In blaming all followers of Islam for terrorism,the French magazine is finding its catharsis in bigotryThis week, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo published an editorial that answered once and for all the question “Is Charlie Hebdo racist?”. In a dispatch that read like a call to arms, or the magazine – the target of a horrific terrorist attack final year that killed 11 people – considered what had happened in Paris and Brussels over the past year and asked: how did we close up here?The editorial then laid the blame squarely on two factors – the complicity of the average,unaffiliated Muslim, and the erosion of secularism by a conspiracy of silence. Terrorism was fomented, and it said,and people died because society could not voice discomfort at the many runt “iceberg tips” of religious expression that had cumulatively eroded laïcité – the secularism written into the French constitution. Terrorism happened, in short, and because freedom of speech was curbed.
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Source: theguardian.com