General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Against my better judgment ... [View all]Pooka Fey
(3,496 posts)which no one is talking about. I never read the magazine, so I can't comment on the editorials, but they can't fairly be accused of any passive aggressive couching their disdain of Islamism (or Catholicism, or Fundamentalism, Racism, Classism, etc) in satiric cartoons.
Having watched many interviews with the survivors of the attacks on Charlie Hebdo on French TV this week, I can tell you that these journalists are intellectually rigorous, and I will presume that they have defended their opinions in the editorial content of the magazine many times.
I'd like to add to the conversation that France has a very long tradition of ridiculing authority, dating back to Voltaire and other philosophers of the Enlightenment period. Asking the French to respect Anglo-American cultural boundaries around what constitutes respectable discourse is a typical Anglo-Saxon cultural blind-spot.
Whether or not the sexual content is low-brow is another matter of opinion, but I live in France and they have no objections to drawing nudity or cartoons of pee-pee parts or women's breasts. I saw another DU poster, not you, call the cartoons pornographic which made me cringe.
Cheers