A book written by the late Stephane Charbonnier — aka Charb — hit French newsstands Thursday.
Charb, the editor of French satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo, was killed in the paper’s Paris office in an attack by Islamic militants on January 7. Eleven other staffers were killed, as well as 11 injured.
The book, titled An Open Letter to the Fraudsters of Islamophobia who Play into Racists’ Hands, was finished two days before Charb’s death, publishers said. The book not only upholds the right to ridicule religion, but defends the paper’s editorial and satirical stance and rebukes against its critics.
“The suggestion that you can laugh at everything, except certain aspects of Islam, because Muslims are much more prickly that the rest of the population — what is that, if not discrimination?,” he writes, before condemning the position as “white, left-wing bourgeois intellectual paternalism.”
Founded in 1970, the magazine folded in 1981 before relaunching in 1992. Charb had received numerous death threats prior to his murder, including after the magazine published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammed in 2006. Charlie Hebdo’s offices were also firebombed in 2012.
The two brothers who carried out the deadly January attack, Said and Cherif Kouachi, were later shot dead by police. They were acting on behalf of al Qaeda.
(H/T BBC)
