It is one year since the Charlie Hebdo killings in Paris, and one year since much of the free world proclaimed itself to “be Charlie.” It is also a year since it became obvious that almost no one really was Charlie and that, if people had been, then the people shot for being Charlie might still be alive to publish Charlie. As it was, after the 2005 Danish cartoons controversy the staff of one small-circulation secularist French magazine were just about the only people in the world willing to treat Islam in the same way satirists and cartoonists across the world treat every other religion. Left out so far in front of a culture which prides itself on fearlessness and bravery, while being rife with fear and self-censorship, it made what happened in Paris a year ago seem almost inevitable.
Perhaps it is for that reason that the first reaction to the killings seemed not only over-compensating but slightly guilt-tinged in its posthumous solidarity. In any case, it wasn’t long before a backlash to this occurred. At first it came only from Islamist pundits who insisted that although the cartoonists might not have deserved death, they did in some sense “have it coming to them.” Naturally the smarter Islamists sensed that excusing murder for the crime of “blasphemy” is still not presently the fastest way to the Western heart. So they lobbed an even more untrue and toxic claim into the mix: Charlie Hebdo, they said, was “racist.”