Tout le monde est Charlie, ça finira par ne plus être chic!

On March 8, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip paid an eloquent tribute to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists murdered on January 7, making a loving use of some of their own best images (Christ I love that Benedict XVI) and showing, incidentally, one way of taunting the murderers without strictly violating the Salafist rules against the visual depiction of the Prophet:

Je suis cheap shots

Because you all want to be smarter than the New York Times, which is incapable of reading the Luz cover for tomorrow's issue of Charlie Hebdo:

It shows a tearful caricature of the Prophet Muhammad holding the by-now iconic “Je suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”) placard with the words “Tout est pardonné” (“All is forgiven”) above him. Many viewed the cartoon image as a conciliatory message from the new editors of Charlie Hebdo after the carnage of the Paris attack.

Wrong, cons. The drawing depicts the Prophet aligning himself with Marine Le Pen, Nicolas Sarkozy, Binyamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, bishops, cabinet ministers, TV idiots, pseudophilosophers, the New York Times Paris bureau, and all the other authoritarians, fundamentalists, rightists, prudes, and cons that hated Charlie and now want to march to show how much they cherish the journal and its freedom. Whether he's the one saying "Tout est pardonné" or being pardoned, he's in the same warm bath of mutual freedom from criticism that they made out of the #JeSuisCharlie party with their solemn and respectful presence. He wants to march too!

The message isn't about Mohammed at all, but about the hypocrites in the parade, and I'm so happy to see that the paper's toughness is undiminished.

Nous sommes tous des juifs français--sauf Bibi

Charb on IDF tactics: "Hamas is taking the population hostage!" "So let's kill the hostages."

Can't quite let go of Charlie without calling attention to the unspeakable behavior of Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who crashed the party in Paris yesterday despite being politely but firmly asked not to come, as Haaretz reports:

A little more Charlie

The finest of the Mohammed caricatures, I think, was Cabu's from 2006, in the wake of the Jyllands-Posten riots, which showed a little sympathy for the old Prophet overwhelmed by intégristes or fundamentalists and doing a double facepalm: "It's tough being loved by cons..." (the word, etymologically referring to the vagina, has much less force than English "cunt" and is more of an equivalent to "asshole").

On the whole, though, the worst thing for posterity about the murders of the Charlie Hebdo staff is that these heroes may be remembered for what wasn't their best work, the relatively crude and satirically unpointed drawings of 2011 and 2012 showing the naked Prophet eating his own shit or posing as Brigitte Bardot. They were so much better taking on the frisky College of Cardinals:

#JeSuisBrooksie

Updated 1/10

The Vagabond (1916).

Shorter David Brooks, "I am not Charlie Hebdo", New York Times, January 9 2015:

I am not Charlie Hebdo in the sense that I would never say anything vulgar in public or denigrate somebody's religion, that's so sophomoric, but, speaking of being sophomoric, I do think we should do away with college speech codes and allow the William F. Buckley, Jr., Program to invite Ayaan Hirsi Ali to insult Muslims freely on the Yale campus, because that's what freedom of speech is all about.

Suis-je Charlie?

For a moment I was afraid this meant he was dead, but of course he was born a long time before 1994.

"Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands," said Daniel Cohn-Bendit in May 1968, or not exactly. He was Jewish himself by birth and German by choice. His parents were German Jews who had fled to France in 1933, and he was born stateless in 1945; after his family moved back to Germany in 1958, already a radical, he opted for German citizenship, specifically to avoid the military service demanded of young French men, but he wound up in France anyway, in 1966, as a sociology student at the working-class university of Nanterre in the northern Paris banlieues.