Table Of ContentTHE
CHARLIE HEBDO
AFFAIR AND
COMPARATIVE
JOURNALISTIC
CULTURES
HUMAN RIGHTS VERSUS RELIGIOUS RITES
LYOMBE EKO
The Charlie Hebdo Affair and Comparative
Journalistic Cultures
Lyombe Eko
The Charlie Hebdo
Affair and
Comparative
Journalistic Cultures
Human Rights Versus Religious Rites
Lyombe Eko
Journalism and Creative Media
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-18078-2 ISBN 978-3-030-18079-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18079-9
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C
ontents
1 Introduction: The Charlie Hebdo Affair as a Global
“Meta-Media Event” 1
Part I Theoretical and Historical Approaches 31
2 Journalistic (Battle)fields, Cultures, Mentalities, and
Proximities 33
3 Charlie Hebdo and French Collective Memory: Origins of
the Right to Caricature 53
4 Genesis of the Charlie Hebdo Affair: The Clash of Human
Rights and Religious Rites 93
Part II The Charlie Hebdo Affair: Case Studies in Journalism
and Comparative Establishmentalities 131
5 The Charlie Hebdo Affair, Freedom of Expression, and
Apologia for Terrorism Under French Law 133
6 The Charlie Hebdo Terrorist Attack and European
Journalistic Solidarity (with Lea Hellmueller) 157
v
vi CoNTENTS
7 The Charlie Hebdo Affair in the Journalistic Field of the
United Kingdom 181
8 The Charlie Hebdo Affair in Turkey: Balancing Human
Rights and Religious Rites 203
9 The Charlie Hebdo Affair and the Right to Take Offense:
Religious Sensibilities Versus Freedom of Expression in
India 221
10 The Charlie Hebdo Affair in Three African Journalistic
Fields 257
11 The Charlie Hebdo Affair and Transnational Solidarity in
three Journalistic Battle(fields) of Latin America 283
12 The Charlie Hebdo Affair in the American Journalistic
Field 319
13 One Country, Two Journalistic Cultures: The Charlie
Hebdo Affair in the Bi-cultural Journalistic Field of
Canada 347
14 Afterword and Afterthoughts 381
Index 425
L f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 Roncin’s Je Suis Charlie slogan 3
Fig. 1.2 President François Hollande of France and 50 world leaders at
Parisian Charlie Hebdo Rally, January 11, 2015 (Getty) 5
Fig. 1.3 Cover of Charlie Hebdo, February 7, 2006: “Mohammed
overwhelmed by fundamentalists” (cartoonist Jean Cabut
[Cabu] murdered in 2015 terrorist attack) 14
Fig. 2.1 Islamic attire that is forbidden or permitted in public places in
France. The burqa and Niqab are forbidden, while the Burkini,
the Chador, and the Hijab are legal. The burkini is contested in
multiple municipalities. Published with permission of Agence
France Presse (AFP) 38
Fig. 3.1 “Liberty leading the people … with pencils and a Je Suis
Charlie sign,” Re-presentation of Delacroix (1830) in the
context of the Charlie Hebdo marches républicaines (Front page
cartoon by Plantu, published in Le Monde, January 9, 2015) 59
Fig. 3.2 View of “Je Suis Charlie” rally in Paris (Getty image) 61
Fig. 3.3 Honoré Daumier’s Louis-Philippe as Gargantua, published in
la Caricature, on December 16, 1831 83
Fig. 4.1 Banned Hebdo Hara-kiri satirizing death of General Charles de
Gaulle (“Tragic ball at Colombey, one dead”) and first edition
of its successor, Charlie Hebdo “There is no censorship in
France” (1969) 97
Fig. 4.2 “The Pope [Benedict, holding a condom] goes too far … This
is my body.” Charlie Hebdo (published November 24, 2010) 99
Fig. 4.3 “Moi Président …” [I am the president] allusion to President
Hollande’s irrational sexual liaisons (Charlie Hebdo cartoon by
Luz, January 14, 2014) 101
vii
viii LIST oF FIGURES
Fig. 4.4 Jyllands-Posten (Denmark) Mohammed cartoons. Published
2005 102
Fig. 4.5 “C’est dur d’être aimé par des cons (it is tough to be loved by fools,
Charlie Hebdo” documentary poster (2008) 116
Fig. 4.6 Mohammed says: Je Suis Charlie, Tout est Pardonné (Charlie
Hebdo, 2015) 120
Fig. 4.7 Catholic Bishop, Muslim Imam and Jewish Rabbi admiring the
survivors’ edition of Charlie Hebdo (published in Le Monde,
January 14, 2015, p. 1. Cartoon by Plantu) 122
Fig. 8.1 Turkish magazines’ collective resistance. They all had identical
Je Suis Charlie covers (Getty/Blent Kilic image) 211
Fig. 8.2 TV announces: “Charlie Hebdo attacked, Massacre in Paris,
Twelve Dead.” President Erdoğan responds, remote control in
hand, “I condemn the attack. 10 Years imprisonment would
have been enough for the cartoonists” (Cartoon by Musa Kast,
Cumhuriyet, Istanbul) 214
Fig. 9.1 Cover of Charlie Hebdo, February 7, 2006: “Mohammed
overwhelmed by fundamentalists” (cartoonist Jean Cabut
[Cabu] murdered in 2015 terrorist attack) 222
Fig. 9.2 Mint (New Delhi, India) front page with Charlie Hebdo
cartoons (January 8, 2015) 241
Fig. 9.3 The terrorists and Charlie Hebdo cartoonist’s brush. Cartoon
by Satish Acharya (Kundapura, India) 249
Fig. 10.1 “We killed Charlie Hebdo” (Cartoon by Zapiro © 2015).
originally published in Sunday Times, Johannesburg, South
Africa, January 7, 2015). Re-published with permission 276
Fig. 11.1 Latin American Federation of Journalists (FELAP) “You
cannot kill the truth by killing journalists” 290
Fig. 11.2 Police and taxation officers invade home of Fernando
Villavicencio on Christmas eve and seize documentary evidence
of corruption. (Cartoon by Bonil, El Universo, Quito,
Ecuador) 296
Fig. 11.3 Yo soy Charlie, cartoon by Xavier Bonilla (Bonil), El Universo,
Quito, Ecuador. Republished with permission 299
Fig. 11.4 Charlie Hebdo’s collateral damage. Cartoon by Carlos Latuff
(Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). originally published in the Middle
East Monitor. Republished with permission 306
Fig. 11.5 “I am Not Charlie.” opposition to Charlie Hebdo’s
provocative, atheistic, anti-religious ideology in Latin America 310
Fig. 12.1 Je Suis Charlie, Tout est pardonné 338
Fig. 13.1 Charlie Hebdo: Mohammed overwhelmed by fundamentalists.
“It is tough to be loved by idiots,” Cartoon by Cabu 368
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Charlie Hebdo Affair
as a Global “Meta-Media Event”
The stock-in-trade of the news media is what American philosopher
Charles Peirce called “those awkward chunks of phenomenon called
‘events’” (Peirce, 1992, p. 186). In order for an occurrence to become a
news event, it has to be transformed into a human interest story, a selec-
tively constructed narrative designed to attract audiences whose attention
is being solicited by multiple other stimuli in real space and cyberspace.
The process of transforming happenings into news narratives or events is
what Stiegler (2009, p. 100) calls selective “événementialisation” (event-iza-
tion). The neologism refers to the “exteriorization, deterritorialization”
and transformation of banal occurrences or happenings into news events
and, once in a while, into “mediatized meta-events” (Christensen &
Christensen, 2013, p. 232). At another level, évenémentialisation or even-
tization is the result of human interest in the novel, the unusual, the
unprecedented, the eccentric, and the incomprehensible. It is “a philoso-
phy of the event, of discontinuity … An event of the World, but also an
event of life” (Baudrillard & Guillaume, 2008, p. 5). Elsewhere, Baudrillard
(1990) noted that the world is “subject to a veritable bombardment of
‘superconductive’ events … untimely intercontinental whirlwinds … In
earlier times, an event was something that happened—now it is something
that is designed to happen … it occurs as a reflection of pre-existing media
defined forms” (p. 41, 46). The censorious terrorist attack of January 7,
2015 was a pre-designed event that fit pre-existing media frames of terror-
ism, and instantly transformed the irreverent, parochial, anti-clerical,
© The Author(s) 2019 1
L. Eko, The Charlie Hebdo Affair and Comparative Journalistic
Cultures, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18079-9_1
2 L. EKO
leftist- wing Charlie Hebdo into the subject of global news and controversy,
the secular martyr of freedom of expression. After the Charlie Hebdo ter-
rorist attack of January 7, 2015, the French political and media establish-
ments engaged in acts of selective évenémentialisation (event-ization) of
the tragic occurrence. They created a master narrative of the attack as an
assault on France and its abstract, post-Revolutionary founding myth, sec-
ular republicanism, and collective memory. According to this master nar-
rative, the terrorists had attacked the identitarian hallmarks of “Frenchness”
and French exceptionalism—French citizenship shorn of all foreign ethno-
national, religious, cultural, and identitarian appurtenances.
Je SuiS Charlie: The Charlie hebdo TerrorisT ATTAck
And GlobAl collecTive MeMory
One of the outcomes of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack was the creation
of an instantaneous imagined or pseudo global collective present. This
ephemeral collective present is triggered by unprecedented calamitous or
catastrophic events that stop people in their tracks, trigger their survival
instinct, and move them to act, jointly with others, in the spur of the
moment, to assuage the pressing psychological angst provoked by the
unprecedented event. Mass trauma is often the trigger and the cement of
the fleeting collective present, which ultimately passes into collective
memory, which Halbwachs (1992) called “the cult of the past.” The col-
lective present is a modern phenomenon facilitated by the interconnected
online media of global communication. One of the first occurrences of the
collective present—and it is always expressed in present tense—occurred
in 1962 when President John Kennedy stood in front of the immense
monstrosity of the Berlin Wall, symbol of the Cold War, and the suppres-
sion of human freedom and proclaimed: “Ich bin ein Berliner!” That
resounding statement of personal involvement in the pain and suffering of
the people of Berlin has passed into the collective memory of Germany. In
2001, the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, French journalist
Jean-Marie Colombani wrote a memorable editorial entitled: Nous sommes
tous Américains! (We are all Americans) (Colombani, 2001) in Le Monde,
one of the newspapers of record in France. That remarkable statement and
the sentiments it aroused are now part of French collective memory. The
collective present was also evident during the Charlie Hebdo affair. The
most remarkable and most enduring “voice” of the Charlie Hebdo
controversy was the pithy but memorable French expression, Je Suis Charlie
