(en) Je ne suis pas Charlie (I am not Charlie) by José Antonio Guti?rrez D. (fr) ~ CookingFood.Org

I'll start by clarifying that, first of all, I consider the attack to the offices of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris an atrocity and that I do not believe that,
under any circumstance, is justifiable to turn a journalist, no matter how much we doubt
on his professional quality, into a military target. The same is valid in France, as it is
in Colombia or Palestine. Also, I do not identify myself either with any fundamentalism,
neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Muslim nor with the Frenchified clown-secularism
either, that raises the sacred "R?publique" as a goddess. I give these necessary
explanations since, no matter how hard the high politics gurus insist on the idea that in
Europe we live under an "exemplary democracy" with "great liberties," we all know that the
Big Brother is watching us and that any speech out of the script is hardly punished. But I
believe that to censure the attack against Charlie Hebdo is not a synonym for celebrating
a magazine that is, fundamentally, a monument to the intolerance, the racism and the
colonial arrogance.

Je ne suis pas Charlie (I am not Charlie)

Thousands of people, comprehensibly affected by this attack, have make circulate French
messages saying "Je suis Charlie" (I am Charlie), as if this message was the ultimate
expression in defense of freedom. Well then, I am not Charlie. I do not identify myself
with the degrading and "caricaturesque" representation that is done about the Islamic
world, in the middle of the "War against the Terrorism" era, with all the racist and
colonialist load that this entails. I cannot see with a good face the constant symbolic
aggression that has as a counterpart a physical and real aggression, by means of the
bombings and military occupations of countries pertaining to this cultural horizon. I
cannot either see with good eyes these cartoons and their offensive texts, when the Arabs
are one of the most marginalized, impoverished and exploited sectors of the French
society, that have received historically a brutal treatment: I do not forget that in the
Paris metro, in the early 60's, the police massacred 200 Algerians, hitting them with
sticks, just because they were demanding the end of the French occupation of their
country, which already had left an estimated balance of a million "uncivilized" dead
Arabs. It is not about not innocent cartoons done by free thinkers, in turn, it is about
messages produced from mass media (Yes, though under an alternative pose, Charlie Hebdo
belongs to mass media), loaded with hatred and stereotypes that reinforce a speech that
considers the Arabs as Barbarians who are to be contained, uprooted, controlled,
repressed, oppressed and exterminated. Messages whose implicit purpose is to justify the
invasions to the Middle East countries as well as the multiple interventions and bombings
that are orchestrated in the West in defense of the new imperial distribution. The Spanish
actor Willy Toledo said, in an controversial declaration - only to point out the obvious-,
that "the West kills every day. Without noise". And that is what Charlie and his black
humor hide under the form of a satire.

I do not forget the cover of the Charlie Hebdo N?1099, in which it was trivialized the
massacre of more than a thousand of Egyptians by a brutal military dictatorship that has
the U.S.A and France's approval, by means of a cover saying something like "Slaughter in
Egypt. The Koran is shit: it doesn't stop bullets." The cartoon showed a riddled Muslim
man trying to protect himself with the Koran. Perhaps this is funny for some. Also, at
their time, the English colonists in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, thought that it was
funny to show photos of them with the natives they had hunted, showing themselves with
wide smiles, carbine in hand, and steeping on the still hot bleeding corpse. Instead of
funny, to me, that cartoon seems to be violent and colonial, an abuse of the fictitious
and manipulated western freedom of press. What would happen if I now made a magazine whose
cover had the following phrase: "Slaughter in Paris. Charlie Hebdo is shit: it doesn't
stop bullets" and made a cartoon of the deceased gunned Jean Cabut holding a copy of the
magazine in his hands? Clearly that would be a scandal: the life of a French man is
sacred. The life of an Egyptian (or Palestinian, Iraqi, a Syrian, etc.) is "humoristic"
material. For that reason I am not Charlie, because for me, the life of each one of those
Egyptians pestered is as sacred as it is for any of those caricaturists today assassinated.

We already know what comes from now on: there will be speeches defending the freedom of
press coming from countries that in 1999 gave the blessing to the NATO bombing of
Belgrade, of the Serbian public TV station for considering it "the ministry of lies";
countries that shut up when Israel bombed in Beirut the Al-Manar TV station 2006; those
that respond with silence to the murders of Colombian and Palestinian critical
journalists. After the beautiful pro-freedom rhetoric, the liberticide action will come:
more McCarthyism, disguised "colonial anti-terrorism", more colonial interventions, more
restrictions to those "democratic guarantees" threatened with extinction and, of course,
more racism. Europe is consumed in a spiral of xenophobic hatred, islamophobia,
anti-semitism (in fact, the Palestinians are Semitic) and this atmosphere has reached
unbearable levels. The Muslims are already the Jews of the 21st century Europe, and the
neo-Nazis parties are being respectable again, 80 years later, thanks to this repugnant
feeling. Because all of these, in spite of the repulsion that the attacks of Paris cause
to me, Je ne suis pas Charlie.

Jos? Antonio Guti?rrez D.
7 January, 2015