The Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack in Paris

We were glad that Vox decided to publish the cartoons of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Though their portrayal of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed has offended many Muslims, they are an important part of the story and readers have a right to see them. We were also glad that we covered the cartoons critically as well as sympathetically, praising them on the grounds of free speech and satire.

The decision of American media organizations to publish or not publish the cartoons has typically been framed of one of bravery or cowardice, based on the assumption that publishing invites physical risk from some number of the 2.6 million Muslim-Americans who will take offense and perhaps action. Vox.com was praised on MSNBC for its bravery, even though this purported risk did not actually enter into our calculus, and other outlets have presented their decision to publish as a way to defy the Islamist radicals who threaten free speech.

Congressman Randy Weber of Texas is officially sorry he nonsensically tweeted something about Obama, Hitler, and visits to Paris saying “It was not my intention to trivialize the Holocaust.”

Less clear is what his actual intention was.

On September 17, 2001, President George W. Bush gave his “Islam is peace” speech from the Islamic Center of Washington DC, tucked into a leafy stretch of embassy row. He urged the country to embrace “fellow Americans” who are Muslim as well as Islam itself “with respect,” explaining to a country full of “anger and emotion” that the jihadists who’d struck a few days earlier were insane outliers and not representative of the religion.

Since then, there has been a tension in how Islam is discussed in American media, and especially in its most populist and popular form, television. Americans typically follow Bush’s advice, but sometimes they struggle, particularly when violent extremist groups are in the news. In recent days, that strain of Islamophobia in the US has risen along with media attention to the attack on French magazine Charlie Hebdo, reaching crisis levels — particularly on American TV news. While this is often discussed as a problem of Fox News, in fact both left-leaning outlets and CNN participate as well, normalizing and mainstreaming subtler forms of Islamophobia that may well be even more damaging.

Cartoonists around the world have drawn responses to the brutal murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff. As the attackers claimed to be acting on behalf of Islam, there’s a special poignancy to remembrances for the victims drawn by Arab and Muslim cartoonists. Here are a few.

Emad Hajjaj of Al Araby (Qatar). The top line reds “in condemnation of the terrorist attacks against Charlie Hebdo”:

Murder is wrong, and the murder of journalists cuts especially close to the bone for anyone in the industry. So I certainly sympathize with Jonathan Chait’s impulse to offer a full-throated defense of publishing blasphemous anti-Muslim cartoons as a positive good.

“The right to blaspheme religion is one of the most elemental exercises of political liberalism,” he writes, and “one cannot defend the right without defending the practice.”

Stéphane Charbonnier, a lead editor of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and one of the 12 people murdered in the attack on the magazine’s office on Jan. 7, 2015, gave a quote to Le Monde in 2012 that is rapidly becoming his epitaph. Speaking about threats against the magazine over its cartoons portraying the Prophet Mohammed, he said, “What I’m about to say is maybe a little pompous, but I’d rather die standing up than live on my knees.”

In the same interview, Charlie Hebdo’s editor in chief Gerard Biard, who survived today’s massacre because he was in London, explained of his refusal to back down from the magazine’s cartoons, “If we say to religion, ‘You are untouchable,’ we’re fucked.”

Joe Randazzo, former editor of the Onion, argues in a new column that the terrorist attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo proves just how important and how effective satire can be.

Charlie Hebdo had already faced threats of violence and actual violence for years for its provocative cartoons of religious figures, including the Prophet Mohammed. Critics viewed these cartoons as purposely mocking Muslims — although the true goal, according to journalists at the magazine, was to marginalize extremists who would seek to silence them.

In Paris and beyond, people held rallies to mourn and commemorate the victims of the Wednesday terrorist attack on the office of French magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Demonstrators held signs that read “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) and defended the freedom of the press.

Political cartoonists around the world are tweeting their response to the massacre at the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo, where armed gunmen killed four French cartoonists.

Ruben Oppenheimer: