Charlie Hebdo shooting Or shooting Freedom
On the morning of 7 January 2015, at about 11:30 local time, two masked gunmen armed with assault rifles and other weapons forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. They fired up to 50 shots, while shouting "Allahu Akbar" (Arabic for "God is [the] greatest"), and killed 11 people. They then killed a French National Police officer shortly after, and injured 11 others during the attack. Five others were killed and another 11 were wounded in related shootings that followed in the Île-de-France region.
Biard, who was in London at the time of the attack on Charlie Hebdo's Paris offices, says it is "very difficult to process because one obviously feels an enormous relief mixed with a sense of guilt."
Twelve people, including the newspaper's lead cartoonist, were killed in the Jan. 7 massacre by gunmen who said the attack was in retribution for Charlie Hebdo's depiction of the Prophet Muhammad.
Biard was asked about the many news outlets that opted not to show Charlie Hebdo's controversial cartoons in their coverage of the killings and aftermath.
Those that blur the Muhammad cover, he said, "blur out democracy, secularism [and] freedom of religion."
"Secularism protects us against this, secularism guarantees democracy and assures peace," Biard said. "Secularism allows all believers and not-believers to live in peace, and that is what we defend.”
The editor of Charlie Hebdo is defending the French satirical newspaper's skewering of religion, saying it targets faith only when it becomes "entangled" in politics.
"We do not attack religion, but we do when it gets involved in politics," Gerard Biard said in an interview with Chuck Todd broadcast on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "We have a problem when faith and religion become political, then we become worried and we attack.
"If God becomes entangled in politics, then democracy is in danger," he said through a translator.
Last week while addressing reporters about the attacks, Pope Francis said, "One cannot insult other people's faith. One cannot make fun of faith."
Biard's response: "Every time that we draw a cartoon of Mohammed, every time that we draw a cartoon of a prophet, every time that we draw a cartoon of God, we defend the freedom of [conscience]. We declare that God must not be a political or public figure. He must be a private one. We defend the freedom of [conscience], yes it’s also freedom of speech, but is the freedom of [conscience]. Religion should not be a political argument."
France raised its terror alert to its highest level and deployed soldiers in Île-de-France and Picardy. A massive manhunt led to the discovery on 9 January of the suspects, brothers Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, who exchanged fire with police. The brothers took hostages at a signage company in Dammartin-en-Goële, and were gunned down when they emerged firing from the building.
On 11 January, about two million people, including more than 40 world leaders, met in Paris for a rally of national unity, and 3.7 million people joined demonstrations across France. The phrase Je suis Charlie (French for "I am Charlie") was a common slogan of support at the rallies and in social media. The remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo continued weekly publication; issue No. 1178 sold out a print run of seven million copies in six languages, in contrast to its typical French-only 60,000. Unrest in Niger following the latter publication resulted in 10 deaths, dozens of injured, and at least nine churches burned.
Charlie Hebdo had attracted attention for its controversial depictions of Muhammad. Hatred for Charlie Hebdo 's cartoons, which made jokes about Islamic leaders as well as Muhammad, is considered to be the principal motive for the massacre. Michael Morell, former deputy director of the CIA, suggested that the motive of the attackers was "[a]bsolutely clear: trying to shut down a media organisation that lampooned the Prophet Muhammad".
In March 2013, Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, commonly known as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), released a hit list in an edition of their English-language magazine Inspire. The list included Stéphane Charbonnier and others whom AQAP accused of insulting Islam. On 9 January, AQAP claimed responsibility for the attack in a speech from AQAP's top Shariah cleric Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari, citing the motive as "revenge for the honor" of Muhammad.
French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve declared that by the morning of 9 January 2015, 3,721 messages "condoning the attacks" had already been documented through the French government Pharos system
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