They will never kill Charlie Hebdo

As staunch left-wing secularists, the cartoonists and journalists at Charlie Hebdo will have no truck with notions of immortality, or an afterlife. But 10 years on from the Islamist massacre at their Paris offices – when two al-Qaeda terrorists gunned down 12 people in cold blood – the spirit of those slain lives on.

Charlie Hebdo has become a symbol. Of freedom of speech in the face of Islamist barbarism. Of laughter in the face of terror. Of courage. As we mark this grim milestone, it is these men and women’s defiance, not their murder, that we should remember.

When Charb, Cabu, Wolinski, Tignous, Honoré, Bernard Maris, Elsa Cayat, Mustapha Ourrad – some of the editors, cartoonists and columnists of the satirical newspaper – lost their lives on 7 January 2015, they’d already been threatened, their offices had been firebombed, they were under police protection.

Their great crime, supposedly, was to publish cartoons of Muhammad. First in 2006, following what is rather limply referred to as the ‘Danish cartoon controversy’, and again whenever someone told them they couldn’t. But as we all know, it doesn’t take much to offend a jihadist. Going to a pop concert will do.

Still, they were resolute. They blew raspberries at the authoritarians, as they always did – whether they were priests, presidents or far-right-wingers. As editor Charb put it in 2012: ‘I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees.’ What an indictment it is that he, in 21st-century secular France, was forced to make that choice.

Were the Charlie Hebdo killings the work of two deranged killers, it would be bad enough. But it came in the context of a growing Islamist intolerance that the Western great and good had either already capitulated to, or nursed some sympathies towards.

We saw that in the aftermath. Yes, there were inspiring shows of solidarity. Millions marched through Paris declaring ‘Je Suis Charlie’. But the cultural elites stared at their shoelaces. Most newspapers and broadcasters in the UK and America essentially took their editorial line from the Islamist killers, refusing to show the cartoons.

This wasn’t the worst of it. When Charlie was given a Courage Award by PEN America – the big, free-expression writers’ group – 200 of its members, including Michael Ondaatje and Joyce Carol Oates, signed a letter in protest, arguing the caricatures were ‘intended’ to cause Muslims ‘humiliation and suffering’.

After decades of hearing ‘I believe in free speech, but…’, we had a new, even more craven formulation: ‘I’m not saying they should have been killed, but…’ Worthy broadsheet columnists took a break from raging against ‘victim-blaming’ to low-key accuse murdered cartoonists of maybe bringing it on themselves.

With the Charlie Hebdo attack, we saw the often unspoken alliance between Islamist terrorists and identitarian activists burst to the surface. One accused the cartoonists of blasphemy, the other of racism. One wanted to kill them, the other to cancel them.

The truth is, that Charlie has always held the truly anti-racist, pro-Muslim position. As editor-in-chief Gérard Biard told spiked, in a video interview we’re publishing today, the notion that Islam is beyond mockery or criticism, unlike almost any other faith or doctrine, is to treat Muslims as ‘savages’.

The left’s betrayal of Charlie Hebdo, like the betrayal of Salman Rushdie a generation before, speaks to how divorced leftists have become from what were once their foundational, Enlightenment values – not least the radical conviction that freedom and reason are for all.

That Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a leader in the French New Popular Front, now sneers at the Charlie journalists as the ‘bag-carriers’ of the hard-right, says far more about him than it does about them. The left has sacrificed universalism at the altar of identity politics.

It’s not just the left that has abandoned free speech, of course. The liberals, the centrists, the conservatives. All of them have massive ‘buts’. France might hold firmer to its secular principles, but it also has sweeping ‘hate speech’ laws. Indeed, Charlie was once sued, by the Grand Mosque of Paris, for supposedly ‘inciting hatred’. Like much of Europe, France has only really traded in its old blasphemy laws for new ones.

But there is hope. It lies in following the example set by Charlie, before and after the horror of 10 years ago. The day after the attack, when their friends’ bodies were barely cold, the journalists gathered to begin putting together what would become known as the ‘survivors’ issue’. Its incredible cover depicted Muhammad, crying, holding a ‘Je Suis Charlie’ sign, under the heading ‘All is forgiven’. This week, they have published a new anniversary issue, featuring the winners of a cartoon competition. The theme? ‘Laughing at God’.

As Gérard Biard put it to us in Paris: ‘The best way to defend freedom… is by making use of it. It’s to use it, above all, without fear.’ So in the spirit of Charlie Hebdo, on this awful anniversary, let’s all speak more freely – and fearlessly – than ever before.

‘We avenged the Prophet Muhammad! We killed Charlie Hebdo!’ So screamed the giddy, Kalashnikov-wielding scumbags as they emerged from that Parisian office block. How wrong they were. A decade on, Charlie Hebdo lives. And so long as we all stand up for freedom of speech, no one can kill it.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater