Charlie Hebdo - it's not only the attack that should make us wory

Even it is Sunday and I should probably write about something nice and peaceful, I’ve decided to come up with a subject today that is exactly the opposite of peace. It’s about the attack on the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine which happened four days ago. The actual shooting at the office in which eleven journalists and one policeman have been killed was not all that happened. The consequences of the event also include a shooting at a kosher supermarket and the death of a young police woman.

What is Charlie Hebdo?

Charlie Hebdo is known as a left-wing magazine that mostly criticizes religion and politics. Their staff included Jews and people of Arabic origin. Islamic extremists mistake it for a magazine that only makes fun of their religion. But it isn’t. Charlie Hebdo mistrusts all religions, not only the Islam. Their columnists and caricaturists pass criticism on our capitalist consumer society and also create funny caricatures of their own president.

Cartoonophobia

The attack at the beginning of the new year isn’t the first one the magazine has to deal with. Hebdo’s office has already been fire-bombed by extremists once in 2011 for publishing cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammad. People call this the ‘Islamic Cartoonophobia’ and are now fighting against it reposting the magazine’s caricatures. 

'False Muslims'

I think the ones who are annoyed by the attack the most are French Muslims. Most of them lead a normal life and work and attend schools like their French-descending fellow citizens. Some people have reacted to the killing in Paris by a grenade-attack on a mosque and an explosion in a kebab shop beside a mosque. This makes it hard for peaceful Muslims to practise and stand to their religion. According to Malek Merabet, the brother of the killed policeman who was Muslim too, Chérif and Said Kouachi, the brothers who performed the shooting, are ‘false Muslims’. People like them are maniacs who have neither colour or religion.

How a mistreated hero saved his customers

Not only the Kouachi brothers, but also a guy called Amedy Coulibali who is from Mali and called himself a Muslim, fought for ‘their religion’ over the last days. Only two days after the office-attack, Coulibaly stormed into a Jewish supermarket in Paris with two Kalashnikovs. He took people hostage for hours before elite forces finally stormed the supermarket. The shopkeeper had managed to hide a small group of shoppers in a cold storage room in the basement and risked his own life for them. He somehow managed to escape the building using an elevator. The shopkeeper’s name is Lassana Bathily, from Mali and Muslim too. When he left the building in order to give the police further information about what was going on inside, they did not thank him for what he had done. No, the first thing the police did was to cuff and hold him for an hour because they thought he was involved into the crime somehow. That’s just another example of how lunatic extremists bedevil ordinary Muslims’ lifes.

Is there anything we can do?

I could go on about this topic for hours now because there’s so much that extremists like these people have already done to the world or are going to do. The Islamic State that keeps killing ‘disbelievers’ in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram who are killing in Nigeria, terrorist attacks in European and American cities,…they are all bound together. None of us can really understand why there are lunatics like the Paris-killers or IS-combatants and it’s hard to stop their number from increasing. But, there is something we can do. We can stop mixing up Muslim extremists and Muslims. It is only a small and simple action. But isn’t making a small step better than leaving things as they are?