A terrorist attack on the offices of the satiric newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, in Paris January 7 killed 12 including the editorial director and cartoonist Stephane Charbonnier. He spearheaded the publication of an issue in 2011 that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad and resulted in the firebombing of the newspaper’s offices. In 2006 they reprinted cartoons of Muhammad first published by a Danish newspaper. (The New York Times, January 7, 2015, by Ravi Somaiya with reporting by Doreen Carvajal)
Much of the commentary in the U.S. focused on the importance of avoiding self-censorship. Walter Olson of the Cato Institute wrote in Time, January 7, 2015, about the danger of remaining silent in the face of violence and even passing laws banning defamation of religion or criticism of others’ religions.
CNN reported that after killings in Paris The Washington Post was one of the few media outlets to print images of the cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The Post said they showed the cartoons to help readers understand the issues at stake. CNN itself opted to describe the cartoons rather than showing them. CNN cited the importance of protecting their reporters stationed around the world. (CNN Money, January 8, 2015, by Brian Stelter and Tom Kludt)
Josh Stearns of Journalism & Sustainability in Medium, January 8, 2015, argues that those taking the streets to protest the killings hit on a truth with their sign “Je Suis Charlies,” “I am Charlie.” With the Internet millions more people in the world are “committing acts of journalism, bearing witness, and holding the powerful to account through media of their own making.” Stearns called for solidarity in defending free speech among all people, and not just abandon the fight to journalists.
Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, January 10, 2015, argues that the Charlie Hebdo attack was not driven by religious zealotry or a protest of raucous free speech or French Islamophobia but was a political act., “its true target…multicultural democracy in general and the specific version, both more fragile and more successful, found in France in particular,” writes O’Hehir. It was an attempt to polarize the French and empower French radicals to commit acts that would undermine the foundations of the French nation.