“Je suis Charlie”: the freedom of the press

by Dishana Tevanantham

On the morning of 7 January 2015, at about 11:30 , two Islamist terrorists armed with assault rifles and other weapons forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper “Charlie Hebdo” in Paris. They killed 11 people and injured 11 others, and shouted "Allahu Akbar”" (Arabic for "God is [the] greatest") during their attack. 

A French National Security officer  was the last to die as he encountered the gunman shortly after they had left the building. The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to “Al Quaeda” the terrorist organization, responsible of several massacres in the world. Several more attacks took place in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo shooting, where five others had been killed and another eleven wounded, also by terrorists.

 Immediately after this terrible massacre, the phrase “Je suis Charlie”  has become  a common slogan of support in social media. The slogan was first used on Twitter and spread to the Internet at large. The remaining staff of Charlie Hebdo continued publication, and the following issue sold out seven million copies in six languages, in contrast to its typical French-only print run of 60,000.

Charlie Hebdo is a controversial satirical newspaper in France that features cartoons, reports and jokes. The publication is irreverent and stridently non-conformist in tone, is strongly secularist, antireligious and left-wing, and publishes articles that mock  the far right, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Israel, politics, culture, and various other groups.

    Do you think that journalists are free to write what they want?
  Some  people say that journalists have all the right to write what they want, in the name of the indisputable right of the  freedom of  speech.
Some others think   that the French journalists are wrong because they published their cartoons against Islam, without thinking about the effect they could have had  on the Islamic  world, because there must be a limit to the freedom of the press and this limit is other people’s dignity.
If you ask me this question, I would say that journalists have all the rights, but they should not be offensive towards others.
    From my point of view, those journalists should not have published the vulgar cartoons  against Islam, however, I am not saying that terrorists are right because religions should be a way to bring peace in the world not an excuse to fight.