Charlie Hebdo - The Hidden Agenda Exposed

‘Love to Prophet Mohammed’: Crowds protest Charlie Hebdo cartoons in Chechnya — RT News

Hundreds of thousands have flooded the streets of Chechen capital of Grozny in a rally against the publication of the Prophet Muhammad by Charlie Hebdo magazine. The demo, dubbed “Love to Prophet Mohammed,” was organized by region’s clerics.

About 1 million people, residents of Chechnya and other Russian Caucasus republics, gathered for the rally, the Interior Ministry press service said. Orthodox priests, mostly from the neighboring republics, have also arrived for the demonstration.

Thousands of balloons were sent into the air at the beginning of the rally.

The protesters were carrying banners, saying “We love Prophet Mohammed,” “No to Mohammed cartoons,” “Islam is a religion of peace and creation.”

Participants at the rally said Muslims should not respond to provocations. “Violence is not the method,” one of their slogans said.

The crowd gathered near the "The Heart of Chechnya," one of the biggest mosques in Russia.

Complete story at - ‘Love to Prophet Mohammed’: Crowds protest Charlie Hebdo cartoons in Chechnya — RT News

#IlSontHypocrites: Why should Charlie Hebdo deaths mean more than those in E.Ukraine? — RT Op-Edge

The Western public justly condemns the murders at Charlie Hebdo, but continues to behave as if Kiev's terror victims in Donetsk are “subhuman.”

On January 7, masked terrorists massacred the staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in downtown Paris, killing ten. Two police officers (one of them a French Muslim, Ahmed Merabet) were also gunned down in the attack, while five more innocents lost their lives during a subsequent hostage standoff at a Parisian kosher store. Three male suspects were killed by the police, while their female accomplice is reported to have fled to ISIS-held parts of Syria. The attack was allegedly a reprisal for the magazine's cartoon covers, condemned as “blasphemous” for mocking Islam and its prophet, Mohammed.

Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine, forces loyal to the NATO-backed government in Kiev renewed the terror-bombing of civilians in Donetsk, killing and maiming indiscriminately. While the slain French cartoonists were declared martyrs on the altar of free speech in a social media campaign under the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie), a similar Twitter campaign to raise awareness of civilian deaths in Donbass (#IamVanya) was soon hijacked by Russophobic propaganda.



Part of the problem is that free speech is demonstratively not a sacred value in the West. The same general public in Europe or the United States that is proclaiming #JeSuisCharlie today, has in recent years organized increasingly frequent public witch hunts in the name of political correctness, targeting individuals whose words or deeds had somehow “offended”, from scientists who dared mention IQ (or wear “sexist” shirts) to celebrities and video game producers. In 2009, Charlie Hebdo sacked its cartoonist Maurice Sinet (now 80); over one allegedly “anti-Semitic” cartoon. And France has arrested dozens of people, including the comedian Dieudonné, on charges of “hate speech” in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Meanwhile, using the pretext of the attacks in Paris, the U.S. and British governments pushed for expanding their already extensive surveillance of the general public. This despite the fact that the alleged attackers on Charlie Hebdo were known terrorists and under constant surveillance, but were able to carry out the massacre unhindered.

Complete story at - #IlSontHypocrites: Why should Charlie Hebdo deaths mean more than those in E.Ukraine? — RT Op-Edge

The Vineyard of the Saker: Je Suis Donbass

by Tura Kurkinen.

Propaganda, or more precisely, manipulation of minds is one of the most important elements in modern warfare. One aspect of it is creating enemies, where there are no real enemies. Good example of it was 9/11, a moment that changed our world permanently. After what happened in New York, we saw how new kind of a warfare rapidly took place, the war against terrorism. Very flexible, even though a bit vague, military concept. That concept justifies casualties, slaughtering of innocent civilians, and enormous military budgets. And so, Pandora's box was opened, and this endless war against terrorism continues and escalates all the time, covering true purposes and targets.

In todays world, sometimes it looks like nearly anything can be branded as a terrorism. I wouldn´t be surprised if US, in Washington's endless desire to destroy Russia as a sovereign state, finally brands Russia as a terrorist state, or at least a state that supports terrorism, when supporting Donbass. With the aim to justify possible future war against Russia, and to legitimize Kiev's war crimes and human rights violations, and finally to gain broad international support for everything that took place in the Ukraine, in last year. Unfortunately, that might be happening right now, indirectly. Attempts to declare DPR and LPR as a terrorist organizations have been going on, under the surface of the public, during the last year. If those attempts will be successful, it could mean serious trouble for Donbass and a growing threat to Russia. Declaring DPR and LPR terrorist organizations gives a powerful weapon to the Washington: justification. To be strong, power must find it´s moral ground. But will US find any moral ground for everything what Kiev has done to Donbass? I doubt that. Things are getting gradually out of control, and maybe too many red lines are crossed. In the last year Obama was forced to retreat a bit, from his support to Israel, when public opinion turned against Israel, because of the hundreds of slaughtered children in Gaza missile strikes. It´s impossible to find any justification for slaughtering school-children. And that´s what has also happened in Donbass. In fact, there are also some other similarities between the situation in Ukraine and in Israel. As Israel serves as a foothold for US in the middle-east, Ukraine serves now as a foothold for US in the Eurasia, fully in line with Brzezinski's vision in the Grand Chessboard. And the next victorious move in that chessboard requires legitimacy. Battle for the moral ground is extremely important, if you want to win. But lets abandon the chessboard and change the game to poker. And for now it seems to me, that the best cards are in the hand of Putin, so maybe the end result depends on how those cards are played? In this world of propaganda and counter-propaganda, and half-truths and pure lies, it´s easy to forget that there´s always the truth somewhere there. Thus, there always will be an element, that goes beyond the propaganda. And the moral ground should be based on that.

I believe that the moral ground for Donbass is much more stronger than Kiev's (in fact, it´s very difficult to see any moral ground for Kiev at all), so, it´s important that there will be no factor that can weaken that ground, I mean factor not based on facts and reality. And branding fighters of Donbass as terrorists is exactly that kind of a factor, because mostly they are common men and women, fighting for their land, values and sovereignty. Had America been faithful to her own original values, Americans should and would give their support to Donbass. If there´s no support, no compassion, no concrete help, the world will not turn it´s attention to Donbass. With all due respect, I say that what happened in Paris was wrong and tragic. But what has happened in Donbass, is many times more tragic. And as there´s no justifying to what happened in Paris, there´s absolutely no justifying to what´s happening in Donbass, right now. And there will never be justifying for it. How on earth anyone can justify heavy artillery and ballistic missiles against civilians, against women and children? Even though Washington would manage somehow to brand them as a terrorists, or supporters of terrorism, will that change anything? Of course not, because those people has nothing to do with the terrorism. How can a small child support terrorism? Possibly the logic behind it is exactly same than in Nazi-Germany, during the WWII: because Jewish children will be grown-up Jews someday, they must be eliminated. And Kiev seems to think that if they let the children of Donbass alive, someday they will be terrorists? If this sounds exaggerating, I would like to remind some of the Poroshenkos own words, "when our children go safely to the kindergartens, children of Donbass go to the basements", and when speaking in the US congress about the war in East Ukraine, "it´s a war of civilization against barbarity". Maybe a word "terrorist" is nothing else than the euphemism for a barbarian? But if the bombings of civilians in Donbass are not barbarian, then, what is?

History always repeats itself. That´s why the world should turn its eyes to Donbass. What Donbass needs now, is a public campaign for it. Campaign that has a very clear message to the people of Donbass: you are not alone. A lot of people in Europe were eager to go to the streets after Charlie Hebdo. I want to ask to you: are you eager to go to the streets also for the children of Donbass? And I want to ask to you, you free and accurate and objective western media: are you willing to go to Donbass, and write stories about it´s people, about it´s heroes, about it´s suffering? Are you willing to give a real face to Donbass? And I want to ask to you, all of you famous rock-stars, and actors, and celebrities, who so willingly protest against climate change and support gay-rights, are you eager to support also the children of Donbass? Je Suis Donbass.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: Je Suis Donbass

The Vineyard of the Saker: In the Charlie Hebdo psyop double standards, logical fallacies and crass ignorance are everywhere

Many of pointed out that apparently the French and most westerners seem to be much more upset when 12 people die in Paris then when hundreds, thousand and tens of thousands die elsewhere. It appears that the 1980s slogan "don't touch my pal" which was originally supposed to denounce racism now has been "re-worked" into a, if not racist, then at least a chauvinistic mode: don't kill French leftists no matter how offensive their discourse is. I won't make that case again here, but because by now anybody still capable of critical thought "got it", but I will look at another, much less noticed case of double standards: the one about the issue of moral pain.

Here is what the official doxa tells us: Muslims have no right to whine about their Prophet being insulted, this is part of free speech. It is disingenuous for them to claim that they have been hurt by these caricatures, in reality they have not been hurt, they just had their feathers ruffled by a bit of disrespectful speech. How can you possibly compared such ruffled feathers with issues of life and death?

So is there such thing as moral pain and can it be compared to physical pain?

Let's look at the record as it stands in the West:

Any psychologist will explain to you that not only does moral pain exist, but it can be worse then physical pain. This is why some people confess to crimes (whether real or not) when they are told that their family members will be tortured next even though they themselves had found the internal courage not to yield to torture inflicted upon them. An idea can hurt more then physical pain.

The Geneva conventions specifically forbid mock executions even though all they inflict is fear (a form of moral pain).

In France, it is currently illegal to even question the official version of the so-called "Holocaust" precisely because doing so would cause moral pain to the very few actual "Holocaust survivors" still alive. This protection from moral pain even extends to the relatives and descendants of "Holocaust survivors" who were born already after the war and how never suffered from any ill-treatment themselves.

At the famous Nurenberg trial Julius Streicher was sentenced to death even though he never committed any other crime then "infecting the German mind with the virus of anti-Semitism". He was, by the way, also viciously tortured before his execution. His crime? He was the founder and editor of a newspaper, Der Stürmer, a nasty racist propaganda paper whose name can be roughly translated as "The attacked" or "The stormer". Apparently, hate speech can even get you the death penalty in the West.

The 8th Amendment of the US Constitution prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" especially if it "degrading to human dignity". Apparently, for the Founding Fathers human dignity was an extremely valuable and real thing which deserved to be protected.

Even in GITMO (hardly a bastion of civilization and human rights!) following the 2005 scandals about the desacration of the Quran, it was decided that the rules about the manipulation of the Quran (which had already existed in the past) would be strictly implemented. So even in waterboarding GITMO insulting the Prophet is considered beyond the norms of civilized behavior. Apparently not in Paris.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: In the Charlie Hebdo psyop double standards, logical fallacies and crass ignorance are everywhere

Paris Charlie: The “Shock Doctrine” par Excellence

by Peter Koenig

On 12 January the French Parliament approved with almost unanimity – with one abstention only – the budget for France’s continuous and enlarged involvement in the new war on Iraq, a new war engagement led by Washington and supported by its vassals, UK, Canada, Australia and France. Aircraft carriers and troops were immediately mobilized, not even losing a day. Doesn’t that conspicuously smell of an earlier preparation, just waiting for that crucial and appropriate event, prompting parliamentary approval?

At the same time France lawmakers agreed to display 10,000 troops throughout the country to protect ‘vulnerable places’; spying on citizens, for their protection takes on new forms and formats. A direct reaction to the attack on Charlie Hebdo on January 7 and the assault on a kosher supermarket on January 9? – Killing 17 people in all? Is that it?

French Ministers of the Interior and of Defense have advanced their wish of substantially increased respective police and defense budgets, when the 2016-2017 allocations are being discussed later this year. No doubt they will get their way.

And – no doubt, this is the shock doctrine at its best. People are in awe and shock after the assault on the satirical and Moslem insulting Charlie Hebdo. A million and a half took to the streets in Paris this past weekend, the largest manifestation since the liberation of Paris after WWII in 1945. Some media report more than 6 million people marching throughout Europe. Almost all waving signs “I am Charlie” – Solidarity or stupidity? Hard to say. Most likely just sheer ignorance.

It’s ignorance that kills our democracies, our human values; public ignorance allows leaders (sic) to wage wars, to aggress nations that refuse to submit, to fall to their knees. It’s ignorance perpetuated daily by our mainstream media and swallowed without question, day-in-day-out like breakfast coffee.

Neocon leaders, all over Europe, the new patsies of Washington that we, the people, have voted into office, under shrewd but hardly perceptible Washington-funded propaganda, through NED (National Endowment for Democracy) and other well-endowed CIA sponsored so-called think-tanks, meddling in local politics, sowing subtle threats or acts of destabilization. Europe’s new masters that a majority of the people doesn’t really like, but who are in office anyway – these spineless stooges constitute Europe in Brussels, the EU itself having become a miserable colony of Washington.

Complete story at - Paris Charlie: The “Shock Doctrine” par Excellence

Former Charlie Hebdo employee lambasts its racist trajectory - Counterfire

'Charlie Hebdo', not racist? If you say so…

Dear Charb and Fabrice Nicolino,

“We hope that those who claim, and will claim tomorrow, that Charlie is racist, will at least have the courage to say it out loud and under their real name. We’ll know how to respond.” Reading this rant at the end of your opinion piece in Le Monde[1], as if to say “come say it to our face if you’re a real man”, I felt something rising within me, like a craving to go back to fighting in the school playground. Yet it wasn’t me being called out. Which upright citizens you hope to convince, moreover, is a mystery. For a good long while, many people have been saying “out loud” and “under their real name” what they think about your magazine and the effluent flowing out of it, without any one of you being bothered to answer them or to shake their little fists.

And so Le Monde has charitably opened their laundry service to you, for an express steam-cleaning of your rumpled honour. To hear you talk, it was urgent: you couldn’t even go out in Paris without a taxi driver treating you like racists and leaving you helpless on the footpath. I understand your annoyance, but why did you have to go give yourself another black eye in a different publication than your own? Doesn’t Charlie Hebdo, its website and its publishing house give you space to express yourself to your heart’s content? You invoke “Charlie’s” glorious heritage of the 60s and 70s, when it was political censorship and not haunting disrepute that gave your magazine something to worry about. But I doubt that, at the time, writers like Cavanna or Choron would have asked for help from the posh press to make themselves respectable.

If it also occurred to me, in the past, to scribble out some furious lines in reaction to some of your exploits, I never dwelled on the subject. Doubtless I would not have had the patience or the stoutness of heart to follow, week after week, the distressing transformation which took over your team after the events of September 11, 2001. I was no longer part of Charlie Hebdo when the suicide planes made their impact on your editorial line, but the Islamophobic neurosis which bit by bit took over your pages from that day on affected me personally, as it ruined the memory of the good moments I spent on the magazine during the 1990s. The devastating laughter of “Charlie” which I had loved to hear now sounded in my ears like the laugh of a happy idiot getting his cock out at the checkout counter, or of a pig rolling in its own shit. And yet, I never called your magazine racist. But since today you are proclaiming, high and loud, your stainless and irreproachable anti-racism, maybe it’s now the right moment to seriously consider the question.

Racist? Charlie Hebdo was certainly no such thing at the time when I worked there. In any case, the idea that the mag would expose itself to such an accusation would have never occurred to me. There had, of course been some Francocentrism, as well as the editorials of Philippe Val. These latter were subject to a disturbing fixation, which worsened over the years, on the “Arabic-Muslim world”. This was depicted as an ocean of barbarism threatening, at any moment, to submerge the little island of high culture and democratic refinement that was, for him, Israel. But the boss’s obsessions remained confined to his column on page 3, and overflowed only rarely into the heart of the journal which, in those years, it seemed me, throbbed with reasonably well-oxygenated blood.

Scarcely had I walked out, wearied by the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion practices of the employer, than the Twin Towers fell and Caroline Fourest arrived in your editorial team. This double catastrophe set off a process of ideological reformatting which would drive off your former readers and attract new ones - a cleaner readership, more interested in a light-hearted version of the “war on terror” than the soft anarchy of [cartoonist] Gébé. Little by little, the wholesale denunciation of “beards”, veiled women and their imaginary accomplices became a central axis of your journalistic and satirical production. “Investigations” began to appear which accepted the wildest rumours as fact, like the so-called infiltration of the League of Human Rights (LDH) or European Social Forum (FSE) by a horde of bloodthirsty Salafists[2]. The new impulse underway required the magazine to renounce the unruly attitude which had been its backbone up to then, and to form alliances with the most corrupt figures of the intellectual jet-set, such as Bernard-Henri Lévy or Antoine Sfeir, cosignatories in Charlie Hebdo of a grotesque “Manifesto of the Twelve against the New Islamic Totalitarianism”[3]. Whoever could not see themselves in a worldview which opposed the civilized (Europeans) to obscurantists (Muslims) saw themselves quickly slapped with the label of “useful idiots” or “Islamo-leftists”.

Complete story at - Former Charlie Hebdo employee lambasts its racist trajectory - Counterfire

The Vineyard of the Saker: Why Charlie Hebdo offends me as much as the terrorists

by Jiwan Kshetry

It goes without saying that the new set of iconoclasts condemning the unjustified bravado of Charlie Hebdo, including this author, loathe the terrorists as much as anyone else and there is no question of justifying their grisly deeds. It is merely to remind the triumphant supporters of absolute 'freedom of expression' that if you sow poison, you cannot expect to harvest otherwise.
..........................

Journalists using their pencils and pens being brutally murdered with Kalashnikovs, can there be anything more despicable than that? To borrow the words of a 'common man', a bunch of terrorists trying to apply blasphemy law with AK-47 on non-believers, can there be anything more outrageous than that? Should we let some psycopaths decide what limits we should impose on our 'freedom of expression'?

All of a sudden a large number of human beings worldwide are asking these questions to themselves. Mainstream media (MSM) all over the world have multiplied and amplified these questions to such an extent that another cohort of people with ambivalent feelings towards the issue are increasingly feeling guilty for not being as outraged by the French killings as the former cohort and thus not contributing enough to preserve the sanctity of freedom of expression in the world.

So, are the Charlie Hebdo killings all about terrorists trying to apply blasphemy laws in Europe to muzzle freedom of expression worldwide? It seems so if the whole saga is taken out of context and understood within the compromised limits of 'conventional thinking' as decided by the MSM. The reality is, however, far more complex with no easy answers to the questions.

Before entering the prickly issue of freedom of expression vs sacredness of religious faiths, let me clarify this: I am a non-Muslim. A bit of quasi-journalism has made my skin thick, so I am not easily offended; even when I am, I mostly keep it to myself and it is beyond me to decipher the psyche of people who are eager to do as extreme things as blowing themselves up when offended by others. You can call me the prototype of tolerant citizen in this increasingly intolerant world.

Minding your own business and leaving others to mind their own, that is my way of showing to the world that I am a tolerant and peaceful citizen here. If I start dictating others how they should run their business, I am no longer tolerant and peaceful. If I still say I am tolerant, that is sheer hypocrisy and mockery of true values of tolerance. My attachment to my faith does not at all resemble with that of the Muslims anywhere in the world, nor does it with that of the Jews, the Christians, the Hindus, the Jains, the Buddhists and so on. Still I am perfectly alright with their way of carrying on with their faiths: some indulging in idolatry, others condemning it, some claiming a single god, others proclaiming many, and so on.

Yet, I am now badly offended by what Charlie Hebdo was and is up to, to be honest, even more than that by the terrorists who rampaged the magazine office. The MSM- propagated arbitrary dichotomy--between people advocating freedom of expression by showing solidarity to Charlie Hebdo and those ready to sacrifice that freedom either out of indifference or out of passive complicity with the deadly terrorists--is a hoax to me. Increasingly, they appear as the two extremes of the same spectrum of intolerance and insensitivity to the belief and faith of the others.

Complete story at - The Vineyard of the Saker: Why Charlie Hebdo offends me as much as the terrorists