Charlie Hebdo: Liberty, equality, fraternity — Marc de Faoite

JANUARY 8 — It was a Wednesday morning, the 7th of January when two brothers, Said (32) and Cherif Kouachi (34) and their companion Hamyd Mourad (18), drove into central Paris, parked their car outside the offices of Charlie Hebdo. (Hebdo is a contraction of the word hebdomadaire, meaning weekly).

Charlie Hebdo is a far from mainstream media. It is a small satirical newspaper and tends to be provocative, but with a circulation of about 30,000 copies a week in a country with a population of almost 70 million can’t be considered to be widely read. For most of the week the offices are quiet with only a few staff present, but being Wednesday morning the weekly meeting of the editorial staff was going on.

Coco, an illustrator for Charlie Hebdo, accompanied by her daughter, who she had just picked up from kindergarten, reached the door of the building that houses the Charlie Hebdo offices. She abruptly found herself face to face with three armed men wearing balaclavas who “brutally threatened” her. Fearing for her life, and that of her daughter, she typed the security code into the keypad thereby allowing the three gunmen to enter the premises.

A few minutes later 11 people were dead including a policemen. With shouts of “God is great” “We killed Charlie” and “The prophet has been avenged,” and using the one-fingered salute of the ISIL, the gunmen jumped into their car and sped away, but not before gunning down a twelfth victim and second policemen, Ahmed Merabet, ironically a Muslim himself.

It was a brutal act the French President Francois Hollande has condemned as terrorism. As well as being an attack on unarmed citizens, it was also an assault on freedom of expression. Liberty Equality and Fraternity is the slogan upon which the French republic was founded. France has long prided itself on its defence of freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to practice religion without fear of persecution, the freedom to publish newspapers with satirical cartoons.

Said and Cherif Kouachi are not foreign terrorists. They are both Frenchmen, born in Paris within a few minutes walking distance from the Charlie Hebdo offices. They are also members of France’s vast Muslim community, which varying estimates count from two to seven million strong, making it the republic’s second religion after Catholicism. Their acts will be applauded by only a tiny minority of this population, yet inevitably the entire community will suffer as a result.

Integration can be a difficult process, and France’s attempts to integrate the Muslim community into the mainstream population have been fraught with difficulties, and if truth be told, a certain lack of enthusiasm from both sides. Having spent almost 12 years living and working in France myself, I can attest to the prevalence of casual racism and discrimination, even towards white-skinned Northern Europeans like myself, though anything I had to endure during my years in France pales in comparison to the treatment of the members of other immigrant communities.

Two generations after the majority of the Muslim community first arrived in France, as willing labourers that helped rebuild a nation recovering from a series of wars fought both at home and abroad, the majority of the French population have come to accept, albeit often begrudgingly, the presence of the Muslim minority.

As well as the untold heartbreak for friends and families of those murdered the brutal actions of these three gunmen will affect the entire French population, but none so drastically as the Muslim population. Immediately after the attack many prominent Muslim clerics denounced the act and the killers, insisting that neither represent Islam. For the coming weeks and months many in the Muslim community will fear reprisals and their fear will be justified.

Parallel to the rise of radical Islam, Northern Europe is experiencing a backlash in the form of increased support for right-wing and extreme right-wing parties. Former political pariahs are rapidly becoming main stream. France is no exception, with the National Front sweeping a hitherto undreamed of 25 per cent of the votes in last year’s European elections. If those elections were to be held today the National Front would almost certainly improve upon that result.

The truth is that this heinous act plays right into the hands of the right wing extremists, which in the short and long term will make life more difficult for France’s immigrant community in general and the Muslim community specifically.

Ironically these terrorists have made life more difficult for the very community they claim to represent. Are they really defending Islam or are they venting the frustrations of being members of a much maligned minority? The answer to this question depends on whether you want to put the blame on those preaching and promoting radical extremist forms of Islam, or whether we see it as a failure on the part of France to successfully integrate its Muslim community. My suspicion is that there are elements of both involved, but of course the ultimate responsibility lies with the three gunmen, who went to the Charlie Hebdo offices having deliberately planned to murderer as many people as they could.

There will also be repercussions for the French public in general, including the most liberal, with the introduction of security measures. The far right will feel vindicated and its emboldened supporters will use that same freedom of expression to spread more hate across the land. Even as I write, social media is ablaze with racist comments and calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty, ironically a sentence that these three men seemingly had no compunctions with issuing upon the staff of Charlie Hebdo in defence of their beliefs.

Which raises the question: What do you do when someone provokes you? Do you lash out in blind anger, or do you try to take a more measured approach? In the aftermath of this slaughter will France be able to live up to those lofty ideals of Liberte, Egalité, Fraternité?

* Marc de Faoite is based in Langkawi and mostly writes short stories. His book Tropical Madness was longlisted for the 2014 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.