I was just talking to a relative, who lives in France.

[Denzil_DC]

66. Here's some explanations of the context of some of the cartoons.

I posted part of this post on another thread in response to another DUer, but for those who are genuinely curious, here it is again:

I did find this Quora discussion which may be food for thought:

http://www.quora.com/What-was-the-context-of-Charlie-Hebdos-cartoon-depicting-Boko-Haram-sex-slaves-as-welfare-queens

Here's one person there's explanation of that particular cartoon (the link has some background on others, too):

This cover is mixing two unrelated elements which made the news at about the same time:
- Boko Haram victims likely to end up sex slaves in Nigeria
- Decrease of French welfare allocations

In France, as in probably every country who has welfare allocations, some people criticize this system because some people might try to game it (e.g., "welfare queens" idea). Note that if we didn't had it there would probably be much more people complaining because the ones who really need it would end up in extreme poverty.

Charlie Hebdo is known for being left-wing attached and very controversial, and I think they wanted to parody people who criticize "welfare queens" by taking this point-of-view to the absurd, to show that immigrant women in France are more likely to be victims of patriarchy than evil manipulative profiteers.

And of course if we only stay on the first-degree approach, it's a terrible racist and absurd cover.

Similarly, the "monkey" cartoon is explained like this:

The first clue that all is not what it seems is that the cartoon was drawn by Charb - the editor himself. He was a Communist, and his girlfriend's parents were North African. A funny kind of racist. Next you have to note that the text next to that cartoon says "Rassemblement Bleu Raciste". This is a play on "Rassemblement Bleu Marine", the slogan of Marine Le Pen's national front, and the tricolor flame next to it is the party logo.

So, what you then need to know is that the cartoon was published after a National Front politician Facebooked a photoshop of the woman in the cartoon as a monkey, and then said on French TV that she should be "in a tree swinging from the branches rather than in government".

I've seen other French people elsewhere discussing this who evidently didn't get these references, or if they did, didn't think they were worthwhile, and have a different take on Charlie Hebdo's politics, feeling that they went for shock value in order to boost sales.

My problem with people outside France simply reproducing these particular cartoons as part of "Je suis Charlie Hebdo" - which they're obviously free to do - is that they're removed from their context, which makes them ambiguous - to non-French audiences, probably not even ambiguous, but incomprehensible, if not downright offensive to some, and cheeringly offensive in a non-liberal way to others (like those who love to circulate cartoons of Obama as a monkey, for instance). Again, they're obviously entirely free to do so, but how many understand what they're circulating, and how many who see them understand what they portray?

On the other hand, I don't think there's similar ambiguity about a number of the other cartoons about religious figures or French politicians. They're often scatological or sexually explicit. There's a long tradition of that in satire, not just in France (the British 19th-century cartoonist Rowlandson, among others, is definitely NSFW at times). I also find some of the depictions of Jews and Muslims very stereotyped - which may be part of the joke, but is a bit sophisticated for something that's going to sit on a newsstand and be visible to people who aren't necessarily going to take the time to parse it.

I'm not sure which cover cartoons are being most widely circulated now outside France. It might be interesting to know. It was apparently the ones of Mohammed that the murderers used as their "justification."*

* Since the original post, I've since heard reported on the BBC that another "justification" was the attacks on ISIS.