Stéphane Charbonnier, editor of Charlie Hebdo, was always very clear about what his satirical magazine was doing when it made fun of Islam, or any religion.

“I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen. I’m not putting lives at risk,” Charb, as he is known, told Le Monde. “When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.” He later also added that he wanted to make fun of Islam until it became "as banal as Catholicisim".

Early indications suggest that Wednesday’s attack on the magazine in Paris, which has left 12 dead, including Charb, and four critically injured, were carried out by gunmen taking revenge for Charlie Hebdo’s willingness to poke fun at Islam. The magazine has in the past depicted prophet Muhammad, considered blasphemous by Islam, on its cover saying “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter”.

That cover got the magazine hacked and firebombed, but Charlie Hebdo, under Charb’s editorship, has continued to take on all the holy cows. Since then it has shown a Muslim man kissing a male cartoonist. Its current cover features controversial French author Michel Houellebecq, whose new novel shows France under a Muslim President in 2022, with a caricature of the author saying, “in 2022, I will celebrate Ramadan.”


Love is stronger than hate.




 

As with the outcry over Jyllands-Posten's decision to run cartoons depicting Muhammad, the Charlie Hebdo controversy also prompted plenty of support from the community. The most poignant of those came from New Yorker’s cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff, who drew the only “culturally, ethnically, religiously and politically correct cartoon” – an empty box.


Spanish magazine, El Jueves also published a cover in solidarity with Charlie Hebdo, soon afterwards, and it too faced a similar fate: it was hacked and threats were made to its journalists. The magazine ran a cover with a cartoon that had a number of Muslim looking men in a police line-up, with the text saying, "but does anyone know what Muhammad looks like?"


In the  aftermath of the attack on Wednesday, those supporting the magazine and the journalist who were attacked have taken to twitter using the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie, in French), as a way of showing their solidarity.