What I want to say about Charlie Hebdo

 I was interested by two letters in today's Independent.  Readers helped the journalists out as 'journalists' are now the victims.  Journalists find it difficult now because they have been personally affronted, and so are still smarting in collective agony.  It could have been them.

...freedom of speech...one of the western world's enduring myths.  We have never had to be more careful about what we say, rightly or wrongly, and mindful of ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, colour, social background and belief.  We all know the drill.
George Sharpley Gloucester.

We all know what he is saying, but I would also say 'about time too.'  The powerful have been at liberty to provoke the weak for too long. The other way round has always been forbidden.

Steven Garside from Manchester asks,
At what point does the 'right to offend' slide into Muslim-baiting and old-fashioned racism?  ...Readers might want to check out the Charlie Hebdo cartoon "The Koran is shit" and reflect on how this compares with the lurid depiction of Judaism in Der Sturmer in 1930's Germany.

Commentators have said 'this is not about religion, it is about power: the power of violent intolerance versus the power of free expression.'  I agree that it is about power, but it is the expression of powerlessness of a less powerful religion, from a poorer and more dependent part of the world, versus strong insensitive, bloody minded western dominance.

The jokes made by Charlie Hebdo and others are not funny, and are akin to bullying.  The response is not justified, but it is expected, given that the killers were from sad deprived and traumatised backgrounds.  Who is there to grieve for these two thirty year old brothers?

The violence in Paris feels analogous to that in Northern Ireland, so we Brits should understand.

A Western perspective of comedy and humour (free speech)

An Islamic perspective of the same humour.