laubaq

Hello all,

I am one of the manager behind Affil4You.

Our company is based in Paris 5 mn walking distance from Charlie Hebdo offices. The police officer who was shot dead, died right under the window of one of our developer. I also leave near the place when the young policewoman got shot the following day and my kids got locked in their school during all day. But beside the geographical locations, the attack hit us because the people killed were close to us. Wolinsky (80yo) and Cabu (76yo) were already famous cartoonist when I was a teenage starting having interest in politics and society. I grew with them and have been following their work since then. Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier) was the head of publication at Charlie Hebdo but was also the cartoonist illustrating Mon Quotidien, a daily newspaper for kid. During years we received daily a copy of this newspaper with a funny cartoon of Charb on front page. My kids grew with him. Bernard Maris was a well known economist. He was having a talk slot every Friday morning on France Inter, our public broadcast radio station. For months I have been waking up on Friday with the sound of his voice. And of course Charlie Hebdo and all the cartoons of the team have been displayed on our newsstand for so many time?

Charlie Hebdo was the target of fundamentalists because they reprinted in 2005 the Mahomet?s caricatures originally printed in Denmark by the Jyllands-Posten. When they did this at that time some people did not understand. It seemed to these people, and I was sharing this opinion, that these cartoons were not providing any useful message and that reprint them was not helping a better understanding between people. They explained why they choose to do this and it appeared to me clearly that they could not have done something else : These guys have been born in a time when free speech was not granted, when church, family and institutions were still having strong censorship power. They grew against that system, they had free speech directly coded in their DNA. When the Danish newspaper got threaten by religious forces, they just reacted as they always reacted against censorship. No other reaction could have make sense for them.

However, this team was not standing against the muslin or the Arab community in France or elsewhere. They had a very clear view on the difference between the community we live with and the fundamentalists we fight against. After the controversial publication of a book on this subject two day ago, the main subject of the redaction conference when the shooting occurred was how their cartoon could help fight against the growing islamophobic feeling in France.

All this to explain why this shooting made me so sad, made a lot of us terribly sad. I was at the gathering Place de la Republic the day of the shooting and sadness was clearly bigger than anger. On broadcast we heard so many people struggling not to cry. It seems to me that with them died another piece of hope. For years now we see door being closed, old problems remaining in place and new problems gathering. Let?s just hope that they did not died in vain and that after this we really work on trying to solve problems.

Thank you for reading this long post, See you all with pleasure in LA and LV

Laurent