Thursday 30 April 2015

Ni Charlie Ni Charia

Francine Prose is right. Nothing about Charlie Hebdo entitles it to anything approaching an award from PEN.

Christopher Booker, the Founding Editor of Private Eye, had the measure both of the reaction to the Charlie Hebdo attack, and of the spiteful, juvenile publication itself.

"Ni Charlie Ni Charia" was the excellent headline in a January edition of Rivarol, a publication that propagates a dangerous perversion of the Catholic Faith into the ideology of the French Far Right.

It does so in achingly sophisticated fashion. I am given to understand that the technical term is "French".

What if Islamists had attacked Rivarol rather than Charlie Hebdo?

Would the world's torturers, media-repressers, heckler-arresters (that's you, David Cameron) and all the rest of them have wended their way to Paris in order to march in that most preposterous of things, a government-organised demonstration led by the very Head of State?

The burial of the fallen Police Officers with the Legion d'honneur was obviously fitting. But why not also of the cartoonists?

After all, their supposedly satirical organ is now being kept going at public expense, effectively nationalised, initially in order to make possible an enormously expanded print run for the most boringly predictable front page imaginable.

At least in France, satire itself is now dead.

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