Nous Sommes Tous Charlie Hebdo?

Last week as reported in the New York Times:

Satirical Magazine Is Firebombed in Paris

By DAVID JOLLY

PARIS — The office of a French satirical magazine here was badly damaged by a firebomb early on Wednesday, the publisher said, after it published a spoof issue “guest edited” by the Prophet Muhammad to salute the victory of an Islamist party in Tunisian elections. The publication also said hackers had disrupted its Web site.

The magazine, Charlie Hebdo, had announced a special issue for publication Wednesday, renamed “Charia Hebdo,” a play on the word in French for Shariah law.

The magazine’s editor, Stephane Charbonnier, told Europe 1 radio that the police had called just before 5 a.m. to report a fire of criminal origin. News reports said a Molotov cocktail had been thrown through a window. The special edition was on its way to the newsstands, the editor said, and will appear as scheduled.

But, he added: “We are homeless and we have no way to put out the magazine. We hope this won’t be the last issue.”

“We can’t put out the magazine under these conditions,” he said. “The stocks are burned, smoke is everywhere, the paste-up board is unusable, everything is melted, there’s no more electricity.”

The magazine’s Web site appeared to have been restored by early Wednesday.

Caustically ironic and vulgar, Charlie Hebdo prides itself on being offensive to virtually everyone. It has drawn the ire of Muslim activists before, including in 2006, after it republished cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that first appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Islamic law usually forbids depictions of the prophet. The edition of Charlie Hebdo that apparently inspired the fire-bombing showed a cartoon of Muhammad and the words: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter.”

A Turkish hacker has taken credit for the website attack.  He’s now threatening to attack the website of the left-leaning French daily, Liberation, which offered space to the Charlie Hebdo staff and helped them put out their last issue. 

No one surpasses me in disliking the French;  I once spent 30 hours in Paris, and the experience is still seared into my memory like one of the more horrifying episodes of the Twilight Zone. 

But the French deserve their due.  After all, they’ve banned the burka.  And their leftists are still free to ridicule anything and everything, including Islam – (and, more important: it occurs to them to do so).  Our highly disciplined American lefties only imagine they’re  free to ridicule everything, when actually all they ever think to go after are  Christians and the Tea Party – they’d never dream of making a crack against the religion of the Prophet.