Director of Charlie Hebdo: "We had the feeling that the left betrayed us"

It is eight years since the Islamist attack on the French satirical magazine. Laurent 'Riss', a survivor of the attack, points out that 'wokism' embraces censorship.

Published by

Alejandro Baños

7 de enero, 2023

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On January 7, 2015, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, two Islamist terrorists stormed the editorial office of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and began shooting indiscriminately at the professionals who were on site at the time. The attack, which the Al Qaeda terrorist organization took credit for several days later, left 12 people dead and 11 wounded. Both terrorists managed to flee and the French government decreed the highest level of terrorist alert in the country.

Within two days, French security forces tracked down the terrorists and, after an intense firefight, they were killed. Eight years later, Charlie Hebdo’s director, who had been in charge since 2009, and survivor of the attack, Laurent Riss Sourisseau, explained how the attack happened in his book One minute forty-nine seconds. They criticized the reaction of the left and, at the time, socialist president François Hollande in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

"We felt a sense of betrayal"

Charlie Hebdo has never denied that they defend a progressive, left-wing tendency. But, after the attack, Riss said they felt a "betrayal" by those who, politically, were closest to the magazine's editorial line:

It's a bit of a strong concept, but the truth is that we felt a sense of betrayal. We were betrayed by people who in theory were politically and historically close to us: in difficult circumstances they let us go, let us fall and plunged our heads under water. It was a paradox, practically more people who belonged to the right supported us. It turned out that the republican right, linked to the liberal values of the 19th century, those of freedom, which are the values of all democracy, was the one that best defended us.

In addition, he stated that the left stopped defending freedom of expression:

Historically, the left was the great guarantor of secularism and freedom of expression but now it does not defend them, it has distanced itself from values for which it had fought. This feeling of betrayal is unbelievable.

"Wokism is a restrictive movement"

Riss pointed out that Wokism embraces censorship out of its own complex:

People who indulge in this type of discourse devote their political imagination to prohibiting rather than opening new horizons. Wokism is a restrictive movement, as if they themselves are afraid of their own freedom. It works a bit like a religion. Religious people fabricate dogmas in the domains they do not control: desires, intimacy.... Today these are young people in their 20s who think like the far-right people of three decades ago: their discourse is exactly the same as that of ultra-conservative, Catholic or right-wing extremist family associations.

The director of Charlie Hebdo stated that those who follow the dogmas of the Woke dictatorship are supporters of retrograde ideas:

They think they are leftists but they are ultra-reactionary moralists. Wokism is really a reaction against something acquired, that's what reactionary means: to go back, to go backwards.

Islamist terrorism will never be fully controlled

In the last decade, Islamist terrorism perpetrated several attacks, such as the one in Paris in November 2015 or the one in Nice in 2016. These attacks left more than 230 people dead. Riss believes that surveillance of terrorist cells has increased, but "unpredictable" attacks such as the attack on Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022 will never be prevented:

Nothing has changed. I would say that police vigilance has been intensified and there are fewer terrorist cells willing to commit violent acts or plant bombs. The police have realized that they were not effective enough in their surveillance of the radicals. But then there are the unpredictable attacks of guys with a knife or machete in the middle of the street... You can never be completely safe. It only confirms the caution we must always exercise. I consider that it is not over... It takes new forms, but it is not over. Islamists are fighting less and less with weapons, but more and more with debates of ideas, by demanding that religious symbols be displayed in schools, for example.