Who's Charlie Again?

Je suis Charlie Brown.

Je suis Charlie Chaplin.

Where is that support everyone kept promising to give? Who cares about hashtags and placards? They don't mean anything. No one 'gave our girls back' and most major news agencies refused to print Charlie Hebdo cartoons (save for French Canada) but they did offer cringing, whiny pretexts as to why they would not.

Case the first, David Studer, CBC's chief coward director of Journalistic Standards and Practices:

“This is not a ban, and it isn't censorship,”  David Studer, CBC's director of Journalistic Standards and Practices, said in an email on Wednesday, reminding news staff of CBC's long-established policy. 

“We are being consistent with our historic journalistic practices around this story, not because of fear, but out of respect for the beliefs and sensibilities of the mass of Muslim believers about images of the Prophet​. Similarly, we wouldn't publish cartoons likely to dismay or outrage mainstream followers of other religions​.”

Would these be the same "beliefs and sensibilities" of the terrorists (or should I say "militants" as the CBC is wont to do?) who gunned down twelve unarmed people? I find it curious that for a major news story the publicly-funded CBC will not only refuse to print what is ostensibly the motive for this outrageous terrorist attack but then attempts a stiff upper lip when it claims it is doing so out of "respect".

I'll bet it does respect other religions.


Case the second:

David Walmsley, The Globe and Mail’s editor-in-chief, explained the decision not to include the cartoons: “One doesn’t need to show a cartoon to show the story. The story is the killings, not any cartoon. As our editorial said, we support the right to publish material that provokes. Throughout the media landscape across the world, there is a wide range of material that is published. Charlie Hebdo has its voice, for example. The Globe and Mail has its. We hadn’t published the cartoons before the slaughter and our editorial position remains the same today.”

Wrong.

The entire story is about why these Islamist terrorists (one of whom has been tried for terrorism offenses) murdered twelve people in cold blood. If Catholic terrorists had murdered the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists over offensive cartoons, you would damn well publish that fact and the cartoons that came with it until you went purple.

But they weren't Catholics. They weren't Buddhists. They weren't Quakers. They weren't Jains. They are Muslims who killed defenseless people over badly drawn cartoons.

And that is the reason why you refuse to do the very thing that would not only fully flesh out this incident but stick a proverbial thumb-in-the-eye of the intolerant savages whose brains still reside in the seventh century.


Today, once again, the post-modern West has failed to stand up for itself and left itself open to more attacks, abuse and disintegration.