Trudeau has a French sounding name. Maybe he thinks that makes him an authority on France, and on the context in which Charlie Hebdo published and wrote.
And Trudeau doesn't draw very well, so maybe he thinks this places him on par with the often lazy, and occasionally inept art that appeared in Charlie Hebdo.
I think he is grandstanding. And mostly wrong about this one. It's been said before, Charlie Hebdo was an equal opportunity offender who held the entitled out to dry.
The dispute got real when Charlie Hebdo decided to carry water for the Danish cartoonist who was attacked a few years ago, and then, the offices of Charlie Hebdo were firebombed and destroyed roughly one year ago.
This escaladed the tit for tat dispute between the magazine and the prophet.
Some militants with guns paid them a visit and stopped their clo
...ck.
Get your act together Trudeau!
The thing most Americans have difficulty with, it seems, is the depth of French secularism, and the fact that in Parisian French culture, the religious do not get to strut around with the swagger of entitlement they enjoy in the USA.
A paper like Charlie Hebdo was especially good at pissing off the religious of any denomination.
Hate Speech? Not really. Lampooning the stupid is more like it.
Some things do not translate very well, and clearly, Charlie Hebdo is not a paper that was ever meant to be perused by hordes of politically correct Protestants, and sensitive NPR listeners in need of purging some personal agenda, but that's just what happened.
Everybody became an expert on an essentially unknown rag - and everybody had an opinion about "what's really going on there."
Now that the temporary meme high has passed, people are inclined to wonder what got into them in the first place, and out of shame, may need to revise their support. "JE SUIS CHARLIE" is revealed to be as empty as the fools who spread the fashion statement.
Here's what happened: A bunch of elderly, White guys, cartoonists, who mostly have made enemies of everyone in politics and clergy in France for the last 40 years, got shot. Presidents and leaders rushed to be seen in the front line of a march for guys they'd just as soon have killed themselves if they could. Everyone used Charlie to trumpet some phony cry of solidarity... Solidarity for nothing at all. Of course we're all against killing cartoonists. And of course they were upwardly mobile White intellectuals. And of course we forgot about it all two weeks later. A million people came out in the street to express... What exactly?
The French certainly know why they took to the streets, even if the rest of you can't work it out.
Meanwhile, the same week that 2000 people were murdered in a bunch of Nigerian villages. And guess what stirred our passions?
If that's not hate speech through omission, I don't know anything.
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