Charlie Hebdo: Gun attack on French magazine kills 11

Tons of Europeans are in Syria/Iraq fighting on one side or the other at the moment, and people have been warning that they would be 'radicalized' when they came home for quite some time (also, traumatized and all that) So news that they were warriors in Syria is very very relevant to this story.

Thats been a big big thing here in AU as well - a rising number of mostly young kids (male and female - and not always already muslim either) running away to join the ISCircus. And, more often than not, ending up dead about 15 mins after they land there.

In Britain the government is trying to find ways of revoking passports of the impressionable young men who go out there, rendering them stateless. VERY dodgy, against international law etc. - better to take these young adults back home and deal with them maturely, because there will always be impressionable hot-headed young adults with grievances and it is possible to direct that energy to a less toxic place.

It is very important that they were french born. It is a big change in terrorism in Europe that it is no longer foreign cells, or cells organized from abroad, but perhaps small groups radicalized and choosing to do something on their own. It changes how intelligence should work massively.

Of course, big reason they are getting radicalized is massive amount of islamophobia going around in Europe.

Arrest operation going down in Reims

Is there a good streaming radio station with live / updates? I've tried BBC 4 and World Service but they're just doing bulletins.

It is a big change in terrorism in Europe

unless you're taking a long view, it's not really that new. the train bombers in london were uk-born.

and Mohammed Merah was also french born.

idk if there are any up-to-date English-language resources. Guardian just walked back the arrest story that the raids in Reims overtook half an hour ago.

Rolling coverage/pictures of the raids here: https://twitter.com/France3CA

Though "police go into a building"..."police come out of a building" doesn't add a whole lot to our knowledge.

Lost of French tweets now about the Reims raid being a decoy operation iirc. Stunned by the poor reporting on the raid from French journalists, even if it is a chaotic situation. Unless this is the effect of the authorities having asked the press to stay put while this is going on.

http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/paris-magazine-attack/paris-attack-suspect-dead-two-custody-n281761
maybe

That's been up for a while, but no French media are confirming it.

There is however a new big raid going on, in Charleville Mézières right now.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B6ypp1KIcAAjo6V.jpg:large

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html

that's a great article, thx alba

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebdo-attack-cartoonist-says-gunmen-threatened-to-kill-her-toddler-daughter-unless-she-let-them-in-9963788.html

Holy shit, just imagine being this woman right now. Or her toddler for that matter.

Grenade attack on a mosque in Le Mans. Thankfully no reports of injuries.

i don't really believe in "evil" but it's really hard to think of much else right now

I do believe in cretinism however.

things are really fucked up today, obviously

I can't help feeling disturbed by some of today's headlines and thinkpieces. What happened was barbaric - there's no justifying a massacre of this kind, no matter what. However, the right-wing are saying it's an attack on freedom; the liberal papers an attack on democracy; while so many others are saying this is an attack on freedom of speech. Possible alternate agendas aside, this was an attack on a satirical magazine by a group of highly confused people who felt that the paper's provocations somehow justified the killing of over a dozen people.
The buzzwords being used in the media and online - 'democracy', 'freedom' - are direct echoes of post-9/11 rhetoric, but with the added sexy militancy of 'freedom of speech' thrown in. In this context, these words are needlessly evocative. They elevate these murderers from the ranks of cold-blooded killers to enemies of fundamental Western virtue.
These are not just terrorists who've been brainwashed into thinking that killing civilians and law enforcers is justified by their beliefs, they represent a more insidious attack on our right to vote, our right to roam, and our right to say whatever the hell we like whenever we like.
I believe we already have a thread for this, and I'm sure it's been said elsewhere and in not-so sensitive terms (one article from the FT was especially insensitive in a 'what did they expect?' kind of way) but is this what 'freedom of speech' is all about? I can imagine a lot of right-thinking moderate Muslims weren't all too happy about Charlie Hebdo's representation of the Prophet. This is, after all, one of the more sensitive parts of Islamic tradition. So should we hold up or 'sacralize' CH as a pillar of Western virtue any more than we should hold the gunmen up as anything more than faith-blinded murderers?

Muhammed waged wars, battles and invasions all over the place. He ordered slaves, sold woman and children into slavery, had a child by a slave woman.

He had people assassinated for writing bad poems about him. (http://wikiislam.net/wiki/List_of_Killings_Ordered_or_Supported_by_Muhammad)

Imagine if Jesus, an important but of course subsidiary prophet in Islam, did any of this stuff? Struck people down with his sword? Wouldn't be possible to follow his teachings.

why are we comparing the two?

Like I said, Muhammed ordered people killed for "mocking him through poetry". How is that different to what these people did? They are just following it to the word.

Plenty of Christians follow the Bible to the word, and would be prepared to kill over it too.

i don't see how this conversation is relevant. these are atrocities committed in the name of religion and like it or not, killings in the name of religion happen around the world on a daily basis.

wikiislam.net definitely seems like a site with rigorous standards for accuracy.

dog latin, don't feel like you have to respond to this person in good faith.

so sad about these killings.

xp

You're saying you don't see how following the words and actions of Prohpet Muhammed are relevent in an attack waged in his name, for his justice, and for his vengence? ("The prophet is avenged" is what they shouted.)

I think I'm going to follow horseshoe's advice and politely ignore you, RT as I can't see your argument for all the strawmen you're putting up. If you're insinuating that there is some sort of inherent evil in the teachings of Islam, then I'm definitely ignoring you.

You need to read up.

is this what 'freedom of speech' is all about?

yes

ban tanuki

i did flag tanuki but immediately regretted it because he does get an absurd number of bites, that conscious rap thread is hilarious

def looking forward to tanook's analysis of cherif kouachi's rap skills tfs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OoRjFCP5spE

am in the Paris office today, and we just had a minute's silence. everyone very pre-occupied. it reminds me of the aftermath of the July London bombings in that respect. A number of people here were down at the Place de la Republique last night, saying the atmosphere was very reflective - people remembering when they'd first bought the magazine, the part it had played in their life etc.

there was visible military presence at Gare du Nord, light police presence on the metro. And that thing I remember with the London tube bombings, of people scrutinising each others' faces, not in an aggressive way, but as if searching for responses from behind their own inscrutable mask. I guess in a large city community, with a typical mixture of anonymity and general civic trust, this was for me the clearest expression of a social trauma. It's obviously a very multicultural city and country as well, with a large number of people feeling uncomfortable in the public space.

Feel bad for LOLing but LOL (xxp)

Well, ILX was deeply affected by the London Tube Bombings.

Let's get this straight first - Cherif Kouachi is not a devout Muslim, he is an angry disenfranchised street kid, he's an orphan, he was in Paris gangs, he's had no guidenace or positivity in his life. This is the social problems we should be looking at more than Islam. There are millions like him. He drank, smoked weed, had girlfriends, listened to hip hop. This is not a man following scripture devoutly. He admitted this himself. This is someone looking for something to grab hold of on his very last wits and at the end of sanity in todays world.

xposts to contenderizer
I guess I need to actually learn more about CH, their brand of satire and the offending images therein to truly make sense of all this. I have an old copy of it at home but I'm not sure how much of it I'd be able to contextualise.
I guess my concern here, is with people suggesting that the gunmen had a problem with 'satire' - that ultimately they 'just don't get it' or can't take a joke - that the ultimate issue here is a concrete lack of humour.
Putting aside the obviously indefensible atrocities committed here for just a moment, isn't this a bit like saying someone's an enemy of freedom of speech because they're opposed to a racist joke or a rape joke? And is it a satirist's duty, as a defender of free speech, to continue to provoke their targets via these jokes?
I'm not sure I know the answers myself here, I admit. It may very well be an unequivocal right to be able to poke fun at anything. And the last thing I want to do here is echo that shitty FT piece which made out the victims of these attacks 'had it coming'.
However, I do believe it's important not to be derailed or blindsided into malice by yet another conceptual value like 'freedom of speech' any more than previous buzzwords like 'freedom' and 'democracy'.
Freedom of speech is of course an important liberty to hold and should be cherished, but trying to make sense of these atrocities on these grounds just doesn't quite work for me in this context.

The corporate media been shutting down free speech for years so this is rich.

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/07/on-debating-dead-moral-questions/

There's a strong possibility that many of their cartoons would have fallen foul of British laws about inciting racial and religious hatred. Many would have been equally as at home in a Neo-Nazi publication as they were in a libertarian satirical magazine. It's clearly possible to separate the belief that they have a right to publish from a belief that other organisations should republish as a point of principle, though.

Putting aside the obviously indefensible atrocities committed here for just a moment, isn't this a bit like saying someone's an enemy of freedom of speech because they're opposed to a racist joke or a rape joke?

it's like saying someone's an enemy of freedom because they murdered 12 people because they're opposed to a racist joke or a rape joke. you can't put the atrocities aside.

From '08: 60-70% of prisoners in France are Muslims. (via Perrin, who says "Clearly something to satirize.")

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/28/AR2008042802560.html

xpost I appreciate the difference and the seriousness of the situation, but I do not appreciate the idea that this is an explicit attack on the Western value of 'freedom of speech'. As ShariVari says, a lot of these cartoons would have been censored in other countries and some of them do seem remarkably right-wing for a supposedly left-leaning satirical mag. So I'm wary of politicians and the media using free speech as an unassailable liberty to be upheld in the face of atrocities like these.

https://medium.com/@asgharbukhari/charlie-hebdo-this-attack-was-nothing-to-do-with-free-speech-it-was-about-war-26aff1c3e998

It may very well be an unequivocal right to be able to poke fun at anything.

yep

Blimey, Tony Husband, of Yobs infamy, currently being interviewed on Sky News.

In USA, we let media corporations self-censor. They do it as well as the guvmint would.