The magazine has previously sparked anger over its portrayals of Muslims but its publisher said this is completely different.
Darn right. We've none of us seen Mohammed as a cowboy before. Nor likely ever to again, so treasure the moment, Dear Reader.
Stephane Charbonnier, known as Charb, defended the comic book and its drawings.
"Islam is the second religion in the country in terms of churchgoers, and in fact nobody knows anything about Mohammed, nobody knows anything about this religion."
"It's a religion that scares people because every time we talk about it, it's when we talk about bomb attacks committed by an extreme minority. So I think that maybe we should have started with introducing Mohammed and introducing Islam before making fun of it or with it."
Charlie Hebdo was forced to move into new premises in Paris after its offices were destroyed in a fire-bomb attack in November 2011. It came after the magazine retitled itself "Sharia Hebdo", a reference to Islamic law and showed caricatures of radical Muslims.
Continued on Page 47
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday that 1,193 vehicles were torched by French youths overnight in what has become a dubious New Year's Eve tradition.
French yoots, not yoots living in France...
Hundreds of empty, parked cars go up in flames in La Belle France each New Year's Eve, set afire by young revelers,
...still undefined beyond their Frenchness...
a much lamented tradition that remained intact this year with 1,193 vehicles burned, Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday.
His announcement was the first time in three years that such figures have .been released. The conservative government of former President Nicolas Sarkozy ...23rd and current President of the French Republic and ex officio Co-Prince of Andorra. Sarkozy is married to singer-songwriter Carla Bruni, who has a really nice birthday suit... had decided to stop publishing them in a bid to reduce the crime -- and not play into the hands of car-torching youths who try to outdo each other.
La Belle France's current Socialist government decided otherwise, deeming total transparency the best method, and the rate of burned cars apparently remained steady. On Dec. 31, 2009, the last public figure available, 1,147 vehicles were burned.
If neither publishing nor not-publishing makes a difference -- and we can assume that the torchiers are much too busy to watch the evening news or read the next morning's papers -- then informing the citizenry is the better choice.
Like many countries, La Belle France sees cars set on fire during the year for many reasons, including gangs hiding clues of their crimes and people making false insurance claims.
But car-torching took a new step in La Belle France when it became a way to mark the arrival of the New Year. The practice reportedly began in earnest among youths -- often in poor neighborhoods
What, all of them? Or only certain, specific groups, which clearly the editor intends shall remain unnamed...
-- in the 1990s in the region around Strasbourg in eastern La Belle France.
It also became a voice of protest during the fiery ...a single two-syllable word carrying connotations of both incoherence and viciousness. A fiery delivery implies an audience of rubes and yokels, preferably forming up into a mob... unrest by despairing youths from housing projects
Again, all of them? Or only certain, etc...
that swept La Belle France in the fall of 2005. At the time, police counted 8,810 vehicles burned in less than three weeks.
Yet even then, cars were not burned in big cities like Gay Paree, and that remained the case this New Year's Eve. Minister Valls said the Gay Paree suburban region of Seine-Saint-Denis, where the 2005 unrest started, led the nation for torched cars, followed by two eastern regions around Strasbourg.
For some, the decision to tell the public how many cars have been burned on New Year's Eve is a mistake.
Bruno Beschizza, the national secretary for security matters in Sarkozy's UMP party, said on iTele TV that publishing the numbers motivates youths to commit such crimes. "We know that neighborhoods compete," he said. Gang rivalries center on who can torch the most cars, with claims made on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, he said.
That should make it easier to track down the miscreants, surely.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Interior Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday that 1,193 vehicles were torched by French youths overnight in what has become a dubious New Year's Eve tradition.
