And what did leading American media companies do?

Clemens Wergen at Die Welt has some home truths for the American media on this matter of refusing to publish the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, even the new cover cartoon.

Today the French newspaper Libération published the new cover of Charlie Hebdo which will be on the newsstands on Wednesday. Yes, it is Muhammad again. He is shedding a big tear and holding a poster like so many people did in these days that reads “I am Charlie”. The title of the cover says “All is forgiven”. I can only imagine what amount of self conquest the surviving members of the Charlie Hebdo team had to muster to come up with a cover of such melancholic sweetness after they have lost 8 people, their most important editors and cartoonists among them. Anyone would have understood if they had had put all their rage and mourning into a biting and unforgiving cover. Except that they didn’t. They came up with a cover that speaks of the enlightened humanism Charlie Hebdo embodies, despite its at times scathing style.

[Read more…]

A strong iconoclastic streak

Sameer Rahim at Prospect points out that it’s not straightforwardly true that – as so many media outlets glibly assert – “Islam forbids depictions of the Prophet.”

Although it’s true there is a strong iconoclastic streak in the religion, there is also a significant alternative tradition of representing the Prophet in Islamic history books and devotional manuals—a tradition not especially well known in the West because Muslim clergy have often condemned or tried to suppress it. [Read more…]

The silencing of Perumal Murugan

Another tragedy – the Tamil writer Perumal Murugan has decided to withdraw all his books and never write again after being bullied by Hindutva groups.

A week after the police advised Tamil writer Perumal Murugan to leave his home in Namakkal following protests by caste- and Hindutva organisations against his book Madhorubagan, the author has announced that he will withdraw his entire body of work from publication and will never write again. [Read more…]

The radical feminist movement strongly influenced the Church

If you haven’t seen enough rebarbative assholitude enough lately, there’s always Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke. The lovely man did an interview with a lovely site called The New Emangelization – see what they did there?

Cardinal Raymond Leo Burke:  I think there has been a great confusion with regard to the specific vocation of men in marriage and of men in general in the Church during the past 50 years or so. It’s due to a number of factors, but the radical feminism which has assaulted the Church and society since the 1960s has left men very marginalized. [Read more…]

Je suis une femme

Tina Nguyen at Medialite reports on the photographic obliteration of women who had the temerity to be visible in the Paris march on Sunday. These brazen hussies were merely the chancellor of Germany and the mayor of Paris and the EU foreign policy chief, so what the hell did they think they were doing out there with the grown-ups?

Yesterday’s historic march across Paris included over 40 world leaders expressing solidarity for France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but if you read this Haredi newspaper, you’d believe that none of them were women.

The image that ran on the front page of the Israeli newspaper The Announcer edited two female world leaders out of the image, originally provided by wire service GPO: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

A third, in a blue scarf is Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris.

You have to go to the original, which has the real photo and the faked one and a third pointing out all the traces of the photoshopping.

 

Just a man who cries: it’s Mohammed

The Telegraph has clips from a press conference in which the Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Luz describes his thinking about the cover for the January 14th issue.

I invoked all the talents of the magazine, all those who were not there any more, all those were still there, I said to myself, we must do a drawing that above all makes us laugh, and not one on the emotional charge we are victims of. [Read more…]