Yup.
There's only space for so many Charlie Hebdos on this planet.

That said, given all what we know about the people who died, I believe some of them would probably wear this "award" as a "badge of honor" and make it a front-page article.

Many conservative English Christians find the Radical Islam worse than tiresome, and don't make ideological excuses for cowardice.

As for been obnoxious, I believe these guys were called that and worse, but they stood up for their beliefs:

I've seen some horrible treatment and verbal abuse of blacks, jews, gypsies, eastern europeans, christians, homosexuals, chinese, Indians, Americans, whites, women, etc. Not just verbal abuse, but actual physical abuse. I don't think I've seen the same level of abuse directed towards Muslims. For the most part, Muslims are not even distinguishable from other people. I only hear about it from their reactions. Are Muslims truly more abused than anyone else?

Have you ever actually watched the Life of Brian?

Phos, you don't even know any Muslims.

But I do. And I've never seen them experience the kinds of abuses I've seen other groups have. And I've seen some horrible things happen to people just for being black,white, or gay.

watched it ? I worshipped it. splitter !

despite the sacriligious visuals of that scene, "always looking on the bright side of life" is actually theologically sound.

I can't believe Maajid Nawaz and Home Secretary Theresa May were voted UK Islamophobes of the Year. Where did they hold this vote? Mosul? Its a bit juvenile.

This Islamophobe label has now been abused beyond anything useful. Its a disservice to Muslims who might encounter real abuse out of real hate, and need real help.

To say they are activists is a bizarre and extreme conclusion. It may apply in some personal cases but not in others. And I dare say that the NON-Atheists are the majority.

ideological excuses for cowardice ? You mean that people who apply common sense are cowards ? And that radical conservatives are perfect ?


And the Video is perfect nonsense. People who got crucified had at least their arms NAILED to the cross and often also their legs and suffered unbelievable pains, at least until losing consciousness and very slowly dying

I thought they were some sort of satirists....silly me.
They ridiculed Christianity more than any other religion, but for some reason we don't want to acknowledge this. Strange. I can only guess some people covered their eyes when looking through their cartoons.
Had they focused on only one, it would have seemed very suspicious indeed.

In Charlie Hebdo, nobody is pro-religion. You must be talking about another majority somewhere else. I used the word activists as a pedagogical short-cut because not one line of this paper (I've been reading it for years, remember?) ever defended religions. It's a secular paper against any influence of religion in public, social and political life.

Well, in France nobody who considers themselves intellectual is pro religion. So placing this in context, your above statement is not that surprising really.

In France it would be virtual sacrilege to even suggest religion should play a greater role in the public arena. So in that respect Charlie Hebdo was really just towing a mainstream political and establishment position. Maybe its style and tone were rebellious, but the core message less so.

I don't think its the job of satire to be for anything or even against anything. Good satire ridicules and rubs salt in wounds and indeed asks questions - but should leave it to others to thrash out coherent and complete answers.

I did NOT say PRO-RELIGION, I said NOT Atheist. That is a difference.


To be secularist and against influence of religion does NOT mean that you are an atheist. And it is not the Job of publications to defend relîgion


Houari Boumediènne, originally Makhmoud Barkharouba, became, after studies in the Zitouna in Tunis and the Azhar in Cairo, an Imam, but then first Defence Minister and then in 1965 President of Algeria. He never was an atheist, but clearly a secularist

France is a place where there are several ways of being anti-religion.

Saying that intellectuals reject religion by definition means that you consider that there is no intellectual in the right wing parties. I don't mind, but they don't agree with you.

If religion was absent behind the scene, incl. intellectuals and politics, there wouldn't be people like at Charlie Hebdo who go a step further than secularity: they oppose all kind of religious founded thinking, not only the public secular religious presence that is strongly represented in French society.

Religion is everywhere in France, incl. intellectuals, but one doesn't see it. Charlie Hebdo doesn't agree with religion being hidden, they write it off totally. Intellectuals rarely go that far, the secular view is usually sufficient even in left wings parties.

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Es wird nichts ausgelassen, um mich hier herauszuekeln. Ein Lehrbuch. False accusations and attacks continue. There is no stopping righteous people when they are wrong.

Six novelists boycott PEN gala dinner honoring Charlie Hebdo. Saying:

"All this is complicated by PEN’s seeming blindness to the cultural arrogance of the French nation, which does not recognize its moral obligation to a large and disempowered segment of their population.”

Little known novelists desperate for publicity.

Also from the link "“If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” Mr. Rushdie (former PEN president) said. “What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”"

I can't spontaneously think of any right-wing French intellectual, and I think the typical modern French intellectual is both anti-religion and if not explicitly left-wing, at least nominally anti-right-wing.

Maybe there are some right-wing guys who can give it back to the left-wing guys in TV debates and the like. And a good many have gone to the Grandes Ecoles and all that. But that alone doesn't make them proper intellectuals in the intellectual sense of the word if you follow what I mean. There's more to being intellectual than just being smart.

Banning any religion influence from any form of public life is an anti freedom, totalitarian ideology in its own right and we all know how it ended.