Have you ever heard Gary Habermas, Michael Licona or William Lane Craig defend the resurrection of Jesus in a debate by saying that the resurrection is the best explanation for the “minimal facts” about Jesus? The lists of minimal facts that they use are typically agreed to by their opponents during the debates. Minimal facts […]
Negan was right, “I’m bringing ORDER to this shit!” I seem to remember this above all else OVER the constant shit about how a society deals with, ‘The most vulnerable.’ Or as I call them, the people that would be culled due to inadequacy and weakness. Most people born with the inability to care for self would naturally die out and the strong would survive. Weak assholes liberalize the reason for non-producers to survive in a time of plenty because they are idiots who can’t live with themselves if they actually made the right decision about defective human animals. These people are eradicated on a natural level. If you cannot contribute to the village pot, you are turned out or driven out due to your uselessness. This is life as an animal in the real world.
Most stupid humans try to believe that they are beyond their animal origins and believe that overpopulation is not an issue due to bullshit asshole hubris believing that they are above the ecosystem of the basic animal. This is fucking crap! Humans have busted out of the ecosystem that they occupy resulting in unnatural results such as adjusting habitat situations resulting in elevated murder/crime statistics resulting from too many rats in the maze. We are an animal regardless of the religious communities opinions or dictates and the opinions of the assholes that believe we are better than the things that they allow to piss on their lawns.
We have problems that are going to kill us as a species related to the opinion that we are above the other mammals on our planet. Until we manage our villages like we do our rabbit hutches and hen houses, we are going to spiral out of control and kill each other trying to take resources to survive.
I am a moderate…what does that mean? It means that I see Right and Left as extremes that cannot come to agreement because they are too busy one-upping each other and smearing the truth into something unreadable. The extremes are too busy flogging their respective dicks in pleasure and celebration of their utter superiority to one another, while ignoring the dictates of a small thing called ‘Demonstrable Evidence.’ Neither dickheaded group respects evidence or even, ‘shred-of-proof, because they are too busy celebrating non-win situations that rational people see as fucking ridiculous.
One can learn if one is open-minded, that sand papering one’s dick to a bloody nub is quite non-productive and deeply unpleasant to the dick in question. Spinning a wheel to no avail is the same thing and a seeming standard today with the two ruling asshole parties that don’t even advertise as being keggers! Fuck you dude! No beer? Take your party and shove it up your collective proper assholes! Moderates, such as myself, claim to be in the middle and devoid of the same unreasonable illogical bullshit positions as either side. Moderates take demonstrable evidence into account and weigh it against all incoming claims that may dispute it and use intellect to decipher a probable and reasonable standpoint. When given new evidence, they take this into account and vet the evidence at hand so as not to decide based upon emotion or popular belief. This is called,”Sane.”
Religion uses faith, which requires absolutely ZERO evidence, and 100% emotion and knee-jerk to determine some of the most important decisions in this life. Reference the molestation of the Duggar sisters at the hands of their own brother which the sick fucks known as Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have sought to sweep this under the carpet to hide that fact that their God sure as Hell didn’t do a fucking thing to protect the Duggar sisters from this dangerous pedophile! Duck you Fuggars!
I, as a moderate, ask what the evidence is that backs the things that you are telling me. Both Left AND Right have attacked me for not taking sides. I have slammed the Left for their hypocritical support of the misogynist Hillary, and the Right for their intolerance. The Left and the Right need to come together on taking back many rights, because they will find themselves behind the eight ball if they keep fighting. The 1% counts on the divisive shit fed to the public by the media to keep the hen house open for the wolves!
I ask people to continue to be diligent in their resistance to media and bullshit and to skeptically evaluate things so that they can fight for their rights through the bullshit. Watching reality TV and shit will fuck you. Rejecting crap and other bullshit will empower you. Rioting and ‘demonstrating,’ will empower your Millennial Hipster entitlement. Be aware of how you demonstrate. If it is ineffective, then you are an asshole. If you are legit, then you are an activist. Being in the middle seems to regulate reason and balance. I use ‘Snowflake,’ and ,buttercup,’ to describe assholes who think that they are special to everyone besides their loved ones, because no one is special in a pack of wolves except to their fucking parents!
Moderates believe that eventually evidence will trump, (no relation), bullshit, and that reason will return control of the nation to the people instead of the 1%. Yes, the rich have always lived above us and beyond our laws, but their heads roll from their bodies with a sharp blade the same as every one else’s. So, if the elected officials refuse to be accountable, we can cut their fucking heads from their bodies and feed the carrion to the crows! Fucking sucking A dudes!
Hello America, today is yet another day that we can say, “Days without presidential embarrassment…..FUCKING ZERO! And counting. I had hoped to be a holdout to encourage folks to give him a chance, but he is proving himself a 1% asshole just like the rest of the Washington ilk! I am in the middle of the teeter totter. I balance myself in the middle while the angry children on the Left and Right try to knock each other in the dirt. My ass doesn’t end up there because I have found the mathematical perfect position of balance between two warring and extreme knee-jerk factions, none of them right but full of emotional conflict.
My position is to examine all of the facts and examine ways to solve complex problems, the Left and Right positions are examples of how children quarrel over a toy ending in the weakest one sustaining an injury while the winner gloats over the show of blood. It is very strange how the sociopathic Darwinist takes the position of peacemaker and caregiver of wounds in the midst of supposed normal folk who lust for blood at the enemy’s expense. I usually attempt to lead the religious zealot to the climate change believer and try to broker a peace and mutual understanding between them, me, the social Darwinist who believes that Eugenics wasn’t all bad and that death row inmates and lifers should face mandatory sterilization, believes that mediation could result in rational outcomes and the betterment of mankind in general…DUH!
The Donald is fucking irrational and deluded. He is busy not connecting with the majority of us as he stated he would! He is busy still fucking off at Mar-a-lago at our expense and fucking the local economy by causing a shutdown of all of the airport businesses due to restrictions related to Airforce One flying in their area of operations. Every commercial aircraft is grounded while The Donald’s plane is in the area! This is causing businesses to go bankrupt and the economy to take a downturn which is contrary to the message that he sent during his campaign of restoring the middle class. He isn’t for restoring the middle class, he doesn’t even install middle class friendly people to his cabinet. He elects those who have a strong dislike for those not in their country club and those who hob-knob with the 1%. You see, these assholes are not the 1%, not Donald, not his acolytes or his sycophantic fucktards. The 1% is unknown to us and multi-generational. These people operate above Donald and Bill Gates. These are the Billionaires that we know. The 1% operate above the law and don’t give a shit about the feeble every-day problems of the rich and the poor, they just pit them against each other to create a smoke screen for the constant fleecing.
The Donald was an answer to nothing that was supposed to be an answer to politics as usual. Now we have uncertainty and erratic bullshit over any balanced decision making resulting in a worry over whether or not Donald will kill us all. This dick cannot just shoot off his mouth and expect people to accept him as anything but ridiculous! Our President must respond with diplomacy and measured rhetoric before dropping a big assed bomb on any opponent. It’s like a chess game, not getting punched and reacting. This shit is gonna get us into something that the American people cannot extract themselves from for at least a decade, so pay attention people! Get the net and start being as afraid of this asshole’s policies as any other fair and balanced person!
I am on alert and am reasoning with the people that I can reason with. I am pissed about bullshit and complacency and ignorance and am well against it and need to warn others of the Donald’s idiocies. This fuck needs to NOT have 4 years of fucking us all. The Left needs to GIVE us a candidate like Sanders that we can use to fix certain things and veto others. Fix it and socialize education Goddammit! Get yer ass in gear! Donald is a loser!
I find myself coming back to my writing more and more as I realize that it comforts me and allows me to actually be my true self. There are no employers, no friends with religion, no other influential assholes here that harsh my literary mellow or try to squash my opinions with their idiotic outrage. When I write I go to my creative happy place and with a lack of worry, create what I believe to be some pretty cool and edgy prose on the foibles and frets of mankind, and how easily fixable most of it all is if people weren’t such complete dunces most of the time.
As a healthcare professional, I am somehow required by the law of man to passionately give a shit about humanity and strive for the betterment of these creatures above all else, even though they fuck themselves on a constant basis. I care, I do actually have a conscience, but the limits therein create a line that about 90% of humanity crosses on a daily basis with all of their petty infighting and, ‘I don’t give a shit about any problems but my own,’ attitudes. These people annoy me to no end and cause me to be very aware of an almost sociopathic quality to my personality that I am apologizing for quite rarely these days, but there are those whose opinions greatly matter to me over all others. The ones that matter discuss things sanely and fairly, without harsh judgment to those that they disagree with, without totally denying peer-reviewed demonstrable evidence, without masking their assholery in in pseudo-educated unsubstantiated circumlocutions tainted by holier-than-thou bullshit. These people are very few and far between and are always greater than an arms length away, making them very difficult to reach.
I used to consider my self a humanist, and maybe I am one, more so than I actually think. I believe that doing the best for the human race is the greatest gift that you can actually give it, so being a bit harsh, but adhering to logic will save the race without giving in to pseudo-morality and bullshit pandering to completely fucktardish thinking. Therefor I must now put forward my basic thoughts about humanity and it’s failings.
I believe in a swift death penalty only with irrefutable evidence. There is no room if conviction was done upon race and socioeconomic standing. If genetic evidence is present or a camera shows the crime in question, then convict and execute immediately as the gavel falls. Why? Not because of, ‘an eye for an eye,’ but because we have too many rats in the maze and it is showing the scientific signs of breaking down in real time as we speak. The animal condition of overpopulation is the real problem behind most of our difficulties on the planet Earth and less human beings is the answer. Religion will say different and knee-jerk liberalism will also defend the weakest, but the reality is that if you have a defective brake pad, then you wouldn’t install it on your car. So if this is the case, why do we keep death-row inmates alive and why do we keep those too disabled to contribute, alive when the system is the entity paying for their survival? This is a logical call, not a knee-jerk call! Asshole liberals will say that this is, ‘draconian,’ until the population reaches it’s breaking point when too many rats are in the maze, and then where are the liberal sentiments when these assholes are just trying to shore up their supplies by eliminating the needy?
I just believe in pre-empting the inevitable, the mass extermination of those not deemed worthy by the current government. We need to think and act upon forcing birth control on Medicaid recipients creating multiple children and using welfare as a career. The system needs to enact a free college and trade school system for these people while taking them and instructing them that they need to get a trade or a career, or forever be banned from the welfare system as complete flotsam. The system needs to be focused on being a necessary part of the village instead of a burden. People need to be trained for needed skills and plugged into the system as needs arise, and discouraged from getting worthless degrees that they, ‘dreamed of,’ getting because these fucking fields are goddamned pipe dream fields not populated by those based in reality. Yes, I understand the 1% and I get the bullshit that is going around, but I also believe that if society allows you to say what you want, then rise against the 1% and demand a better deal! This is possible because the status quo relies on the majority NOT rising up with guns and assassinating the minority! So get this shit together if you are unhappy with the current state of jobs and the minimum wage and be willing to risk your piece of the American pie to make the changes that you want, because if the Government is allowed to make those changes, you are probably not going to be quite satisfied with their incarnation of YOUR wishes. My father-in-law is very accustomed to using the word, “Draconian,” to describe anything that he disagrees with, ie, ALL things not extremely liberal, but given the problem with overpopulation, I hope that liberals get the net and realize that when people in industrialized countries begin fighting over resources, you a see the altruistic liberal vanish in a heartbeat when they miss a few meals.
The truth of the matter is that human beings need to start embracing some of their similarities to other animals, because it is unnatural and against what we are intrinsically as mammals to try to deny ourselves. We pontificate about unnatural things that we think elevate us and make us better as beings but ignore the fact that in the animal world there are no freebies and everyone contributes, or those that do not get nothing, THAT is natural and good! It is advanced thinking to assist a person or a family in temporary need, but it is unnatural to create a strata of flotsam who constantly graze on the labor of the working people while sitting on their subhuman asses. Things need to change that allow for socialized education and assistance programs for retraining if a person is injured, but if the person does not want these things and is abide, they need to be denied any tax dollars from those that work for a living. If this confederacy of dunces resort to crime, than force them to labor for 10 hrs a day and give them three meals a day and a cot, AND NO CONJUGAL VISITS! These slope-browed idiots should be mandatorily sterilized so that they cannot repopulate the trailer park!
You see, there is a serious need for people who are hardwired to do the right thing no matter how hard the decisions may be. I see these things in black and white and realize that half of our people have deluded themselves into thinking that all of this altruistic save-everyone bullshit is advanced thinking, much to the detriment of the ENTIRE planet, it’s climate, and it’s renewable resources that are rapidly dwindling. Most of these positions are due to liberal and far right religious folly, religion being the cancer upon humanity that seeks to fill the pews by restricting birth control and encouraging Latin men to essentially force their wives into maternal servitude and early death. These are just a few things that humanity uses to pump up the volume of an already overpopulated species! Yes, I know that poor Muslim countries do this as well and the 90% of their people follow it hook, line and sinker, or stinker, just like most of the majority of human beings. We have people like the ducking Fuggars who view the vagina as God’s sacred clown car, the more that comes from it, the better, until we are shoulder-to-shoulder and literally spiriting our neighbors away in the middle of the night to carve ’em up ala Terminus style and save ’em in ‘th big freezer until maw needs a shank fer the fucking stew!
The world needs a shake-up in the leadership, and not one that ignores the coming problems. It needs forward-thinking social Darwinists able to make decisions that are sensible and animal for the good of the producers/survivors, for the hunters that put meat on the table and keep the village psycho from running rampant! Liberal idiocy aside, these things are gonna happen and I would LOVE people to get on the bandwagon and support sensibility rather than support the free-love freebie snowflake shit happening today. I WANT green energy NOW! I want free college and trade school NOW! I want sustainable solutions to save the planet like fucking yesterday, but I am NOT a knee-jerk liberal and I think that the far right are insane. People need to, ‘be willing to break a few eggs.’ The reality of the matter is that people need to return to the days when hard choices were something you just had to make, instead of turfing it to someone with more guts and sticking their heads in the sand! I always say that I notice how 99% of self-made people are NEVER extreme liberals because they are too used to making tough choices and working for stuff instead of getting it for free, and I mean that. Without a frame of reference, a person should NEVER speak of something of which he/she has no experience. It’s like a career poor person telling you that money can’t buy you happiness. Has this person ever had money? No! Keep your mouth shut unless you have demonstrable evidence! Many of those without experience will pontificate on things that they know nothing of and they usually make themselves look like fools. These people usually are not those who have made hard choices that ended in their success or the success of others. Hard choices have to be made by people with guts who can look you in the eye after sacrificing something to save countless others.
I have gone on long enough. As I have said before, I am a social Darwinist who believes that the salvation of the human race relies on us going back to embracing the fact that we are animals and returning to a village lifestyle, where those who don’t contribute are given a job and if they can’t hack it, they receive NO benefit.
Anne Nicol Gaylor is an 86-year-old abortion provider with no medical training of her own. Her “office supplies” consist of little more than a pen, paper, checkbook, and a telephone. On a Tuesday morning this past July, in a retirement home just outside of Madison, Wisconsin, I sat in her living room as we waited for calls from women who needed (or wanted) to obtain abortions but just didn’t have the ability to pay for them. She is their last hope for a handout.
As the founder of Women’s Medical Fund, Inc., a non-profit group she formed in 1976, Gaylor asks intimate questions of strangers without the slightest hesitation. There’s no time for emotion. There’s work to be done.
Are you single or married?
How much money do you make?
Did you use contraception?
Is the man involved helping you?
How much will your procedure cost?
Did you see a doctor yet?
Have you had an ultrasound?
Gaylor has answered the phone like this more than 20,000 times. Since 1995, WMF has raised and spent nearly $3,000,000 to help women, with most of the money — just over $200, on average, per caller — going to a small handful of providers like Planned Parenthood. The funding comes mostly from individual donors, though about a quarter of the funding last year came from foundation grants. Its mission is to make sure that a woman’s right to reproductive choice is not denied because she doesn’t have enough money, regardless of whether the pregnancy is unintended or unwanted. The organization has no paid staffers, only dedicated volunteers. And, for the moment, Gaylor is just sitting in her recliner, waiting for the next caller, waiting to write her next check.
Anne Gaylor at her 80th birthday party (via Annie Laurie Gaylor)
Depending on who you ask, I’m sitting in front of a sweet woman in the final years of her life or someone who will dread meeting her Maker; a modern-day savior or a prolific serial killer; one of the great feminist activists of the past several decades or, as one newspaper columnist put it, “Granny Blood-Money.”
…
There are only a few prerequisites that must be met before a check can be written: the caller must live in (or plan to obtain the abortion from a shortlist of clinics in) Wisconsin, she must be more than eight weeks pregnant, and she must visit a clinic to confirm her pregnancy. Once Gaylor can verify that information, she writes out a check for up to $400 directly to the hospital, clinic, or physician performing the procedure. She also refers the callers to another national organization that may be able to write out an additional check, allowing the women to pay as little out of pocket as possible. Gaylor used to give out some of the money as a loan, hoping to get paid back eventually, but she knows better now. The women are just too poor. Still, she tries to get them to put up a little money of their own, even if it’s only $25, so that they don’t see her fund as a form of free birth control.
When I ask Gaylor how young her callers are, she opens up a nearby nightstand and pulls out a folder containing a stack of papers, all records of her phone conversations over the past few days. A sheet near the top documents a phone call she received the day before my visit, concerning a 13-year-old girl who had been raped by her 17-year-old brother.
How is anyone even supposed to process information like that?
I’m not sure whether to follow up with a question about the incest, the rape, or their ages. All crimes are reported to the police by the clinics, so Gaylor doesn’t deal with those issues. Her primary concern is whether the caller (in this case, the girl’s older sister) can pay for the procedure.
She’s immune to the horror stories by now. While it’s the first time I’ve ever heard such an awful story, she hears them on a regular basis. The youngest caller this year, she tells me, was only 11.
Gaylor knows the trends, too. While she hears from women all throughout the month, the calls tend to come near the end of the week, when some of the women receive a paycheck, and around the first of the month, when the welfare checks arrive. They don’t cry as much as they used to. They all cried when abortions were harder to come by, she recalls, but now only some shed tears. Most are just nervous. Emotional. Worried about how to pay for it. Wondering how they’ll reconcile their religious faith with their decision. Wondering if they can keep this a secret from their immediate and extended families.
Do you ever hear back from the women who call for help? She shakes her head. Few of them ever want to talk about the procedure after it’s happened. Gaylor herself has never had an abortion. In 1958, a few years after giving birth to her fourth child, she had a tubal ligation (something she highly recommends to women who’ll listen).
I wonder if there’s anything that could help make things better for her organization. More donations? Paid staffers? Nope. None of that. She just wishes women had easier access to birth control. She wishes young women could more easily report instances of rape and get immediate help. But “as long as men keep attacking women, you’re going to have a need” for abortion services.
…
Women’s Medical Fund, Inc. unofficially began in March of 1970, just after Wisconsin’s anti-abortion laws were declared unconstitutional by a district court. The ruling effectively made first-trimester abortions legal in the state. (It wasn’t until 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, took a similar position.)
Gaylor was already a vocal abortion-rights advocate at the time. In 1967, she wrote an editorial (she believes it to be the first of its kind) in favor of an overhaul of the state’s abortion laws. In the years to follow, she joined the Association for the Study of Abortion and the Wisconsin Committee to Legalize Abortion, spoke about the issue on radio and TV shows, and wrote a number of letters-to-the-editor of local newspapers. But in 1970, building off a program launched by scientist Paul Ehrlich, Gaylor began the Zero Population Growth Referral Service (ZPG), where she could direct women to cities where abortion services were readily available. After the Wisconsin court’s ruling, her phone began ringing — women knew they could get abortions now, but they weren’t sure from where, and they believed the outspoken Gaylor would have the answers.
On August 12, 1970, Gaylor placed an ad in two local newspapers that included ZPG’s post office box and her personal phone number. The ad urged women to contact her if their doctors weren’t helping them obtain an abortion. In the weeks to follow, nearly 100 women contacted her. Playboy magazine later mentioned her as a resource for women who needed such help, which only ramped up the number of phone calls. (“Contrary to popular opinion,” she later wrote, “Playboy readers rarely went to bed.”)
Unfortunately, local hospitals were expensive, often had long waiting periods, and required getting through all sorts of bureaucratic red tape (including, in one hospital’s case, letters from two physicians confirming that the procedure was required to save the life of the woman). One provider in Madison, Dr. Alfred Kennan, opened up an outpatient clinic for women who needed abortions, but he was limited to seeing about 100 patients a week. It wasn’t long before Gaylor began referring her callers to sites in Mexico, where the total cost for the flight, procedure, and hotel room was still less than a trip to the expensive hospital next door. (Abortions were illegal in Mexico, and still are in many parts of the country, but bribes to police officers allowed some doctors to practice without problem.) Referrals to New York soon followed.
With the help of University of Wisconsin professor Robert West, Gaylor began Women’s Medical Fund, Inc. in 1972 as an outgrowth of the service she was already providing. It was incorporated as a non-profit in 1976 and is now said to be the country’s largest and oldest independent, all-volunteer abortion fund.
The Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1976 and still in effect today, resulted in an even greater demand for Gaylor’s service. The legislation bans the use of federal funds to pay for abortions, with exceptions made only for rape, incest, and to save the life of the woman. Because Medicaid funds are included in this ban, poor women are disproportionately affected and they frequently need financial help to go through with the procedure. According to the National Network of Abortion Funds, which WMF is a member of, “[t]here are 15 states that use their own money to pay for abortion care as part of their Medicaid programs, but there are 35 that do not.” Wisconsin is one of the 35.
WMF no longer advertises as it once did, but local clinics are aware of it and they frequently refer clients who need financial assistance to Gaylor’s organization. It’s not hard to see why: the non-profit has virtually no overhead costs and, as the group’s financial records show, more than 99% of its income goes right back to paying for abortion care.
…
If you called WMF today, using information available on some older websites, you might reach the offices of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF), another organization Gaylor founded in the late 1970s. FFRF is a church/state separation watchdog, writing letters of complaint to those who appear to be violating the First Amendment and filing lawsuits against them if needed. Gaylor officially retired from the organization in 2004, though she still holds the title of “president emerita.” Staffers at FFRF screen the callers and only then give them Gaylor’s direct line — to the phone in her living room — offering her an additional layer of security. (Most clinics, after screening the women, give them Gaylor’s number directly.)
After 61 years of marriage, Gaylor’s husband Paul died of brain cancer in 2011 and she moved into the retirement home where she now lives in the summer of 2012. Gaylor herself suffers from macular degeneration and glaucoma, but her voice, while frail, is still strong enough to answer the calls. (Her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor said about her in a 2004 tribute, “She may be losing her eyesight, but she is not losing her vision.”)
Gaylor’s only daughter inherited her mother’s activist streak. Annie Laurie Gaylor is one of the co-presidents of the FFRF, along with Dan Barker, and she’s also no stranger to anger from the opposition. At FFRF’s headquarters in Madison, they even have a system in place for dealing with all the hate-mail they receive: Serious threats go in one pile, angry letters go in another.
According to Annie Laurie, fighting for church/state separation is similar to fighting for abortion rights, but “they want to kill you more” when you do abortion work.
The elder Gaylor is used to that kind of hostility, too. When I asked how she responded to threats, her voice became a little stronger, a little more confident.
“I ignore them.”
Anne Nicol Gaylor and daughter Annie Laurie stand near the family tombstone (via Annie Laurie Gaylor)
…
Just as I’m leaving Gaylor’s apartment, with my computer packed up and my keys in hand, the phone rings. Gaylor answers it while instinctively picking up a pen and a form. She listens quietly for a few seconds while jotting down some basic information about the caller. Gaylor asks where she’s from. And how much the provider is charging. And if she’s visited the clinic for her first appointment. There’s an extended pause after that question, after which I hear Gaylor gently cut in: “You have to have that appointment before I can take your application, because at that point, they will do the ultrasound which will confirm exactly how far you are, and then they’ll be able to tell you exactly what the cost will be.”
The call lasts only two minutes before Gaylor hangs up the phone and smiles at me. “Ordinarily, they’re more interesting to listen to,” she jokes.
…
WMF won’t last — can’t last — much longer in its current form. Gaylor won’t always be around to answer the phone. But a contingency plan has already been drawn up. When the time comes, the group’s board of directors and additional volunteers will take over the phone calls and other menial tasks that Gaylor has been doing for decades now. They haven’t worked out all the logistics yet, but thankfully, they haven’t had to. They’re considering getting a dedicated cell phone that is assigned to volunteers during shifts or getting a phone number that goes straight to voicemail and having volunteers call the women back. For now, Gaylor is able to answer all the calls herself on a landline without leaving her home.
One of WMF’s board members, Nora Cusack, wrote to me that if abortion services were covered by health insurance providers or Medicaid the same way as other medical procedures, the phone might just stop ringing. Or at least not ring as much. That, too, would ease the succession problem.
Gaylor’s mission when she began WMF was to help women obtain legal abortions even if they couldn’t afford them. That mission hasn’t changed, but as she sits back down to wait for the next call, she reflects on the grander vision she has for the future: “It would be nice to not be needed.”
-Best wishes to the family of Anne Nicol Gaylor, a woman who did more for humanity than most in taking care of the needs of women and fighting religious bullies on their own ground! This is a sad time for all who respect the separation of church and state.
Funny thing, this fucking day and age of scrutinized everything. Certain things needed to be scrutinized, but as usual the human animal takes it all to extreme and practices the same as slut-shaming on anyone who doesn’t agree with the pop-speak of the day. Jonah Hill uses the word ‘Faggot’ in the heat of the moment because he was brought up in a day when high schoolers used the expressions, ‘That’s so gay,’ or they called people ‘Faggot’ as a pejorative. We enlightened folk now know that these things are wrong and that the terms marginalize a vast majority of our population that have struggled through the years to overcome the mostly religious-based discriminatory policies of the times. The LGBT people of our world are normal people and have been persecuted for eons and I, for one, am glad that people are getting smarter.
My daughter’s generation has also grown up with the ‘That’s so gay,’ term and I can’t remember how many times that I heard it from so many people in her high school circle in 2010. I chastised her so many times and reminded her that her uncle was gay in order to purge this prejudice from her general repertoire. She eventually listened and now reminds others of their insensitivity when using pejorative terms. I am extremely proud of this. On to the reason for this post.
I read recently that Dr. Richard Carrier, whom I had had incredible respect for, had recently left his wife. I have had a divorce myself and was not overly skeptical of the matter in Carrier’s situation until I read in many articles, including those that included quotes from Carrier himself, that stated that his divorce was due to his “Coming out,” as polyamorous. I say that he came out as ‘I can’t help what I stick my cock into and I’m trying to classify it into the same category as a legitimate sexual orientation,’ situation. Call me intolerant of the fucked up PC bullshit of our time, but if I can’t keep my cock in my pants, I sure as Hell wouldn’t marry someone who would pay for all of my degrees while I don’t fucking hold a goddammed job! This asshole has gotten EVERYTHING off of the back of his wife and then dumped her when he got Atheist famous!
Am I the only fucking atheist who thinks that this asshole gives us a bad name due to the fact that he demonstrates the atheist amoral bastard who can’t have morals due to a lack of sky fairy? This asshole stinks and I would never have him at MY dinner table because he would most likely flirt with my 21 year old daughter. We, as atheists, need to hold our own accountable for their choices, and I mean the popular folks that we have speak at our events. It’s not just about beliefs, it’s about an entire movement built on getting myth out of our lifestyles once and for all! Carrier made the mistake of trying to meld his reprehensible lifestyle with the movement that made him famous. He also used another human being in order to achieve his goals, which is very prevalent in the area of religion, and if we are to demonstrate our ability to go beyond the idiocy of sky fairy, we need to use common sense and NOT fall into the common traps of the religious community! They are having a field day on this Carrier thing right now, just read they’re fucking blogs as I do!
This so-called news is really hot stuff, because Richard Carrier looks like the jerk of the fucking century! He should have kept his personal shit to himself AND he should have waited until all logic and sense died with my generation due to the fact that we still remember that Hitler was the architect of the movement called, ‘PC.’ Maybe in the future, people who are completely vapid and follow the leader will digest this POLY shit and accept it as some sort of fucked up norm, but until then, sense will prevail and Carrier will be looked upon as a narcissistic opportunist who believes that he is way smarter than the legitimate people in his midst.
I caution my atheist brethren on associating with someone as reckless as this and will continue to exercise skepticism and individuality in this particular matter. POLY is nothing more than naming the want to fuck multiple people. There is nothing wrong with fucking, just don’t fucking use someone else who is goddamned stupid enough to believe in you to reach your goals. I don’t care if you fucking fuck a gerbil before you go to sleep tonight, but don’t involve MY movement in your personal dealings and try to fabricate excuses. Fuck you POLY assholes and your PC verbiage to describe fucking around! You want to fuck around, PERIOD! Label it honestly, don’t fucking be a total amoral piece of shit about it, and leave atheism out of your personal shit, you narcissistic motherfucking, self-important assholes!
First of all, I would like to send out a heartfelt thanks to B.B King, who died this week, for all of his incredible contributions to relevant awesome music. This trailblazer has been a staple of my music selection since I was in my late twenties and will be there until the day I also pass. He was the master blaster of Blues guitar.
I would also like to commend the jury in the Boston Bombing case for handing down the verdict to smite that little scumbag, Joker Tsarnaev, from the face of the Earth. Batman, you won’t be needed here, and The Joker won’t go to Arkham this time, he will he injected with a poison to snuff out his worthless existence once and for all! Thank you Logic, for prevailing in the face of uppity Massachusetts liberal elitism that dictates that saving scum is a humane and forward thinking practice. When shitbags blow children up rape and murder, kidnap them as so many prisoners in the system have done, it says little for our race that we are backward enough to justify not putting them to death. And when a dirtsack can tear apart so many bodies in the name of a mythological figure and be considered for a life sentence, the Human race really needs to take a look inward at where their thought processes have become so utterly twisted.`I can safely say that I hope this rat squirms in his chair for an hour before succumbing to the cocktail of drugs that will make this world a better place on that historic day. Fuck him and fuck his belief in his despotic killer deity.
Due to the content of this rant, I would like to add a few things about my system of belief that will shed some light onto why I am such a logical, clear-headed person. I grew up in very scummy neighborhoods across the country that were inhabited by the very poor and the scum that preyed upon them. If you had intelligence, you figured out how to keep yourself safe most of the time, while at other times, even the most wiley could end up catching a stray bullet for no apparent reason. If you were a bit dim, then you perished or learned to make the best out of being used by thugs and reprobates for the rest of your miserable existence.
Life was extremely tough and I was given no breaks at all in my journey through the ghettos of America. I suffered and was forced to steal to support and feed myself as well as the many others who were not given a choice of lifestyle. I, though, decided on my own, without assistance from anyone else, to figure out how to leave this life behind for good, this was called, “Taking personal responsibility.” Many never do this and are instead, given lip-service considerations by the liberal elites as having absolutely no way of alleviating their own suffering. This is the thinking that the poor buy into that keeps them down and looking like mooches on the system as their community leaders would have them do. I, of course, refused to bring a family into this and made the conscious choice not to do so. Not everyone can use insight such as this, but through widespread, actually funded socialized education programs, instead of the dismal failures of a system that we have now, poor kids would at least be given a chance in the Corporate States of America, to succeed and elevate themselves beyond poverty.
But then that would eliminate the desperate masses of poor factory worker mentality people that the Koch Bros. are cultivating so that the can keep them at a perpetual minimum wage. People can change this at the grassroots level by deciding not to commit crimes and banding together to resist the influence of the oligarchy. Yes, it seems to be an insurmountable task, but it beats prison and being referred to as sheep by the intelligent folks who actually made their way out of the ghetto under the same oppressive circumstances the current residents still face.
Idiots will say that because I am white I had a better chance. I will counter that I made the right choices and consciously decided not to hang with a criminal element and chose to reject drugs as a way to anesthetize my bruised self-esteem. I made my choices. I busted my ass. I didn’t get help from anyone besides myself…..see a pattern? I will again refer to Personal Responsibility. Why did I not turn to the same fate as that do-nothing Scummerlan Tsarnaev? That self-righteous bastard and his brother, who were brought here from another country by their parents, supported by the American Welfare system and lived in Section 8 housing because they were lazy sacks of shit? Why, you ask, did I not sit around on the public dime hatching plots to steal or harm others? PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY! I will say it over and over. That worthless piece of shit couldn’t even hold a job to support that idiot wife of his and the child that they knowingly brought into their terrorist midst! What a testament to how extreme liberalism has utterly failed and how extreme conservatism exploits the weaknesses of the left by stealing all of the wealth! As a side note-don’t even get me started on that weak-kneed sop of an idiot, Katherine Russell who converted to an oppressive religion and gave up her freedom and who had inside knowledge of what was going on in her own hovel and refused to do the right thing except for being a punching bag for a terrorist bully. She lucked out when she should be behind bars, if anything, for being a complete waste of space!
The only way out of the world’s current problems, is through aggressive population control. If you have to have a license to operate heavy machinery, then you should be required to have one to do the most important job that you will ever do. Fuck freedom at this level, NO ONE has the,’right’ to abuse a child and that is what happens when people are allowed to breed like roaches. We have over 25 million human slaves in the world today, partly because of an unchecked population, and partly because of the criminals that, as I mentioned before, haven’t been rightfully put to death because of liberal bullshit twaddle thinking! With DNA evidence or, as I say, the smoking gun in hand and fresh blood on the shoes, pedophiles, rapists of any kind, murderers, human traffickers, the criminally insane, should ALL be eliminated as soon as possible! This is only LOGIC, not pithy bullshit elitist sentiment designed to cloud the mind with false morality, just logic and the ONLY way to save children en masse and save the Earth from eminent demise.
Corporate welfare needs to be eliminated, green energy needs to be widespread NOW! A system of social education needs to be enacted to level the playing field instead of relegating the poor to welfare and servitude. Drug addicts need to be given prescription for heroin and given needles so that they may continue their destructive behavior without criminalization. When they decide to get clean, then, and only then will rehab work for them. Court mandated rehab is an abject failure and needs to be gone. Many will fall by the wayside due to their own poor choices and that is just life. Invest the wasted money into prevention and early intervention. Build camps where criminal drug offenders can manually work off their sentence when they victimize others. If they desire to reenter legitimate society, then get them rehab!
I can tell you that the reason that I’m an atheist is because it allows me to think much more clearly and to separate the morality from mankind’s penchant for enacting systems of socially enforced PC false morals. I skeptically approach EVERYTHING and do not give any credence to populist speakers and leaders who try to shove unworkable shitty policies down the throats of the masses. My style can best be described as informed, workable, sensible and logical, flying directly in the face of the current ideas of the backward thinking intellectual elitists who claim to be sooo enlightened above the realm of common sense. In other words, I’m not a pedantic fucking asshole who does 2 years of Peace Corps work and afterwards locks myself behind the gates of a rich community to tell everyone how goddammed unequal the social system is without getting my feet dirty EVER again. I’m not that type of fucking hypocrite. I just do my research and spell out the hard workable sensible choices that need to be made.
These are a few of my thoughts and musings and if they smack some in the face, well then, TOO FUCKING BAD! Don’t listen or read! Peace out everyone and I’ll see you later!
Charlie Hebdo shooting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Charlie Hebdo shooting
Police officers, emergency vehicles, and journalists at the scene two hours after the shooting
Location 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert, 11th arrondissement of Paris, France[1]
Coordinates 48.85925°N 2.37025°ECoordinates: 48.85925°N 2.37025°E
Date 7 January 2015 11:30 CET (UTC+01:00)
Target Charlie Hebdo employees
Attack type
Mass shooting, terrorism
Weapons
AK-47 assault rifle variant
Škorpion vz. 61 submachine guns
Grenade or rocket launcher
Tokarev TT pistols[2]
Pump action shotgun[3]
Deaths 12
Non-fatal injuries
11
Perpetrators Al-Qaeda in Yemen[4]
Assailants Chérif and Saïd Kouachi
On the morning of 7 January 2015, at about 11:30 local time, two masked gunmen armed with assault rifles and other weapons forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. They fired up to 50 shots, killing 11 people and injuring 11 others, and shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is [the] greatest”) during their attack. They also killed a French National Police officer shortly after. The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, which took responsibility for the attack. Five others were killed and another eleven were wounded in related shootings that followed in the Île-de-France region.
France raised Vigipirate (its terror alert) to its highest level, and deployed soldiers in Île-de-France and Picardy. A massive manhunt led on 9 January to the discovery of the suspects, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who exchanged fire with police. The brothers took hostages at a signage company in Dammartin-en-Goële, and were gunned down when they emerged firing from the building.
On 11 January, about 2 million people, including more than 40 world leaders, met in Paris for a rally of national unity, and 3.7 million people joined demonstrations across France. The phrase Je suis Charlie (French for “I am Charlie”) was a common slogan of support at the rallies and in social media. The remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo continued publication, and the following issue sold out seven million copies in six languages, in contrast to its typical French-only run of 30–60,000.
3 November 2011 cover of Charlie Hebdo, renamed Charia Hebdo (fr) (Sharia Hebdo). The caption reads “100 lashes if you don’t die laughing”.
The former building of Charlie Hebdo after it was set on fire in 2011
Charlie Hebdo (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁli ɛbdo]; French for Weekly Charlie) is a satirical weekly newspaper in France that features cartoons, reports, polemics, and jokes. The publication is irreverent and stridently non-conformist in tone, is strongly secularist, antireligious[5] and left-wing, and publishes articles that mock the far right, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Israel, politics, culture, and various other groups as local and world news unfolds. The magazine was published from 1969 to 1981, and again from 1992 on.[6]
Charlie Hebdo has a history of attracting controversy. In 2006, Islamic organisations under French hate speech laws unsuccessfully sued over the newspaper’s re-publication of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.[7][8][9] The cover of a 2011 issue retitled Charia Hebdo (fr) (French for Sharia Weekly), featured a cartoon of Muhammad, whose depiction is forbidden in some interpretations of Islam.[10] The newspaper’s office was fire-bombed and its website hacked.[11][12] In 2012, the newspaper published a series of satirical cartoons of Muhammad, including nude caricatures;[13][14] this came days after a series of violent attacks on U.S. embassies in the Middle East, purportedly in response to the anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims, prompting the French government to close embassies, consulates, cultural centres, and international schools in about 20 Muslim countries.[15] Riot police surrounded the newspaper’s offices to protect it against possible attacks.[14]
Cartoonist Stéphane “Charb” Charbonnier, murdered in the attack on the magazine, was the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo from 2009.[17] Two years before the attack he stated, “We have to carry on until Islam has been rendered as banal as Catholicism.”[18] In 2013, al-Qaeda added him to its most wanted list, along with three Jyllands-Posten staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose.
Numerous violent plots related to the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were discovered, primarily targeting cartoonist Westergaard, editor Rose, and the property or employees of Jyllands-Posten and other newspapers that printed the cartoons.[a] Westergaard was the subject of several attacks and planned attacks, and lives under police protection. On 1 January 2010, police used guns to stop a would-be assassin in his home, who was sentenced to nine years in prison. In 2010, three men based in Norway were arrested on suspicion of planning a terror attack against Jyllands-Posten or Kurt Westergaard; two of them were convicted. In the United States, David Headley and Tahawwur Hussain Rana were convicted in 2013 of planning terrorism against Jyllands-Posten.
Laïcité and blasphemy
See also: Laïcité and Islam and blasphemy
In France, the principle of laïcité – the separation of church and state – was enshrined in the 1905 law on the Separation of the Churches and the State. Under its terms, people are free to practise the religion of their choice in the private sphere, but are required to keep religion out of the public sphere. Authors, humorists, cartoonists, and individuals have the right to satirise people, public actors, and religions, a right which is balanced by defamation laws. These rights and legal mechanisms were designed and used to protect freedom of speech from local powers, among which was the then powerful Catholic Church in France.
Though images of Muhammad are not explicitly banned by the Quran itself, prominent Islamic views have long opposed human images, especially those of prophets. Such views have gained ground among militant Islamic groups. Accordingly, some Muslims take the view that the satire of Islam, of religious representatives, and—above all—of Muslim prophets is forbidden blasphemy and that it can even be punished by death.
According to the BBC, France has seen “the apparent desire of some younger, often disaffected children or grandchildren of immigrant families not to conform to western, liberal lifestyles – including traditions of religious tolerance and free speech”.
Attack
Charlie Hebdo headquarters
The Charlie Hebdo building, Rue Serpollet (fr)
Before the shooting, the two armed and hooded men burst into number 6 Rue Nicolas-Appert, the address of Charlie Hebdo ’s archives. The gunmen shouted, “Is this Charlie Hebdo?”, and after realizing their mistake left for the magazine’s headquarters at number 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert.[40] There they encountered cartoonist Corinne “Coco” Rey outside. She reported the men spoke perfect French and using threats forced her to key in the passcode to open the door.
The armed men sprayed the lobby with gunfire immediately upon entering. The first victim was maintenance worker Frédéric Boisseau, who was killed as he sat at the reception desk.The gunmen forced Rey at gunpoint to lead them to a second-floor office, where 15 staff members were having an editorial meeting, Charlie Hebdo ’s first news conference of the year. Reporter Laurent Léger said they were interrupted by what they thought was the sound of a firecracker—the gunfire from the lobby—and recalled, “We still thought it was a joke. The atmosphere was still joyous.”
The gunmen burst into the meeting room and called out Charb’s name to target him before opening fire. The shooting lasted five to ten minutes. The gunmen aimed at the journalists’ heads and killed them execution-style. During the gunfire, Rey survived uninjured by hiding under a desk, from where she witnessed the murders of Wolinksi and Cabu. Léger also survived by hiding under a desk as the gunmen entered. Other witnesses reported that the gunmen identified themselves as belonging to Al-Qaeda in Yemen.
Psychoanalyst Elsa Cayat, who wrote a column in Charlie Hebdo, was killed.[50] Crime reporter Sigolène Vinson survived; one of the shooters aimed at her but spared her, saying “I’m not killing you because you are a woman” and telling her to read the Quran. She said he left shouting, “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”( which I assumed meant,” Muhammed is a fucking child rapist.”)
Escape
An authenticated video surfaced on the Internet that shows two gunmen and a police officer, Ahmed Merabet, who is wounded and lying on a sidewalk after an exchange of gunfire. This took place near the corner of Boulevard Richard-Lenoir and Rue Moufle (fr), 180 metres (590 ft) east of the main crime scene. One of the murderers ran towards the policeman and shouted, “Did you want to kill me?” The policeman answered, “No, it’s good, chief”, and raised his hand toward the gunman, who then gave the policeman a fatal shot to the head at close range. Like the killers, Merabet was of Algerian descent.
Sam Kiley, of Sky News, concluded from the video that the two gunmen were “military professionals” who likely had “combat experience”, saying that the gunmen were exercising infantry tactics such as moving in “mutual support” and were firing aimed, single-round shots at the police officer. He also stated that they were using military gestures.
The gunmen then left the scene, shouting (according to witnesses) “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad, (the child rapist). We have killed Charlie Hebdo!” They escaped in a getaway car, and drove to Porte de Pantin, hijacking another car on the way at the corner of Rue de Meaux and Passage de la Brie, forcing its driver out. As they drove away, they ran over a pedestrian and shot at responding police officers.
It was initially believed that there were three suspects. One identified suspect turned himself in at a Charleville-Mézières police station. Seven of the Kouachi brothers’ friends and family were taken into custody. Jihadist flags and Molotov cocktails were found in an abandoned getaway car, a black Citroën C3.
Motive
Charlie Hebdo had attracted attention for its controversial depictions of Muhammad. Hatred for Charlie Hebdo ’s cartoons, which made jokes about Islamic leaders as well as Muhammad,(piece of shit rapist), is considered to be the principal motive for the massacre. Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, suggested that the motive of the attackers was “absolutely clear : trying to shut down a media organisation that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad”( a fucking known child rapist).
In March 2013, Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen, commonly known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP-cowardly deluded cocksuckers), released a hit list in an edition of their English-language magazine Inspire. The list included Stéphane Charbonnier and others whom AQAP accused of insulting Islam. On 9 January, AQAP claimed responsibility for the attack in a speech from AQAP’s top Shariah cleric Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, citing the motive as “revenge for the honor” of Muhammad, ( the child rapist).
Victims
Killed
Frédéric Boisseau, 42, building maintenance worker for Sodexo, killed in the lobby
Franck Brinsolaro, 49, Protection Service police officer assigned as a bodyguard for Charb
Cabu (Jean Cabut), 76, cartoonist
Elsa Cayat, 54, psychoanalyst and columnist of Jewish religion.[69][70] The only woman killed in the shooting.
Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), 47, cartoonist, columnist, and editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo
Philippe Honoré, 74, cartoonist
Bernard Maris, 68, economist, editor, and columnist
Ahmed Merabet, 42, a Muslim police officer of Algerian descent, shot in the head as he lay wounded on the ground outside.
Mustapha Ourrad (fr), 60, copy editor of Algerian descent
Michel Renaud, 69, due to guest-edit an upcoming issue of Charlie Hebdo
Tignous (Bernard Verlhac), 57, cartoonist]
Georges Wolinski, 80, cartoonist, born in Tunisia of Jewish descent
The attacks are the deadliest act of terrorism in France since the 28 people killed in the 1961 Vitry-Le-François train bombing by the Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS), a French dissident paramilitary organisation opposed to the independence of Algeria during the Algerian War (1954–62).
”Charlie Hebdo” shooting victims
Wounded
Simon Fieschi, 31, webmaster—shot in the shoulder; shot in the spine and a lung perforated. He was in an induced coma after surgery for eight days.[82]
Philippe Lançon, journalist—shot in the face and in critical condition
Fabrice Nicolino, 59, journalist—shot in the leg
Laurent Sourisseau, 48, cartoonist—shot in the shoulder
Unidentified police officers
Non-wounded and absent[edit]
Several people at the meeting were unharmed, including book designer Gérard Gaillard, who was a guest, and staff members, Sigolène Vinson (fr), Laurent Léger (fr) and Éric Portheault.
The cartoonist Coco was coerced into letting the murderers into the building and was then unharmed. Several other staff members were not in the building at the time of the shooting, including medical columnist Patrick Pelloux and lead cartoonists Rénald “Luz” Luzier, Catherine Meurisse (fr), historian Jean-Baptiste Thoret (fr), who were late for work, cartoonist Willem, who never attends, and editor-in-chief Gérard Biard (fr) and journalist Zineb El Rhazoui (fr) who were on holiday. The journalist Antonio Fischetti (fr), who was at a funeral, humorist and columnist Mathieu Madénian.
Assailants[edit]
It has been suggested that this article be split into a new article titled Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, accessible from a disambiguation page. (January 2015)
Chérif and Saïd Kouachi
Chérif and Saïd Kouachi
Chérif Kouachi (left) and Saïd Kouachi (right)
Born Chérif: 29 November 1982
Saïd: 7 September 1980;
10th ARR, Paris, France
Died 9 January 2015 (aged 32 and 34)
Dammartin-en-Goële, France
Cause of death
Gunshot wound
Nationality French
Motive Jihadism[90][91]
Killings
Date 7–9 January 2015
Location(s) Charlie Hebdo offices
Target(s) Charlie Hebdo staff
Killed 12
Injured 11
Weapon(s)
AK-47 variant assault rifles
Škorpion vz. 61 submachine guns
Pump action shotgun
Grenade or rocket launcher
Tokarev TT pistols
Police quickly identified brothers Saïd Kouachi (French pronunciation: [sa.id kwa.ʃi]; 7 September 1980 – 9 January 2015) and Chérif Kouachi ([ʃe.ʁif]; 29 November 1982 – 9 January 2015) as the main suspects.[c] French citizens born in Paris to Algerian immigrants, the brothers were orphaned at a young age after their mother’s apparent suicide and placed in a foster home in Rennes.[92] After two years, they were moved to an orphanage in Corrèze in 1994, along with a younger brother and an older sister.[97][98] The brothers moved to Paris around the year 2000.[99]
Chérif, also known as Abu Issen, was part of the filière des Buttes-Chaumont (fr) (named after the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont where they met and performed military-style training exercises); this group sent would-be jihadists to fight for al-Qaeda in Iraq after the 2003 invasion.[100][101] He was arrested at age 22 in January 2005 when he and another man were about to leave for Bashar al-Assad’s Syria – at the time a gateway for jihadists wishing to fight U.S. troops in Iraq.[102] He went to Fleury-Mérogis Prison, where he met Amedy Coulibaly.[103] In prison, they found a mentor, Djamel Beghal, who had been sentenced to 10 years in prison in France in 2001 for his part in a plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Paris.[102] Beghal had once been a regular worshipper at Finsbury Park Mosque in London and a disciple of the radical preachers Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada.
Upon leaving prison, Chérif Kouachi married and got a job in a fish market on the outskirts of Paris. He became a student of Farid Benyettou, a radical Muslim preacher at the Addawa Mosque in the 19th arrondissement of Paris. Kouachi wanted to attack Jewish targets in France, but Benyettou told him that France, unlike Iraq, was not “a land of jihad”.
In 2008, Chérif was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to three years in prison, with 18 months suspended, for having assisted in sending fighters to militant Islamist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s group in Iraq, and for being part of a group that solicited young French Muslims to fight with Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq.[92] He said outrage at the torture of inmates by the U.S. Army at Baghdad Central Prison in Abu Ghraib inspired him to help Iraq’s insurgency.
French judicial documents said Amedy Coulibaly and Chérif Kouachi traveled with their wives in 2010 to central France to visit Djamel Beghal. In a 2010 police interview, Coulibaly identified Chérif as a friend he had met in prison and said they saw each other frequently. In 2010, the Kouachi brothers were named in connection with a plot to break out from jail another Islamist, Smaïn Aït Ali Belkacem. For lack of evidence, they were not prosecuted. Belkacem was one of those responsible for the 1995 Paris Métro and RER bombings that killed eight people.
From 2009 to 2010, Saïd Kouachi visited Yemen on a student visa to study at the San’a Institute for the Arabic Language. There, according to a Yemeni reporter who interviewed Saïd, he met and befriended Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the perpetrator of the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 later in 2009. The two shared an apartment for “one or two weeks”.
In 2011, Saïd returned to the country for a number of months and trained with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants.According to a senior Yemeni intelligence source, he met al Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki in the southern province of Shabwa.[111] Chérif Kouachi told BFM TV that he had been funded by a network loyal to Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in 2011 in Yemen. According to U.S. officials, the U.S. provided France with intelligence in 2011 showing the brothers received training in Yemen. French authorities subsequently began monitoring them, but the surveillance came to an end in the spring of 2014. In the time preceding the Charlie Hebdo attack, Saïd had been living with his wife and children in a block of flats in Reims. Neighbours had described him as solitary.
The weapons used in the attack were supplied via the Brussels underworld. According to the Belgian press, a criminal sold Amedy Coulibaly the rocket-propelled grenade launcher and Kalashnikov assault rifles that Chérif and Saïd Kouachi used at the Charlie Hebdo offices.
Suspected Charlie Hebdo attack driver
The police initially identified the 18-year-old brother-in-law of Chérif Kouachi, a student French Muslim of North African descent and unknown nationality, as a third suspect in the shooting, accused of driving the getaway car. He was believed to have been living in Charleville-Mézières, about 200 km northeast of Paris near the border with Belgium.[115] He turned himself in at a Charleville-Mézières police station early in the morning on 8 January 2015.[115] The man said he was in class at the time of the shooting, and that he rarely saw Chérif Kouachi.[116] Many of his classmates said that he was at school in Charleville-Mézières during the attack.[117] After holding him for about 50 hours, police said that he was not being charged at that time.[118]
After the attack
Manhunt
A massive manhunt began immediately after the attack. One suspect left his ID card in an abandoned getaway car. Police officers searched apartments in the Île-de-France region, in Strasbourg and in Reims.
Police detained several people during the manhunt for the two main suspects. A third suspect voluntarily reported to a police station after hearing he was wanted, and was not charged. Police described the assailants as “armed and dangerous”. France raised its terror alert to its highest level and deployed soldiers in Île-de-France and Picardy.
At 10:30 CET on 8 January, the day following the attack, the two primary suspects were spotted in Aisne, north-east of Paris. Armed security forces, including the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) and the Force d’intervention de la police nationale (FIPN), were deployed to the department to search for the suspects.
Later that day, the police search concentrated on the Picardy region, particularly the area around Villers-Cotterêts and the village of Longpont, after the suspects robbed a petrol station near Villers-Cotterêts,[124] then reportedly abandoned their car before hiding in a forest near Longpont.[125] Searches continued into the surrounding Forêt de Retz (130 km2), one of the largest forests of France.[126]
The manhunt continued with the discovery of the two fugitive suspects early in the morning of 9 January. The Kouachis had hijacked a Peugeot 206 near the town of Crépy-en-Valois. They were chased by police cars for approximately 27 kilometres south down the N2 trunk road. At some point they abandoned their vehicle and an exchange of gunfire between pursuing police and the brothers took place near the commune of Dammartin-en-Goële, 35 kilometres (22 mi) northeast of Paris. Several blasts went off as well and Saïd Kouachi sustained a minor neck wound. Several others may have been injured as well but no one was killed in the gunfire. The suspects were not apprehended and escaped on foot.
Dammartin-en-Goële hostage crisis
Intervention of the GIGN at Dammartin-en-Goële on 9 January
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dammartin-en-Goële crisis.
At around 9:30 a.m., the Kouachi brothers fled into the office of Création Tendance Découverte, a signage production company on an industrial estate in Dammartin-en-Goële. Inside the building were owner Michel Catalano and a male employee, 26-year-old graphics designer Lilian Lepère. Catalano sent Lepère to hide in the refectory and remained in his office himself. Not long after, a salesman named Didier went to the printworks on business. Catalano came out with Chérif Kouachi who introduced himself as a police officer. They shook hands and Kouachi told Didier, “Leave. We don’t kill civilians anyhow.” These words were what caused Didier to guess that Kouachi was a terrorist and he alerted the police.
The Kouachi brothers remained inside and a lengthy standoff began. Catalano re-entered the building and closed the door after Didier had left. The brothers were not aggressive towards Catalano, who stated, “I didn’t get the impression they were going to harm me.” He made coffee for them and helped bandage the neck wound that Saïd Kouachi had sustained during the earlier gunfire. Catalano was allowed to leave after an hour. Catalano swore three times to the terrorists that he was alone and did not reveal Lepère’s presence. The Kouachi brothers were never aware of him being there. Lepère hid inside a cardboard box and sent the police text messages for around three hours during the siege, providing them with “tactical elements such as [the brothers’] location inside the premises”.
Given the proximity (10 km) of the siege to Charles de Gaulle Airport, two of the airport’s runways were closed. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve called for a police operation to neutralise the perpetrators. However, an Interior Ministry spokesman announced that the Ministry wished first to “establish a dialogue” with the suspects. Officials tried to establish contact with the suspects to negotiate the safe evacuation of a school 500 m from the siege. The Kouachi brothers did not respond to attempts at communication by the French authorities.
The siege lasted for eight to nine hours, and at around 4:30 p.m. there were at least three explosions near the building. At around 5:00 p.m., a police team landed on the roof of the building and a helicopter landed nearby. Before police could reach them, the pair ran out of the building and opened fire on police. The brothers had stated a desire to die as martyrs[136] and the siege came to an end when both Kouachi brothers were gunned down. Lilian Lepère was rescued unharmed. A cache of weapons, including Molotov cocktails and a rocket launcher, was found in the area.
Aftermath
14 January 2015 cover of Charlie Hebdo in the same style as 3 November 2011 one. Muhammad holds a sign saying Je suis Charlie and the caption reads “All is forgiven”.
Related events on 7–9 January
Main article: 2015 Île-de-France attacks § Attacks
France
See also: Charlie Hebdo issue No. 1178
The remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo continued normal weekly publication, and the following issue sold out seven million copies in six languages, in contrast to its typical print run of 60,000 copies (sold 30,000 to 35,000).The cover depicts Muhammad holding a “Je suis Charlie” sign, and is captioned; “All is forgiven”. The “survivors’ issue” of Charlie Hebdo was also to be sold outside France.The Digital Innovation Press Fund donated €250,000 to support the magazine, matching a donation by the French Press and Pluralism Fund. The Guardian Media Group pledged a separate donation of £100,000 to the same cause.
On the night of 8 January, police commissioner Helric Fredou, who had been investigating the attack, committed suicide in his office in Limoges shortly after meeting with the family of one of the victims, while he was preparing his report. He was said to have been experiencing depression and burnout.[145]
In the week after the shooting, 54 anti-Muslim incidents were reported in France. These included 21 reports of shootings and grenade throwing at mosques and other Islamic centers and 33 cases of threats and insults.[d]
Security
Alert status in French regions on 8 January 2015
– High probability of threat (threat level 3)
– Definite threat (threat level 4)
Following the attack, France raised Vigipirate to its highest level: terror alert and deployed soldiers in Paris to the public transport system, media offices, places of worship and the Eiffel Tower. The British Foreign Office warned its citizens about travelling to Paris.The New York City Police Department ordered extra security measures to the offices of the Consulate General of France in New York in Manhattan’s Upper East Side as well as the Lycée Français de New York, which was deemed a possible target due to the proliferation of attacks in France as well as the level of hatred of the United States within the extremist community. In Denmark, which was the centre of a controversy over cartoons of Muhammad in 2005, security was increased at all media outlets.
Hours after the shooting, Spanish Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz said that Spain’s anti-terrorist security level had been upgraded, and that the country was sharing information with France in relation to the attacks. Spain increased security around public places such as railway stations and increased the police presence on streets throughout the country’s cities.
The British Transport Police confirmed on 8 January that they would establish new armed patrols in and around St Pancras International railway station in London, following reports that the suspects were moving north towards Eurostar stations. They confirmed that the extra patrols were for the reassurance of the public and to maintain visibility and that there were no credible reports yet of the suspects heading towards St Pancras.
In Belgium, the staff of P-Magazine were given police protection, although there were no specific threats. P-Magazine had previously published a cartoon of Muhammad drawn by the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.
Demonstrations
7 January
For more details on this topic, see Je suis Charlie.
On the evening of the day of the attack, demonstrations against the shootings were held at the Place de la République in Paris[ and in other cities including Toulouse, Nice, Lyon, Marseille and Rennes. These gatherings led to 8 January being declared an official day of mourning by President François Hollande.
The phrase Je suis Charlie (French for “I am Charlie”) has come to be a common worldwide sign of solidarity against the attacks. Many demonstrators used the slogan to express solidarity with the magazine. It appeared on printed and hand-made placards, and was displayed on mobile phones at vigils, and on many websites, particularly media sites such as Le Monde. The hashtag #jesuischarlie quickly trended at the top of Twitter hashtags worldwide following the attack. The United States Embassy in Paris changed its Twitter profile picture to the “Je suis Charlie” placard.
Not long after the attack, it is estimated that around 35,000 people gathered in Paris holding “Je suis Charlie” signs. 15,000 people also gathered in Lyon and Rennes. 10,000 people gathered in Nice and Toulouse; 7,000 in Marseille; and 5,000 each in Nantes, Grenoble and Bordeaux. Thousands also gathered in Nantes at the Place Royale. More than 100,000 people in total gathered within France to partake in these demonstrations the evening of 7 January.
Protests in France
The “I am Charlie” slogan became an endorsement of freedom of speech and press
Demonstrators gather at the Place de la République in Paris on the night of the attack
Memorial for Ahmed Merabet
Demonstrators in Bordeaux
Tribute to Charlie Hebdo in Strasbourg
Tributes to the victims in Toulouse
Similar demonstrations and candle vigils spread to other cities outside of France as well, including Amsterdam,[166] Brussels, Barcelona,[167] Ljubljana,[168] Berlin, Copenhagen, London and Washington, D.C.[169] Around 2,000 demonstrators gathered in London’s Trafalgar Square and sang La Marseillaise, the French national anthem.[170][171] In Brussels, two vigils have been held thus far, one immediately at the city’s French consulate and a second one at Place du Luxembourg. Many flags around the city were at half-mast on 8 January.[172] In Luxembourg, a demonstration was held in the Place de la Constitution.[173]
On the other side of the Atlantic, a crowd gathered on the same evening, 7 January, at Union Square in Manhattan, New York City. French ambassador to the United Nations François Delattre was present; the crowd lit candles, held signs, and sang the French national anthem.[174] Several hundred people also showed up outside of the French consulate in San Francisco with “Je suis Charlie” signs to show their solidarity.[175] In downtown Seattle, another vigil was held where people gathered around a French flag laid out with candles lit around it. They prayed for the victims and held “Je suis Charlie” signs.[176] Further south in Argentina, a large demonstration was held to denounce the attacks and show support for the victims outside the French embassy in the Buenos Aires.[177]
More vigils and gatherings were held in Canada to show support to France and condemn terrorism. Many cities had notable “Je suis Charlie” gatherings, including Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto.[178] In Calgary, there was a strong anti-terrorism sentiment. “We’re against terrorism and want to show them that they won’t win the battle. It’s horrible everything that happened, but they won’t win,” commented one demonstrator. “It’s not only against the French journalists or the French people, it’s against freedom – everyone, all over the world, is concerned at what’s happening.”[179] In Montreal, despite a temperature of −21 °C (−6 °F), over 1,000 people gathered chanting “Liberty!” and “Charlie!” outside of the city’s French Consulate. Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre was among the gatherers and proclaimed, “Today, we are all French!” He confirmed the city’s full support for the people of France and called for strong support regarding freedom, stating that “We have a duty to protect our freedom of expression. We have the right to say what we have to say.”[180][181]
8 January[edit]
By 8 January, the vigils had also spread to Australia. Gatherings had formed in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth, with thousands of people holding up “Je suis Charlie” signs. In Sydney, people gathered at Martin Place – the location of a siege less than a month earlier –and in Hyde Park dressed in white clothing as a form of respect; flags were at half-mast at the city’s French consulate where bouquets of flowers had been left by mourners.[182] A vigil was held at Federation Square in Melbourne with an emphasis on togetherness. The gathering in Perth was described by French consul Patrick Kedemos as “a spontaneous, grass roots event”. He added, “We are far away but our hearts today [are] with our families and friends in France. It [was] an attack on the liberty of expression, journalists that were prominent in France, and at the same time it’s an attack, or a perceived attack on our culture.”[183]
In the evening of 8 January over a 100 demonstrations were held from 18:00 in the Netherlands at the time of the silent march in Paris, after the mayors of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht and later more mayors called to do so. Many Dutch government members joined the demonstrations.[184][185]
Protests around the world
Brisbane, Australia
Berlin, Germany
Luxembourg, 8 January 2015
Bologna, Italy
Chicago, U.S.
French Embassy, Moscow, Russia
Brussels, Belgium
Istanbul, Turkey
10–11 January[edit]
Main article: Republican marches
Wikinews has related news: Millions march in France and around the world in support of Charlie Hebdo
Around 700,000 people walked in protest in France on 10 January. Major marches were held in Toulouse (attended by 180,000), Marseille (45,000), Lille (35–40,000), Nice (23–30,000), Pau (80,000), Nantes (75,000), Orléans (22,000), and Caen (6,000).[186]
On 11 January up to 2 million people including President Hollande and more than 40 world leaders led a rally of national unity in the heart of Paris to honour the 17 victims. The demonstrators marched from Place de la République to Place de la Nation. 3.7 million joined demonstrations nationwide in what officials called the largest public rally in France since World War II.[e]
There were also large marches in many other French towns and cities—perhaps three million people throughout France[clarification needed]—along with marches and vigils in many other cities worldwide.[f]
Republican marches on 11 January in France
Strasbourg
Boulevard Beaumarchais, Paris
Chambéry
Rennes
Apologists for terrorism[edit]
About 54 persons in France, who had publicly supported the attack on Charlie Hebdo, were arrested as “apologists for terrorism” and about 12 people were sentenced to several months in jail.[193][194] Comedian Dieudonné faces the same charges for having written on Facebook “I feel like Charlie Coulibaly”.[195]
Planned attacks in Belgium[edit]
Main article: 2015 anti-terrorism operations in Belgium
Following a series of police raids in Belgium, in which two suspected terrorists were killed in a shootout in the city of Verviers, Belgian police stated that documents seized after the raids appear to show that the two were planning to attack sellers of the next edition of Charlie Hebdo released following the attack in Paris.[196] Police named the men killed in the raid as Redouane Hagaoui and Tarik Jadaoun.[196]
Protests following resumed publication[edit]
Unrest in Niger following the publication of the post-attack issue of Charlie Hebdo resulted in ten deaths,[197] dozens injured, and at least nine churches burned.[198] The Guardian reported seven churches burned in Niamey alone. Churches were also reported to be on fire in eastern Maradi and Goure. There were violent demonstrations in Karachi in Pakistan, where Asif Hassan, a photographer working for the Agence France-Presse, was seriously injured by a shot to the chest. In Algiers and Jordan, protesters clashed with police, and there were peaceful demonstrations in Khartoum, Sudan, Russia, Mali, Senegal, and Mauritania.[198] In the week after the shooting, 54 anti-Muslim incidents were reported in France. These included 21 reports of shootings and grenade-throwing at mosques and other Islamic centres and 33 cases of threats and insults.[d]
RT reported that a million people attended a demonstration in Grozny, the capital city of the Chechen Republic, protesting the depictions of Muhammad in Charlie Hebdo and proclaiming that Islam is a religion of peace. One of the slogans was “Violence is not the method”.[199]
Reactions[edit]
French government[edit]
President François Hollande addressed media outlets at the scene of the shooting and called it “undoubtedly a terrorist attack”, adding that “several [other] terrorist attacks were thwarted in recent weeks”.[200] He later described the shooting as a “terrorist attack of the most extreme barbarity”,[9] called the slain journalists “heroes”,[201] and declared a day of national mourning on 8 January.[202]
At a rally in the Place de la République in the wake of the shooting, mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo said, “What we saw today was an attack on the values of our republic; Paris is a peaceful place. These cartoonists, writers and artists used their pens with a lot of humour to address sometimes awkward subjects and as such performed an essential function.” She proposed that Charlie Hebdo “be adopted as a citizen of honour” by Paris.[203]
Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that his country was at war with terrorism, but not at war with Islam or Muslims.[204] French foreign minister Laurent Fabius said, “The terrorists’ religion is not Islam, which they are betraying. It’s barbarity.”[205]
Other countries[edit]
Main article: International reactions to the Charlie Hebdo shooting
Obama signs a book of condolences at the Embassy of France, Washington, D.C.
The attack received immediate condemnation from dozens of governments worldwide. International leaders including Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, Stephen Harper, Angela Merkel, Matteo Renzi, David Cameron and Tony Abbott offered statements of condolence and outrage.[206]
Media[edit]
Some English-language media outlets republished the cartoons on their websites in the hours following the shootings. Prominent examples included Bloomberg News, The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Gawker, Vox, and The Washington Free Beacon.[g]
Other news organisations covered the shootings without showing the drawings, such as The New York Times, New York Daily News,[213] CNN, Al-Jazeera America, Associated Press and The Daily Telegraph.[214] Two websites accused the latter group of self-censorship.[215][216] The BBC, which previously had guidelines against all depictions of Muhammad, showed a depiction of him on a Charlie Hebdo cover and announced that they were reviewing these guidelines.[217]
Other media publications such as Germany’s Berliner Kurier and Poland’s Gazeta Wyborcza reprinted cartoons from Charlie Hebdo the day after the attack; the former had a cover of Muhammad reading Charlie Hebdo whilst bathing in blood.[218] At least three Danish newspapers featured Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and the tabloid BT used one on its cover depicting Muhammad lamenting being loved by “idiots”.[153] The German newspaper Hamburger Morgenpost re-published the cartoons, and their office was fire-bombed.[219][220] In Russia, LifeNews and Komsomolskaya Pravda suggested that the U.S. had carried out the attack.[221][222] “We are Charlie Hebdo” appeared on the front page of Novaya Gazeta.[222] Russia’s media supervision body, Roskomnadzor, stated that publication of the cartoons could lead to criminal charges.[223]
In China, the state-run Xinhua advocated limiting freedom of speech, while another state-run newspaper Global Times said the attack was “payback” for the West’s colonialism.[224][225]
Media organisations carried out protests against the shootings. Libération, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and other French media outlets used black banners carrying the slogan “Je suis Charlie” across the tops of their websites.[226] The front page of Libération ’s printed version was a different black banner that stated, “Nous sommes tous Charlie” (“We are all Charlie”), while Paris Normandie renamed itself Charlie Normandie for the day.[153] The Frenchand UK versions of Google displayed a black ribbon of mourning on the day of the attack.[9]
Ian Hislop, editor of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, stated, “I am appalled and shocked by this horrific attack – a murderous attack on free speech in the heart of Europe. … Very little seems funny today.”[227] The editor of Titanic, a German satirical magazine, declared, “[W]e are scared when we hear about such violence. However, as a satirist, we are beholden to the principle that every human being has the right to be parodied. This should not stop just because of some idiots who go around shooting”.[228] Many cartoonists from around the world responded to the attack on Charlie Hebdo by posting cartoons relating to the shooting.[229] Among them was Albert Uderzo, who came out of retirement at age 87 to depict his character Astérix supporting Charlie Hebdo.[230] In Australia, what was considered the iconic national cartoonist’s reaction[231] was a cartoon by David Pope in the Canberra Times, depicting a masked, black-clad figure with a smoking rifle standing poised over a slumped figure of a cartoonist in a pool of blood, with a speech balloon showing the gunman saying, “He drew first.”[232]
Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm featured drawings by young cartoonists signed with “Je suis Charlie” in solidarity with the victims.[233] Al-Masry al-Youm also displayed on their website a slide show of some Charlie Hebdo cartoons, including controversial ones. This was seen by analyst Jonathan Guyer as a “surprising” and maybe “unprecedented” move, due to the pressure Arab artists can be subject to when depicting religious figures.[234]
The Guardian reported that “[o]ther Muslims said they would only condemn the Paris attack if France condemned the killings of Muslims worldwide”.[235] Zvi Bar’el argued in Haaretz that believing the attackers represented Muslims was like believing that Ratko Mladić represented Christians.[236] Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr attacked Charlie Hebdo as the work of solipsists, and sent out a staff-wide email where he argued: “Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile.” The e-mail elicited different responses from within the organisation.[237][clarification needed]
Shia Islam’s journal Ya lasarat Al-Hussein, founded by Ansar-e Hezbollah, praised the shooting, saying, “[the cartoonists] met their legitimate justice, and congratulations to all Muslims” and “according to fiqh of Islam, punishment of insulting of Muhammad is death penalty”.[238][239][240][241][242][243]
Activist organisations[edit]
Reporters Without Borders criticised the presence of leaders from Egypt, Russia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, saying, “On what grounds are representatives of regimes that are predators of press freedom coming to Paris to pay tribute to Charlie Hebdo, a publication that has always defended the most radical concept of freedom of expression?”[244]
Hacktivist group Anonymous released a statement in which they offered condolences to the families of the victims and denounced the attack as an “inhuman assault” on freedom of expression. They addressed the terrorists: “[a] message for al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and other terrorists – we are declaring war against you, the terrorists.” As such, Anonymous plans to target jihadist websites and social media accounts linked to supporting Islamic terrorism with the aim of disrupting them and shutting them down.[245]
Muslim reactions[edit]
Condemning the attack[edit]
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Algeria, and Qatar denounced the incident, as did Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, the leading Sunni institution of the Muslim world.[246] Islamic organisations, including the French Council of the Muslim Faith, the Muslim Council of Britain and Islamic Forum of Europe, spoke out against the attack. Sheikh Abdul Qayum and Imam Dalil Boubakeur stated, “[We] are horrified by the brutality and the savagery.”[247] The Union of Islamic Organisations of France released a statement condemning the attack, and Imam Hassen Chalghoumi stated that those behind the attack “have sold their soul to hell”.[248]
The US-based Muslim civil liberties group, the Council on American–Islamic Relations, condemned the attacks and defended the right to freedom of speech, “even speech that mocks faiths and religious figures”.[249] The vice president of the US Ahmadiyya Muslim Community condemned the attack, saying, “The culprits behind this atrocity have violated every Islamic tenet of compassion, justice, and peace.”[250] The National Council of Canadian Muslims, a Muslim civil liberties organisation, also condemned the attacks.[251]
The League of Arab States released a collective condemnation of the attack. Al-Azhar University released a statement denouncing the attack, stating that violence was never appropriate regardless of “offence committed against sacred Muslim sentiments”.[252] The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation condemned the attack, saying that it went against Islam’s principles and values.[253]
Both the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Hamas government of the Gaza Strip stated that “differences of opinion and thought cannot justify murder”.[254] The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah declared that “takfiri terrorist groups” had insulted Islam more than “even those who have attacked the Prophet”.[255][256]
Malek Merabet, the brother of Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim police officer killed in the shooting, condemned the terrorists who killed his brother: “My brother was Muslim and he was killed by two terrorists, by two false Muslims”.[257] Just hours after the shootings, the mayor of Rotterdam Ahmed Aboutaleb, a Muslim born in Morocco, condemned Islamist extremists living in the West who “turn against freedom” and told them to “fuck off”.[258]
Supporting the attack[edit]
Saudi-Australian Islamic preacher Junaid Thorne said: “If you want to enjoy ‘freedom of speech’ with no limits, expect others to exercise ‘freedom of action’.”[259][dubious – discuss] Anjem Choudary, a British Islamist, wrote an editorial in USA Today in which he professes justification from the words of Muhammad that those who insult prophets should face death, and that Muhammad should be protected to prevent further violence.[260] Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia[261] also supported the killing.[262] Bahujan Samaj Party leader Yaqub Qureishi, a Muslim MLA and former Minister from Uttar Pradesh in India, offered a reward of 510 million (US$8 million) to the perpetrators of the Charlie Hebdo shootings.[h] On 14 January, about 1,500 Filipino Muslims held a rally in Muslim-majority Marawi in support of the attacks, calling the incident a “moral lesson for the world to respect any kind of religion, especially the religion of Islam”. The rallyists also asserted that “Freedom of expression does not extend to insulting the noble and the greatest prophet of Allah.”[267][dubious – discuss]
After the attack, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula praised the attackers for killing Charb, and called for militants to murder others on their hit list.[66] A collection of global jihadist organisations condemned the cartoonists and praised the killers, including the Taliban in Afghanistan,[268][269] Al-Shabaab, a militant Islamist organisation in Somalia,[270][271] as well as Boko Haram of Nigeria.[272] ISIS militants in Syria also praised the massacre.[273][274]
Two Islamist newspapers in Turkey ran headlines that drew ire on social media for justifying the attack: the Yeni Akit ran an article entitled “Attack on the magazine that provoked Muslims”, and Türkiye ran an article entitled “Attack on the magazine that insulted our Prophet”.[275] Yahoo Canada reported a rally in support of the shootings in southern Afghanistan, where the demonstrators called the gunmen “heroes” who meted out punishment for the disrespectful cartoons. The demonstrators also protested Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s swift condemnation of the shootings.[276] Around 40 to 60[277] people gathered in Peshawar, Pakistan, to praise the killers, with a local cleric holding a funeral for the killers, lionizing them as “heroes of Islam.”[278][279]
Schools[edit]
Le Figaro reported that in a Seine-Saint-Denis primary school, up to 80% of the pupils refused[280] to participate in the minute of silence that the French government decreed for schools.[281] A student told a teacher, “I’ll drop you with a Kalashnikov, mate.” Other teachers were told Charlie Hebdo “had it coming”, and “Me, I’m for the killers”. One teacher requested to be transferred.[280] They also reported that students from a vocational school in Senlis tried to attack and beat students from a neighbouring school while saying “we will kill more Charlie Hebdos”. The incident is being investigated by authorities who are handling 37 proceedings of “terrorism glorification” and 17 proceedings of threats of violence in schools.[282]
La Provence reported that a fight broke out in the l’Arc à Orange high school during the minute of silence, as a result of a student post on a social network welcoming the atrocities. The student was later penalised for posting the message.[283] Le Point reported on the “provocations” at a grade school in Grenoble, and cited a girl who said “Madame, people won’t let the insult of a drawing of the prophet pass by, it is normal to take revenge. This is more than a joke, it’s an insult!”[284]
Le Monde reported that the majority of students they met at Saint-Denis condemned the attack. For them, life is sacred, but so is religion. Marie-Hélène, age 17, said “I didn’t really want to stand for the one minute silence, I didn’t think it was right to pay homage to a man who insulted Islam and other religions too”. Abdul, age 14, said “of course everyone stood for the one minute silence, and that includes all Muslims… I did it for those who were killed, but not for Charlie. I have no pity for him, he had no respect for us Muslims”. It also reported that for most students at the Paul Eluard high school in Saint-Denis, freedom of expression is perceived as being “incompatible with their faith”. For Erica, who describes herself as Catholic, “there are wrongs on both sides”. A fake bomb was planted in the faculty lounge at the school.[285]
France Télévisions reported that a fourth-grade student told her teacher, “We will not be insulted by a drawing of the prophet, it is normal that we take revenge.” It also reported that the fake bomb contained the message “I Am Not Charlie”.[286]
Public figures[edit]
The Head of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, said “we will not allow anyone to insult the prophet, even if it costs us our lives.”[287]
Salman Rushdie, who is on the Al-Qaeda hit list[17][66] and received death threats over his novel The Satanic Verses, said, “I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity … religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.”[288]
Swedish artist Lars Vilks, also on the Al-Qaeda hit list[66] for publishing his own satirical drawings of Muhammad, condemned the attacks and said that the terrorists “got what they wanted. They’ve scared people. People were scared before, but with this attack fear will grow even larger”[289] and that the attack “expose[s] the world we live in today”.[290]
American journalist David Brooks wrote an article titled “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo” in The New York Times, arguing that the magazine’s humor was childish, but necessary as a voice of satire. He also criticised many of those in America who were ostensibly voicing support for free speech, noting that were the cartoons to be published in an American university newspaper, the editors would be accused of “hate speech” and the university would “have cut financing and shut them down.” He called on the attacks to be an impetus toward tearing down speech codes.[291]
Noam Chomsky views the popularization of the Je suis Charlie slogan by politicians and media in the West as hypocritical, comparing the situation to the NATO bombing of the Radio Television of Serbia headquarters in 1999, when 16 employees were killed. “There were no demonstrations or cries of outrage, no chants of ‘We are RTV’ […]”, he noted. Chomsky also mentioned other incidents where U.S. military forces have caused higher civilian death tolls, without leading to intensive reactions such as those that followed the 2015 Paris attacks.[292]
Bill Donohue, president of the U.S. Catholic League, said Charlie Hebdo had a “long and disgusting record” of mocking religious figures and that Charb “didn’t understand the role he played in his tragic death. … Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive.”[293]
Cartoonist-journalist Joe Sacco expressed grief for the victims in a comic strip, and wrote
but … tweaking the noses of Muslims … has never struck me as anything other than a vapid way to use the pen … I affirm our right to “take the piss” … but we can try to think why the world is the way it is … and [retaliating with violence against Muslims] is going to be far easier than sorting out how we fit in each other’s world.[294]
Social media[edit]
French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve declared that by the morning of 9 January 2015, a total of 3,721 messages “condoning the attacks” had already been documented through the French government Pharos system.[295][296]
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