Whatever Became of “Je suis Charlie?”
Yesterday marked the 10 anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo massacre. For those who’ve forgotten, and for the increasing number too young to have a genuinely active memory, the events were as follows. Charlie Hebdo was a famously outrageous — and outraging — French satirical magazine. One might compare it to Babylon Bee, but such a comparison only works for a Babylon Bee pumped up with steroids. Indeed, the best comparison for today’s The American Spectator readers might be a “roid rage” version of the Bee. Therein lay its almost indefinable appeal, its “je ne sais quoi,” a bull in china shop commitment to destroying all manner of everyday political and cultural pieties.
Its values weren’t mine 10 years ago, nor are they mine today, but their breathtaking — and often hysterical — contempt never failed to provoke at least a rueful chuckle, sometimes a belly laugh, usually followed by a kind of guilt — did I really find that funny? Many didn’t, not least those of a radical Islamist persuasion, ready to be offended when Charlie Hebdo satirized the prophet Mohammed.
On the morning of Jan. 7, 2015, two such critics armed themselves and charged into the magazine’s offices with AK-47s — so much for the vaunted European gun control measures — and expressed their editorial concerns by massacring 10 magazine staffers, as well as a guard, a maintenance worker, and a sadly unfortunate visitor. Leaving the premises, they encountered a police officer, himself a Muslim of North African descent, and murdered him as he lay wounded on the street.
Two days later, the two attackers were run to ground and, after a day-long siege, killed by members of GIGN, the premier French counterterrorism unit. Two days after that, more than 40 world leaders and millions of ordinary Frenchmen gathered in Paris and across France to show their solidarity with the Charlie Hebdo victims. These included Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and, surprisingly enough, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Significantly, U.S. President Obama chose not to attend, nor did Secretary of State John Kerry, who, of course, has since made quite a name for himself flitting about the globe in support of a vacuous climate change agenda — solidarity with the victims of Islamist terror evidently was not a priority. While the U.S. ambassador to France did attend, Attorney General Eric Holder, who was actually in Paris at the time on other business, also failed to attend the march.
For one brief moment, after an act of unspeakable horror, the world seemingly came together, united to proclaim, “Je suis Charlie.”
During the march and for many weeks afterward, the catchphrase became “Je suis Charlie,” that is, “I am Charlie,” a bold proclamation of solidarity in support of free speech and against Islamist violence. Some of us found inspiration in this, and hope. Hope that this might mark a turning of the tide, a recognition, finally, that Islamic radicals must be fought at every turn, that their radicalism itself should be expunged from polite society, and that their violence should be countered with overwhelming force whenever and wherever it occurred.
But it was not to be. The last decade has instead witnessed the march of radical Islam across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the United States, often with the complicit tolerance and even the outright encouragement of Western “progressive” elites. How else, after all, are we to interpret the reaction to the Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom, a year marked by demonstrations across the West in support of the ideological brethren of the Charlie Hebdo murderers? How else to interpret the Biden administration’s two-faced response, strings attached to its military support for Israel, unwillingness to call out Hamas — and Iran — as the perpetrators of evil?
How else to understand the apparent inability of the U.K. government to take energetic action against the phenomenon of Pakistani grooming gangs mass raping impoverished white teenage girls? Why has it taken the scorn of Elon Musk to move a discussion that has languished for more than a decade as British authorities tie themselves in knots to avoid drawing the obvious conclusion, that this is a horrifically brutal expression of a culture war being waged against their nation’s most vulnerable children. (READ MORE: You Get (and Deserve) What You Tolerate. That Isn’t Good News for the UK.)
How might we understand our government’s unwillingness to call out the destruction of Christian communities in Africa as they wither under the assault of Muslim terrorists? How else should we respond when our State Department ignores the clear religio-cultural motivation while subsuming these attacks under the heading of “resource rivalries driven by climate change.” (READ MORE: The Continuing Assault on Nigeria’s Christian Farmers)
To borrow a phrase from that “great humanitarian,” Al Gore, the genuine “inconvenient truth” of the last decade finds its best expression in the initial unwillingness of our FBI to label the New Orleans attack an act of terrorism. The most significant truth of the last decade has been the West’s collective unwillingness to stand up for its traditional values in the face of an unrelenting assault by radical Islam.
For one brief moment, after an act of unspeakable horror, the world seemingly came together, united to proclaim, “Je suis Charlie.” And then, just as quickly, it forgot what this necessarily meant, forgot what it meant to stand up for our best selves. This morning, looking back, we might well be ashamed.
READ MORE from James H. McGee:
The ‘Wright’ Choice at the Department of Energy
Weimar America: The Threat Is on the Left
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. A forthcoming sequel finds the Reprisal team fighting against terrorists who’ve infiltrated our southern border in a conspiracy that ranges across the globe. You can find Letter of Reprisal on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions and on Kindle Unlimited.
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