The Italian-French Founder of Charlie Hebdo

Fascinating sub-story at Bloomberg on the attacked magazine, Charlie Hebdo….
Perhaps you did not find Charlie Hebdo, the Paris satirical weekly attacked by terrorists on Wednesday, all that funny. That’s only natural: People in different countries laugh at different jokes and have varying tolerance for irreverence, offensiveness and plain grossness. As the French magazine, notwithstanding all it’s suffered, prepares to print a million copies of its next issue —  17 times its usual run — it’s important to note that it comes from a European tradition much broader than the French brand of satirical slapstick it most employs, and has at its roots a personal story as tortured as the continent’s recent history.

Francois Cavanna was the publication’s founding editor in chief, back when it was called Hara-Kiri. He was the one who renamed it Charlie Hebdo in 1970, after Hara-Kiri was banned for publishing this cover, which used the death of Charles de Gaulle to spoof press coverage of a nightclub fire that took 146 lives. (“Tragic Ball at Colombey, One Dead,” read the coverline.)

Cavanna was the son of an Italian immigrant mason. He grew up in a poor eastern suburb of Paris, taunted by French nationalists but in love with the French language. He didn’t get to make it his profession until much later.

In 1943, at the age of 20, he was sent by the Nazis to Germany to work in an ordnance factory in Treptow, now part of Berlin … Read ALL

Muslim War On Terror

Contrary to commentators on both sides of the Atlantic, there has been significant Muslim push-back against the crimes being carried out in its name.  Here is Juan Cole, a close observer.

When American commentators like Carl Bernstein complain that Muslim authorities have not sufficiently denounced the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, they show a profound ignorance of the current situation in the Middle East.

The fact is that both governments of Muslim-majority countries and the chief religious institutions have been engaged in a vigorous war on religious extremism for some time.  See ALL

As he also says, one of the purported assassins, now dead himself, is said to have attributed his motivation to turn to weapons to what he saw in the world:

… Benyettou took them on the internet, and showed them images from Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sharif said, “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.”

Which of course does not excuse his actions but is surely a way to begin what every theorist of war, indeed of human behavior, says is of vital importance — knowing the other.

Non Muslims could surely help Muslims in reversing the surge of terror by understanding such motives and taking steps to make them lose force.

Cartoonists Respond

Cartoon Charlie HebdoFrom Cartooning For Peace dot Org  (see more in upper right corner)

PARIS, Jan 8 2015 (IPS) – “They are cowards who react to satire by going for their Kalashnikovs.” That was how renowned French cartoonist Plantu described the killers of 10 media workers and two policemen in Paris Wednesday. MORE at Informed Comment

Turkey Joins France in Recognizing Syrian Rebel Coalition

Ahh, politics does make strange bedfellows.  Not so long ago Turkey fiercely disputed France for its assertion that, in fact, Ottoman troops in Turkey during WW I, committed deliberate extermination of the “alien” Armenians.  Diplomatic relations were barely breathing.

Now, France and Turkey are among the first countries to recognize the newly formed “National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces.”  France is the first, and so far only, non Muslim country to do so.  The others are: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait.

In announcing its support Turkey’s Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, cited some of the raw facts of the on-going civil war in Syria

…more than 39,000 people had been killed, 2.5 million people had been displaced within Syria, and hundreds of thousands of refugees had fled to neighboring countries, including Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.

In Turkey alone, he said, 120,000 Syrians are residing in camps, and nearly 70,000 others are living elsewhere in the country.

NY Times: Sednem Arsu

for more on Turkey by Sednem Arsu go here.

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For absolutely chilling news about Assad’s chemical weapon stockpile, Nor Korean missile techs in Syria, Hezbollah training camps near chemical stores and anti-Assad contingency planning see  Sanger and Schmitt in the times.

Focus on French Economy Fuels Gains by Far Right

“This small city in northern France has few immigrants and little crime. But in the last local elections here, the candidate of the far-right National Front eliminated the standard-bearer of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party in the first round of voting and then won 30.2 percent of the vote in the runoff, losing to a Socialist.

With the presidential election less than three months away, Mr. Sarkozy’s party fears the same results on a national scale. The president is facing strong competition on the right from the National Front and its leader, Marine Le Pen, and his party is worried that she may eliminate the sitting president in the first round of voting on April 22.

What is most striking is how well she and the party are doing not only in the south of France, where immigration and radical Islam are traditional issues, but here in the post-industrial north, where the issues are more economic: unemployment, factory closings, competition from inside the enlarged European Union, from Poland and Slovakia, and from outside, particularly China.”

 

NY Times

Inch’ Allah Dimanche: Algerian Immigrants to France

Immigration is big in the news these days – mostly the opposition to it–  around the world.  It is absolutely the case that most people welcome immigrants when they need them and curse them when they don’t.  What the natives really want is the fairy tale world of snapping fingers to make the genies of cheap labor appear and disappear as needed.  It was as true in France after WW II as it is now.

Inch’Allah Dimanche, a quite wonderful, if not quite complete, film from French Algerian director Yamina Benguigui, explores in microcosm what happens when, after ten years, women and children are allowed to join their worker-husbands in mainland France.  Zouina, as played by the wonderful Fejria Deliba,  also French Algerian, brings three children, and her ferocious mother-in-law [Rabia Mokeddem] to a small row-house in Saint Quentin, France.  After a too painful parting from her own mother at embarkation — with the mother-in-law cursing her, and the children frantic — she arrives to a husband, Ahmed,  [Zinedine Soualem] who is more engaged with his mother than with his wife.

Zouina, despite having to steal the key to get out of the house, begins to make her way around the neighborhood and into the prize flower bed of her next door neighbor after the hyper competitive horticulturist stabs the kids’ soccer ball for a transgression into her sweet babies – that would be flowers.  She learns the strange ways of shopping, that you can’t prepare your coffee in the back yard, and that some French women are demons and others are friends.  She knows when one brings a gift of lipstick and rouge it must be hidden, after a quick try and pleasure at seeing the results.

Deliba  is really wonderful as the determined, curious — and beautiful– mother.   Her  mother-in-law is a dragon of almost unbelievable portions, though she won’t be seen as a stranger to many cultures we are more familiar with.  The man of the house is alternately a beginning guitar player painfully picking out “Apache,”  a dutiful son and a rage-filled husband.

The weakness of the movie  is that Benguigui didn’t quite make up her mind as to whether she had a comedy going, or an angry tale about women in the Arab world.  The husband administers several savage and prolonged beatings.  A heart wrenching scene ends Zouina’s  first contact with another Algerian woman well into the film.  On the other hand, the music, the exaggerated sneaking and running, the flower-gardening neighbors,  sometimes cast it as a French comedy — promising to be all well that ends well.

And in fact it does end well as, after one more escapade, Zouina comes home with her kids alone on a bus whose driver she has caught the eye of.   Ahmed, standing outside waiting for her, suddenly orders his mother to shut-up and go back inside and seems to leap to a new regard of his wife — who announces proudly “From now on, I am walking my children to school.”

An evening of intelligent fun and social commentary, not nearly as disturbing as BiutifulAlejandro González Iñárritu‘s wrenching film, with Javier Bardem, about immigrant life in Barcelona.  Inch’Allah Dimanche won several awards in 2001 for best film, best actress and for  the director.  A very nice sound track complements much of it,  including several songs by Algeria’s well known Berber singer and song writer, Idir, [and here and here,] Alain Blesing’s “Lail” and “Djin,”  Hamou Cheheb’s sweet and scathing “Mon enfance,” [My Childhood.]  (English [google] translation below the fold.)

The title by the way, mixed Arabic and French, translates to “Sunday, God Willing.”

I’m going to watch it again, just to gaze, like the bus driver,  at Fejria Deliba‘s smile.

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