Update Jan 16 10:25am: C.B. Sashenka has revised the translation to fine-tune the nuances. The revised version is now posted below.
Charlie Hebdo has been offending Muslims for a long time. The trouble began long before last week’s massacre. Its staff had received death threats. Its offices were firebombed in 2011. Jihad websites had posted fatwas demanding that the editors, writers, and cartoonists who insulted the prophet be killed.
Mainstream Islamic sites were more circumspect, preferring indirect methods of intimidation — the implied threat of violence against those who “insult religion”, the iron fist of jihad in a velvet glove.
Once such site was Présence Musulmane (Muslim Presence). According to Oumma.com (via Point de Bascule) the website for Présence Musulmane was set up by Tariq Ramadan in 1996 to target French-speakers. In 2008, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission recommended that Présence Musulmane and 22 other Islamic organizations receive funding from the Quebec government.
Last September In September 2012, after some new “offense against the prophet” by Charlie Hebdo, Présence Musulmane published an article entitled “Non Charlie” that demonstrates the softer variety of Islamic threat.
The hardened mujahid says: “Those who insult the prophet of Islam must be killed.”
In contrast, the suave silver-tongued cosmopolitan taqiyya artist demands “the greatest respect that we owe to all those with whom we wish to live and die in peace”, the lack of which “will cost the lives of all those who believe that we can laugh at everything and everyone.”
The “No Charlie” article was still up a couple of days ago — I read it in its original location — but has been pulled since then. However, a cached version is available.
Many thanks to C.B. Sashenka for the translation:
No Charlie
“We have no right to grant ourselves all the rights to offend and put down people in what they hold most sacred: the object of their faith or their distress”.
If offending is the expression of your freedom, then recognize that violence will be the expression of their freedom! No, do not say “but”! Make your choice…
No Charlie
I do not agree with you and will fight all my life if necessary so that you cannot, under the guise of freedom, trample the meaning of all transcendence.
For you it is freedom that transcends … for them it is transcendence that frees!
No Charlie
In the name of freedom of expression, it is not your life that is on the line, but the lives of others… Have you thought about this a little bit? About your compatriots in Cairo, Tunis or Tripoli? Who will soon no longer be able to read you…
No Charlie
Your cartoon is an insult to anyone who has two grams of intelligence and a minimum knowledge of the current situation, the forces present, and the desire for revenge to which you have just given life.
No Charlie
We have no right to grant ourselves all the rights to offend and put down people in what they hold most sacred: the object of their faith or their distress.
No Charlie
There is no freedom…there’s also the secret that goes with the greatest respect that we owe to all those with whom we wish to live and die in peace.
No Charlie
I know you know what everyone else knows: that any bad cause results in the worst effects…the innocent will have to pay for your limited freedom of free thinking devoid of responsibility.
No Charlie
We have no right to tamper with the Prophet when we want to mock him. If the Islamists do not come back … you have to tell them to their face, without violating their religion and their mark with your dark intentions.
No Charlie
Speak no more of freedom of speech…but of values and value scales.
And it is on this scale, it seems important to remember, that freedom of conscience comes first. We are not obligated to honor it indeed, but we don’t have the right to dishonor it.
No Charlie
Your cartoon is a sham.
Moreover, it amounts to marketing that will cost the lives of all those who believe that we can laugh at everything and everyone.
That is a declaration of war…a war of religion that no free expression in the world can be proud of.
No Charlie
If offending is the expression of your freedom, then recognize that violence is an expression of their freedom! It is a trade of bad practices.
No, do not say “but”! Make your choice…
Many thanks to Vlad Tepes for all his work on this, and for the screen shot.
Those who call for the death of people who laugh at homicidal maniacs need to be expunged from Civilization.
Or killed if they insist on violence.
Sacred cows were made to be roasted.
The problem with your POV is that the Jihadi is just the tip of a religio-ethnic-race immivasion. Sure keep rounding up the aggressive among them. But eventually we are going down to the demographic wave.
Religion of peace
“And it is on this scale, it seems important to remember, that freedom of conscience comes first”
Seems nobody prevents muslims from believing in anything they want? How is a cartoon infringes freedom of conscience?
Muslim-speak has its own very special definitions. “Freedom of conscience” means never having to see or hear any challenges to your “faith.” But of course it applies only to the Islamic faith.
If my own faith or conscience tells me that Muhammad was a despicable human being and that the cult he founded (or that a band of Arab marauders founded and then invented a fitting “prophet” for it), I have absolutely no freedom to voice my conscience, no matter how much evidence I bring to bear and no matter how morally urgent I consider the message to be.
Virtually any moral principle that a Muslim articulates really boils down to: “Islam shall rule and it shall never be questioned.”
oops — I didn’t complete the clause after I decided to insert a parenthesis:
… and that the cult he founded (or that a band of Arab marauders founded and then invented a fitting “prophet” for it) is a source of great suffering and evil, ….
Meanwhile there are people orginally from Algeria such as Aldo Sterone, who point out the issues. Here is another (in French) from Lydia Guirous. Notice the title.
http://www.valeursactuelles.com/il-faut-passer-lislam-radical-au-karcher-50101
Not sure if this is the right place. Mehdi Hassan, political director of the Huffington Post (but soon to move to the US for Al Jazeera) appeared last night on BBC Question Time.
Charlie Hebdo was the the subject of the first question to the panel. Hassan, without actually saying it, effectively demanded that the UK adopt yet another facet of Sharia law (we already have unlabelled halal meat in every supermarket, and destroying the koran, but not the bible,results in prosecution). He posited the idea that since depictions of “the prophet” are forbidden then they should be totally banned even as cartoons. He failed to say that this was for muslims only and a sharia issue. None of the other panelists, including two senior politicians and a respected historian, spotted what he was saying or challenged him. Whilst expressing that he found the Paris massacres “wrong” he nonetheless went on to say that publishing the cartoons was the cause. He was challenged on the latter.
The Muzzies are bad, but the worst people are their Western enablers in academia and the press that openly and repeatedly lie to the people as to the truth about Islam and Muslims.
There seem to be a unlimited supply of these traitors who work hard every day to destroy the West and attack those who want to protect it.
Left-libs used to say that how we treat other people is far more important than ritual notions of purity and sanctity; they used to argue that conservatives are too obsessed with sexual prudishness and too unconcerned about violence (which was always untrue).
But now they reflexively side with Muslims and seek to protect Islam, even though Islam clearly inverts the ethical priorities that left-libs otherwise claim to hold.
The historian, David Starkey, scored some good hits, including a reference to Hassan’s description, some years back, of the likes of you and me as “kuffars”.
Chairman David Dimbleby should have followed up, but didn’t. I wonder what his father Richard would have thought? (He reported the liberation of Europe, from D-day to Belsen).
Strange how David Starkey is thought of as a loon or geriatric, when he’s one of the only figures on TV to bring up such “inconvenient” matters as Hasan’s “kuffar” speech.
No surprises there. This would be the same Mehdi Hasan who compared “kuffar” to animals, and called them stupid.
And on his articles, Sharia standards of free speech are already sometimes applied to the comments section. See here…
Looks like the link doesn’t work.
Here it is again:
http://greeninfidel.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/criticism-of-mehdi-hasan-censored-at.html?m=1
And well worth reading the original article and comments section as well.
These people are idiots. Unfortunately they are murderous idiots. People have made fun of my religion for years — I ignore it. Why don’t they?
1. Because crazy Mo set the pattern for violent intolerance of mockery or failure to “submit.”
2. Because Islam is a sterile, joyless, oppressive, hideous creed that would never have become “one of the world’s major religions” without severe penalties for questioning its right to dominate.
3. Because many people born and raised in the cult may at some level recognize its ugliness and its pattern of producing inferior societies, but they’re too deeply indoctrinated to abandon it or question its claim to be the rightful ruling force over all the world. It might be that this cognitive dissonance provokes a panicky response to anything that challenges Islam and exposes its hideousness, and that confronts Muslims with the possibility that they have based their identity and staked the fate of their soul on something evil. Most of them seem to prefer lashing out at Islam-critics rather than examining their beliefs.