‘Those who denounced Charlie Hebdo are pussies’
Charlie’s editor-in-chief, Gérard Biard, blasts liberals’ failure to stand up for free speech.

Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter.
‘Pussies.’ That is how Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Gérard Biard describes those who refused to stand up for his newspaper after it was attacked by Islamist terrorists 10 years ago this week.
“Salman Rushdie called them ‘p*ssies’”
Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Gérard Biard on the writers who failed to stand for free speech in the wake of the 2015 terror attack: pic.twitter.com/5X4E2IQw0d
— spiked (@spikedonline) January 11, 2025
In an exclusive, wide-ranging interview with spiked, reflecting on the massacre of his colleagues and the ongoing fight against Islamism, Biard was particularly cutting about his fellow writers who smeared Charlie – a stridently left-wing, anti-racist newspaper – as bigoted and ‘Islamophobic’.
When PEN America – a prominent free-speech writers’ group – gave Charlie Hebdo its Courage Award in 2015, hundreds of its members objected. Prominent authors, including Michael Ondaatje and Joyce Carol Oates, accused the newspaper of only drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad – the blasphemy which cost 12 people their lives – in order to further the ‘humiliation and suffering’ of French Muslims.
‘I’m going to repeat the argument almost word for word that was made by Salman Rushdie’, says Biard. ‘First of all, Rushdie called them “pussies”. Secondly, he pointed out that the overwhelming majority of them had never once opened Charlie Hebdo, for the simple and understandable reason that they were unable to read a single word of French. So you had these writers posturing against something about which they knew literally nothing.’
In the spiked interview, Biard also takes aim at the New York Times, for cutting its cartoon section for fear of causing offence:
‘When a newspaper like the New York Times says: “We don’t want to create problems, we don’t want debate.” Well, then you should be doing something else other than journalism. You should be selling peanuts.’
Watch the full interview below. You can also read a transcript here.
Comments
Want to join the conversation?
Only spiked supporters and patrons, who donate regularly to us, can comment on our articles.