10 years after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, religious narcissism persists

History bleeds with examples of failed attacks by God-fearing fanatics but freedom of expression always wins

In 1929, Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte painted La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), a picture of a pipe with the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”

“It’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture ‘This is a pipe.’ I’d have been lying!”

The message expressed in a particular medium is not the thing it is expressing.

That said, is there anything more insane than killing someone for saying things you disagree with or for drawing pictures of something you happen to think should not be drawn?

It was 10 years ago today, on Jan. 7, 2015, that two religious fanatics with assault rifles stormed the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris killing 12 people, including eight journalists.

During the attack, the gunmen shouted "Allahu akbar" ("God is great"). If he/she is so great, why can't us mortals make a little fun? Of course it's not about Allah or God or any gods or any religion. It's about power and weakness and control and hatred and confusion.

It's important to note also that none of this about Islam either. This is about any religion or cult or institutional belief system. To paraphrase a meme I saw recently, evangelical Christianity is just radical Islam with pork and beer. The terrorism from certain religious fanatics we have seen in recent decades is simply that, recent. Human history is filled with the blood of people slaughtered, nations conquered, genocides in the name of Jesus. Just ask residential school survivors or the Indigenous populations of any nation on Earth colonized by Europeans.

The bloodshed and cruelty is right there in their favourite book. You get stoned for several transgressions outlined in The Bible, and not in a good way.

Murder. Idolatry. Blasphemy. All those and more mean you are pummelled to death with stones, which really has to be an unpleasant way to die. True believers should be stoning you to death for playing Dungeons & Dragons you evil necromancer, according to Leviticus 20:27. In Acts 7:58, a mob stones someone to death and gets Paul the Apostle to hold their coats. Now that's gangster.

"That radical Islam and militant Christianity are contemporary movements with surprisingly similar characteristics is not mere coincidence," according to history professor Bert de Vries writing in the Christian Courier in an interesting article on the subject back in 2020. "Intertwined origins and frequent cross-cultural relations link them."

Of course these are both religions that are all about peace, right? As de Vries writes, adherents do tend to point out one another's shortcomings in this regard. Muslims stereotype Christianity by reminding them of the Crusades, and Christians won't let Islam believers forget about the Conquests. Gods want you to kill and conquer for your religion of peace and love.

And yes, we can't forget about "God's chosen people" (speaking of narcissistic religious believers). Jews have been victims themselves of centuries of genocide and abuse at the hands of Christians and Muslims. Eight decades after Hitler tried to wipe them off the face of the planet, Jewish supremacists who run Israel's military are themselves slaughtering and starving Palestinians in genocidal, state-sponsored terrorism that makes 9/11 look like a blip.

Everyone has every right to believe any bonkers ideas they come up with under the sun. But the message of Charlie Hebdo is that the rest of us also have the right to point out how bonkers those beliefs are, particularly when the most righteous often commit the most horrific atrocities. Canada's First Nations people know this all too well as do the literally countless children raped and otherwise victimized to this day by men of the cloth.

It would be great if religious ideologues of whatever stripe could take a deep breath and get over themselves.

Back to the 2015 attack, did killing cartoonists help the cause of religion extremists? A day after the terrorist attack, the remaining staff vowed to put out the following week's edition and bumped up the print run to one million copies from the usual 60,000. Media attention and interest and support for freedom of expression and honesty and journalism quickly pushed that to three million and then five million by press day.

And despite the despair and cynicism many of us have in a world still poisoned by religious extremism, there is hope. It is inspiring to know that Charlie Hebdo is still running strong, maybe not despite but because of the rise in Christian, Jewish and Muslim extremist worldwide, from Israel to Washington, from Paris to right here in British Columbia.

Charlie Hebdo still takes swipes at all three of the major Abrahamic faiths following the French tradition of secularism and freedom of expression.

The 10th anniversary edition out today, Jan. 7, 2025 edition, shows a cartoon reader with a rifle under his ass and the headline, "indestructible." The issue contains a selection of caricatures of God chosen after a worldwide competition.

"God is an idea like any other... no less or more respectable than any other,” says chief editor Gerald Biard in an interview with Radio France Internationale.

“Like all ideas, we have the right to laugh about it, make fun of it, contest it... to make fun of what it embodies, of those who claim to speak in its name or in their name, because there are thousands of deities around the world.”

Brilliant and true. Je suis Charlie.

-30-

Paul J. Henderson
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