began in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, will finally be closed,” its editor-in-chief Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau, who was badly injured in the attacks, wrote in an editorial.

“At least from the perspective of criminal law, because from a human one, the consequences will never be erased, as the testimony of the victims at the trial showed,” Riss added.

SOURCE : NEWS AGENCIES

L’article French court finds Charlie Hebdo attack accomplices guilty est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is at it, again: it has chosen to republish the derogatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad which provoked a violent attack against it in 2015. The editors say it is « essential » to reprint these on the eve of the trial of the perpetrators of that violence.

A decade earlier, in 2005, the Danish newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten also published a dozen defamatory cartoons of the prophet which it then republished three years later.

It was the printing of these cartoons that ultimately provoked some Muslims to resort to violence and, as is customary, it was their backlash that became the nub of the « cartoon controversy ».

The original affront to Muslim religious sensibilities was swallowed up by assertions of the cartoonists’ right to free speech and to engage in humour. In fact, in most critics’ views, it was not just the cartoonists who were victimised by « Islamic rage, » but also the principle of free speech itself.

However, it should be possible to condemn violence by Muslims without giving a free pass to those who defame and vilify their religion, their prophet and their scripture. Yet, this rarely happens.

Instead, the Muslim-baiting intelligentsia relies on precisely its own vilifications to incite the violence which it then feigns to be horrified and surprised by. I say feigns because, by now, pretty much everyone knows that, goaded to a point, some Muslims will respond violently to caricatures of their prophet as a terrorist, among other things. I also say feigns because provocateurs require such a response to anathematise all Muslims as a threat to European identities and values.

If it is easy enough to understand why some Muslims respond violently to derogatory tropes about Islam, the prophet and the Quran, what does it say about those who compulsively keep recycling these? I have speculated about this need at length elsewhere but will make only some brief points here.

First, it is difficult to see how anyone – not only a Muslim – could find a cartoon of the prophet as a terrorist/suicide bomber amusing without also treating terrorism itself lightly. After all, how many of us can laugh at a cartoon of a suicide bomber, irrespective of who that person is supposed to be? As for the purported irony of such representations of the prophet, what is satirical about these, when Muslims are already viewed as born terrorists-in-the-making?

Second, European vilifications of the prophet and Islam have a much older pedigree than free speech and have nothing to do with humour. To be precise, they have their roots in medieval Europe and the changing self-conceptions of Christians over a millennium.

For instance, Tomas Mastnak, a historian of the Crusades, argues that it was in the mid-ninth century when Western unity began to express itself as Christendom, that Muslims also came to be seen as the « normative enemies » of Christianity. Until then, they had been viewed as just another pagan group and generally ignored – even the Muslim conquest of southern Spain did not make it into leading chronicles.

Over time though, Europe’s Christians came to see in Islam not just a « sinister conspiracy against Christianity [but] that total negation of [it] … which would mark the contrivances of Antichrist ». This is how Robert Southern describes it in his book Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages and he attributes this suspicion to the « strong desire not to know [Islam] for fear of contamination ».

Instead, he says, even the Christians who lived in « the middle of Islam » (Muslim-ruled Andalusia) looked to the Bible to explain it, which is how they came to consider it the Antichrist. In short, according to Southern, it was ignorance and the fear of contamination that made « the existence of Islam the most far-reaching problem in medieval Christendom ».

Given this history, it is not surprising that medieval Christians would also portray the prophet as a heathen idol, the devil, Mahound (as in Salam Rushdie’s Satanic Verses), an imposter, and the Antichrist. He appears in such guises from the Crusades to the Reformation, with his representation as a religious imposter, reaching its literary apotheosis in Italian poet Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, in which he is confined to the eighth circle of hell.

Two centuries later, he reappears as an Antichrist in the work of German reformist Martin Luther, who of course, believed the pope and the Catholic Church were much worse. A century later, Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, lauded as the father of international law, was still calling him « a robber » and declaring that, in contrast to the Christians, who « were men who feared God, and led innocent lives … they who first embraced Mahometanism were robbers, and men void of humanity and piety ».

With the coming of the Enlightenment, the prophet’s critics also began assailing him in secular language, as the « worst type of … fanatic » (French writer Voltaire) and « the greatest enemy of reason who ever lived » (German philosopher Immanuel Kant).

Such depictions did not, however, portend a change in his representation as the antithesis of European civilisation. If he was no longer called an Antichrist, in European minds, he was still thought to be outside reason and rationality. This is why I see the cartoons of the prophet as a terrorist to be just a secularisation of the figure of the Antichrist.

Both images serve, equally powerfully, to locate him and, by extension, Islam and Muslims as Europe’s natural enemies. This is why reducing the cartoons to just an issue of free speech obscures their historical and ideological genealogy.

Lastly, (free) speech is conducive not only to critique, humour, honesty, and dissent but also to assertions of dominance and enactments of power. Though power is enacted differently, its exercise is « inseparable from its display », as American writer Saidiya Hartman argues in her book Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

In the context of slavery in North America, for instance, being able to represent power was « essential to reproducing domination ». As an example, Hartman notes that a slave-holder’s « display of mastery [over a slave] was just as important as the legal title to slave property ». This display usually involved demonstrating the slave holder’s « dominion and the captive’s abasement, » publicly. It also took the less obtrusive form of organising « innocent amusements and spectacles of mastery » as a way for the dominant classes « to establish their dominion » over the enslaved and dominated.

Borrowing from Hartman, I want to suggest that, today, some Westerners seek to demonstrate and reproduce their dominion over Muslims by caricaturing and maligning our sacred symbols at will. They are thus able to achieve epistemically what they cannot physically or legally. Even if this displacement from the physical to the psychological signifies the limits of Western power, speech is integral to its display. This is why derogatory caricatures of the prophet function as spectacles of mastery and as an ideological means to bolster intra-Western unity against Muslims.

It is as much to such enactments of mastery as it is to the content of specific attacks that Muslims like myself react angrily, and what we condemn is not the idea that people should be free to speak but the use of speech to dominate and degrade the already marginal or vulnerable. Defending domination in the name of freedom just confirms that not all conceptions of freedom are equally worth defending

Asma Barlas is a retired professor of politics in New York

L’article Reprinting the Charlie Hebdo cartoons is not about free speech est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.

Move comes a day before 13 men and one woman – accused of assisting the 2015 attackers of the newspaper – go on trial.

The French satirical newspaper whose Paris offices were attacked in 2015 is reprinting the controversial caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad that the gunmen who opened fire on its editorial staff cited as their motivation.

The move was announced on Tuesday, a day before 13 men and a woman accused of providing the attackers with weapons and logistics go on trial on charges of terrorism on Wednesday.

In an editorial this week accompanying the offensive caricatures, the paper said the drawings « belong to history, and history cannot be rewritten nor erased ».

The January 2015 attacks against Charlie Hebdo and, two days later, a kosher supermarket, touched off a wave of killings claimed by the ISIL (ISIS) armed group across Europe.

Seventeen people died in the attacks – 12 of them at the editorial offices – along with all three attackers.

The attackers, brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, claimed their attack on the newspaper in the name of al-Qaeda. As they left the scene at Charlie Hebdo, they killed a wounded policeman and drove away.

Two days later, a prison acquaintance of theirs stormed a kosher supermarket on the eve of the Jewish Sabbath, claiming allegiance to ISIL. Four hostages were killed during the attack.

The Kouachi brothers had by then holed up in a printing office with another hostage. All three attackers died in near-simultaneous police raids.

The supermarket attacker, Amedy Coulibaly, also killed a young policewoman.

Blasphemy

The decision to republish the cartoons will be seen by some as a defiant gesture in defence of free expression. But others may see it as a renewed provocation by a publication that has long courted controversy with its satirical attacks on religion.

The caricatures re-published this week were first printed in 2006 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten, setting off sometimes violent protests by some Muslims who found the depictions offensive.

The Prophet Muhammad is deeply revered by Muslims and any kind of visual depiction is forbidden. The caricatures were perceived as linking him with terrorism. 

Charlie Hebdo, infamous for its irreverence and accused by critics of racism, regularly caricatures religious leaders from various faiths and republished them soon afterwards.

The paper’s Paris offices were firebombed in 2011 and its editorial leadership placed under police protection, which remains in place to this day.

‘Ignore’

Laurent Sourisseau, the newspaper’s director and one of the few staff to have survived the attack, named each of the victims in a foreword to this week’s edition.

« Rare are those who, five years later, dare oppose the demands that are still so pressing from religions in general, and some in particular, » wrote Sourisseau, also known as Riss.

The president of the French Council of Muslim Worship (CFCM), Mohammed Moussaoui, urged people to « ignore » the cartoons, while condemning violence.

The suspects, who go on trial from 08:00 GMT on Wednesday, are accused of providing various degrees of logistical support to the killers.

The trial had been delayed several months with most French courtrooms closed over the coronavirus epidemic.

The court in Paris will sit until November 10 and, in a first for a terrorism trial, proceedings will be filmed for archival purposes given public interest.

National anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-Francois Ricard dismissed the idea that it was just « little helpers » going on trial since the three gunmen were now dead.

World Opinions News – NEWS AGENCIES

L’article France: Charlie Hebdo reprints offensive Prophet caricatures est apparu en premier sur World Opinion | Alternative Média.