12 dead in shooting in Paris

The redaction of the satirical magazin Charlie Hebdo - probably best known in America as "that one magazine that published those Mohammed cartoons and got firebombed a few years ago" - was the target of a shooting today.
Two men with Kalashnikovs broke in and shot (at least 11) people, including their most famous writers and cartoonists - one of them being the one who drew those Mohammed cartoons.

It's already been classified as a terrorist attack, and is widely considered a direct attack on the freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
 
I never understood the terrorist thought pattern. That if you keep kicking the hornet's nest they will back off. The western world is just getting more and more involved in the Middle East since the surge in terrorism since the 1970's.
 
I don't know. This, once again, seems to like to point the blame at Islam - which is false. 99,9999% of muslims aren't attacking newspapers, after all, and violence in the name of Hinduism or Christianity isn't exactly unheard of (oh, sorry, did you think those terrorist attacks in Sudan were all by muslim terrorists? Oops). Posting an image like that and saying "no-one died because of this" is sort of missing the point and can even be dangerous, further repeating the stereotype "Islam = evil and violent" - leading to such fun little anti-Islam movements as we've seen recently in France and Germany...which some people are starting to comapre to Kristallnacht. Let's not go that way.

Terrorists attacked a newspaper because they said/drew something that offended them, and they don't accept the freedom of speech. We, all people of all denominations and all sides, need to accept that people are allowed to say things that might offend us. Response in the form of language is OK, responding with violence is not.
 
I've seen the video taken from the rooftop of one of the gunman wounding someone, running up to them and executing them at close range.

Fucking awful.

They need to be captured.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
And they're getting their way. The major news outlets are blurring out the "offending" comic when they report on them.

 
And they're getting their way. The major news outlets are blurring out the "offending" comic when they report on them.
The American news outlets, perhaps. The "offending" comics are all over French, Belgian, Dutch, German, British,... news outlets - both websites and in print and on TV. European media are calling it an attack on European intellectual freedom similar in symbolic value to the 9/11 attacks as an attack on American economic freedom values.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
The American news outlets, perhaps. The "offending" comics are all over French, Belgian, Dutch, German, British,... news outlets - both websites and in print and on TV. European media are calling it an attack on European intellectual freedom similar in symbolic value to the 9/11 attacks as an attack on American economic freedom values.
The BBC is blurring it out, or changing to different photos.
 
I have no idea what site you're looking at, or your provider's bluring them or some such. BBC WOrld is showing them.

charliebbc.png
 

GasBandit

Staff member
I've lost the link now, but it wouldn't matter - the web page changed from a clear photo to a blurred photo to an entirely different photo.
 
Are you talking about the *photos* where you see people getting shot (which some may consider offensive and I do'nt care about but does tend to get blurred) or the comics themselves which caused the attack, which, as you can see in the screeenshot above, are clearly displayed still on BBC (and plenty of other news sites)?
 

GasBandit

Staff member
Are you talking about the *photos* where you see people getting shot (which some may consider offensive and I do'nt care about but does tend to get blurred) or the comics themselves which caused the attack, which, as you can see in the screeenshot above, are clearly displayed still on BBC (and plenty of other news sites)?
It was a photo of the physical paper, but with the comic blurred out.
 

Dave

Staff member
This is the image that is supposed to have caused the attack.


The Life of Muhammad showing him with his six (or seven) year-old wife, Aisha. He wasn't a pedophile, though. He waited until she was nine or ten to consummate the marriage.

And of course I don't think all Muslims did this. That would be insane of me. But it seems it's almost exclusively Muslim radicals who do this sort of thing. Yes, there are christian extremists and some of them have done some terrible things, but in the scheme of things it's always the Muslim extremists that perpetuate this level of violence.

Which is exactly what the Onion article is talking about.
 
it's always the Muslim extremists that perpetuate this level of violence.
It isn't, by a long shot. In the Western world (so not counting the Middle East and Central Asia), there have been more deaths by Christian fundamentalists than by Muslim fundamentalists in the last 20 years - but they receive far less attention from the media.

Ever since 9/11 there seems to be a vested interest in singling Islam out as THE terrorist religion and "it's not a bad religion, but..." sorts of statements. Religious fundamentalist nuts are just that. Terrorists are terrorists, no matter what flag they wave or what color they wear, and it has little to do with the actual religion.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
It isn't, by a long shot. In the Western world (so not counting the Middle East and Central Asia), there have been more deaths by Christian fundamentalists than by Muslim fundamentalists in the last 20 years - but they receive far less attention from the media.
I'd like some links to more info about that.
 
Can't find the link - read an article about it some while ago.

I do admit, it included the IRA and Anders Breivik as Christian fundamentalists - while true, it also distorts the numbers, obviously. Still, I'm really wary of people going along far too easily in the "it's always those darn Muslims, isn't it?" which is being pushed far too hard by media - and is frighteningly similar to "it's always those darn Jews, isn't it?" in early 1930's Germany.

Heck, on several occasions, things attributed to Muslims have had to be retracted because it turned out tob e completely unaffiliated different groups behind it (one particularly vicious murder in Brussels, caught on tape, and a group of home jackings in the Netherlands come to mind - one turned out to be a couple of Polish guys, the other a group of Albanian mafia - but both were, at the time, widely reported as being by Moroccan immigrants and used in lots of right-wing pushing of issues...and the retractions after weeks and months of mud-slinging towards Moroccans were one-time small articles at best)
 

Necronic

Staff member
The IRA is such an interesting example of religious terrorism. The fact that it feels different is really just our own racist preconceptions. No offense intended by that. None of us easily consider that anyone in the IRA could be motivated by Catholicism, because their actions so clearly go against the primary teachings of the religion. And most of us recognize that the actions are much more motivated by political ideologies and feelings of historical oppression etc.. What's so interesting is that the exact same template could be directly overlaid on many muslim terrorists, yet we choose to see them in such a different light.
 
I think the reason the eye gets cast on Islam in particular is that Islam seems to expect to be exempt from satire and parody. Every group has been mocked: to insult or for humour or with an ideological motive. Christians, especially cartoons with paedophile priests; Jewish people in controversial images about Israel-Palestine or cartoons published by or in support of the Nazis, Communists in Russia or contemporary enemies like Iran; women demanding the right to vote were ridiculed in cartoons; there's a history of racist depictions of black people in cartoons for hundreds of years.

Some of this might be a joke, or to push a ideological agenda, or just plain mean, and much of it may be wrong or tasteless, but no group says, "You can't do this to us." They may be offended, or angry, and demand it be censored. But only Islam says, "You can't do this to us." This isn't to say that Islam is therefore the problem, however. I just mean to explain why Islam is the focus in these incidents.

I think the biggest problem is that people listen to that edict. It's not controversial for me to draw a paedophile priest joke. People will laugh, or roll their eyes. But if I draw a guy with a turban and dynamite strapped to his chest, it's all, "OMG IS THIS OKAY?!" Forget about the Islamic world's reaction to my drawing: that's a reaction produced by our own media.

I agree that Islam isn't the problem, but I understand why it is seen as exceptional in this case, and others like it (e.g.: the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons in 2005, and Charlie Hebdo was firebombed in 2011 before this). The only cure for that is to ignore the claim that it cannot be done, until doing it is not controversial in Western media anymore (viz., that it draws the same amount of press coverage as any other critical cartoon; what's the last objectionable cartoon not related to Islam that made it into the news?).[DOUBLEPOST=1420664361,1420664315][/DOUBLEPOST]
The IRA is such an interesting example of religious terrorism. The fact that it feels different is really just our own racist preconceptions. No offense intended by that. None of us easily consider that anyone in the IRA could be motivated by Catholicism, because their actions so clearly go against the primary teachings of the religion. And most of us recognize that the actions are much more motivated by political ideologies and feelings of historical oppression etc.. What's so interesting is that the exact same template could be directly overlaid on many muslim terrorists, yet we choose to see them in such a different light.
This is well said.
 

Necronic

Staff member
Also, while violence and terrorism in the middle east is bad, it's sort of a drop in the bucket compared to what has happened for the last century and some change in Central Africa. Want to know what the common denominator between those two areas are? It's not religion. It's a history of heavy handed European/western involvement.
 
I had heard about the shootings, but I did not know the circumstances.
I want to post thatescalatedquickly.jpg, but I don't feel like that properly describes the amount of areyoufreakingkiddingme.jpg that should go with it.

--Patrick
 
The IRA is such an interesting example of religious terrorism. The fact that it feels different is really just our own racist preconceptions. No offense intended by that. None of us easily consider that anyone in the IRA could be motivated by Catholicism, because their actions so clearly go against the primary teachings of the religion. And most of us recognize that the actions are much more motivated by political ideologies and feelings of historical oppression etc.. What's so interesting is that the exact same template could be directly overlaid on many muslim terrorists, yet we choose to see them in such a different light.
Now I could be wrong, but I don't recall stories about IRA members shouting "God bless the Pope" as they murdered members of the press. It's not really just our own racial preconceptions that make it feel different. It's the people responsible who want it that way.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
"The Troubles" was not a religious conflict, it was a conflict between populations that happened to have different religious beliefs, but it was a secular conflict.
 

figmentPez

Staff member
I don't know. This, once again, seems to like to point the blame at Islam - which is false. 99,9999% of muslims aren't attacking newspapers, after all, and violence in the name of Hinduism or Christianity isn't exactly unheard of (oh, sorry, did you think those terrorist attacks in Sudan were all by muslim terrorists? Oops). Posting an image like that and saying "no-one died because of this" is sort of missing the point and can even be dangerous, further repeating the stereotype "Islam = evil and violent" - leading to such fun little anti-Islam movements as we've seen recently in France and Germany...which some people are starting to comapre to Kristallnacht. Let's not go that way.
Let's not forget that, even today, there are parts of the US where a person will get threatened or killed for performing certain taboo acts. While it's not likely some rural southerner will travel to a major city to kill people because of what a newspaper printed, there are still areas where your life would be in danger for being gay, or speaking out in favor of homosexuals. Just because American Christianity doesn't have strong taboos about what can be printed, doesn't mean there aren't taboos that some would kill over.
 
Tumblr's being tumblr. "What happened today was awful... BUT those guys were racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and worst of all, *gasp*

WHITE."

(Granted, it's the minority by a long shot, but it's still being said.)
 
Not all dead were white. The police officer who was wounded, pleaded for his life and was shot at point blank range was Ahmet, from Algerian origin.

Also, dear Tumblr (and AP, by the way, who have decided to give in to the demands and removed all pictures with offending cartoons), we Europeans still tend to value the right of free speech higher than the right t(o be offended. I didn't think Charlie Hebdo was particularly funny, and their cartoons are/were often crude, vulgar and purposefully offensive. Doesn't mean they don't get to say it, though.
 
A friend of mine works at one of the larger newspapers in Germany and they posted the pictures on the first page of their paper and on the website.
Her workplace hired security and is under police protection. I support this 100%.
 

Necronic

Staff member
The IRA goes back almost a century before the troubles, and while it's true that religion played less of a role in the history of conflict between Irish-British than in the Middle East, it would be hard to argue that division of religion was not a key factor in their problems.

The key difference is that there was always a history of stable governments in this regions, which allowed the conflict to be more secular, but the IRA was not a group that renounced their Catholicism with their actions, they were all god fearing men who felt justified, not just politically, but religiously, in acts of terrorism. That's the point. While their religion was not a key motivating factor, they saw no conflict between their beliefs and their actions.
 
I'm not going to say "I am Charlie" (ironically), and I even wouldn't call some of their vile shit "satire".

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/charlie-hebdo-islamophobia/

No, the offices of Charlie Hebdo should not be raided by gun-wielding murderers. No, journalists are not legitimate targets for killing. But no, we also shouldn’t line up with the inevitable statist backlash against Muslims, or the ideological charge to defend a fetishized, racialized “secularism,” or concede to the blackmail which forces us into solidarity with a racist institution.
 
Top