{"id":13769,"date":"2015-03-27T04:47:04","date_gmt":"2015-03-27T04:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/bringing-charlie-home-11\/"},"modified":"2015-03-27T04:47:04","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T04:47:04","slug":"bringing-charlie-home-11","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/bringing-charlie-home-11\/","title":{"rendered":"Bringing Charlie home"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

By Caroline Pain<\/em><\/p>\n

Staff Writer<\/em><\/p>\n

theaspnews@gmail.com<\/em><\/p>\n

March 25, 2015<\/p>\n

Several hundred people had gathered in front of the City Hall of Rouen, in the north of France.\u00a0It was about 8 p.m. and the cold wind of January made the atmosphere even gloomier. There were\u00a0so many people, some were holding signs with Charlie Hebdo front-pages, others had bought the\u00a0actual newspaper and held it up high.\u00a0It was like being at a funeral. The sadness was tangible. There was nothing that could be\u00a0done, and yet everyone felt that getting together was the right thing to do. They tried to\u00a0destroy our freedom, to put us on our knees. We had to show them. We had to stand for\u00a0those who had fell that day. Fell for drawing, because their pencils did not stand a chance\u00a0facing the machine guns.<\/p>\n

Haven\u2019t you heard the news?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had heard the news while driving home. I got tired of the silence, turned the radio on.\u00a0Every station had interrupted its programs. At first, I did not understand what had\u00a0happened. And then, they kept repeating the news: 12 people had been shot dead at the\u00a0Charlie Hebdo offices in the center of Paris this morning. Suddenly, everything was quiet\u00a0again. The sound of the radio was distant now. I felt strange.\u00a0Then I had to tell my mother. She was surprised to see the unusual number of policemen\u00a0in the mall.<\/p>\n

\u201c Haven\u2019t you heard the news?\u201d I asked her. She hadn\u2019t. I could not find the\u00a0right words. I hurriedly explained what had happened. We were in a shop, and she sat\u00a0down in the fitting rooms. The expression on her face was really grave. Ever since I was\u00a0a child I had rarely seen her like that. She was disillusioned. We all were.<\/p>\n

That night, when I went to bed, I felt that something had changed. It could not be undone.<\/p>\n

It would never be the same.<\/p>\n

The next day, a Thursday, I woke up and immediately turned the TV on. After a couple\u00a0of minutes, I had to sit down. Another attack had happened that morning. A man had killed\u00a0a police officer and ran away. At that moment, no connection had been made between\u00a0the two attacks.<\/p>\n

On Friday, while the police were hunting the Charlie Hebdo attack suspects, another attack\u00a0happened in Porte de Vincennes, near the city center. A man had taken hostages in a Jewish\u00a0grocery store. He was the one who had killed the officer the previous day.\u00a0The tension was tangible in Paris. I arrived there on Wednesday night to meet my best\u00a0friends and my family. My mother did not want to me wait for my father at the train\u00a0station. She told me to avoid every tourist location and crowded places. We had no idea what\u00a0could happen next. Everything had been escalating so quickly in the last two days.<\/p>\n

I was with my best friends and my sister that day. The tension had reached a climax.\u00a0There were police officers everywhere. The subway kept being shut down because of\u00a0false alarms. At some point they even shut down the \u201cp\u00e9riph\u00e9rique \u201c, which is the belt\u00a0highway that circles Paris. When we heard that, we understood that it was really serious,\u00a0because they would never do that unless it was. My mother asked us to go into a caf\u00e9 and\u00a0wait until everything was settled. Later we heard that they caught all of them, the word\u00a0relief is probably an understatement.<\/p>\n

What is Charlie Hebdo?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Founded in 1969, Charlie Hebdo is a satirical weekly newspaper best known for its drawings and caricatures of political and religious figures. Its\u00a0tendency to depict and make fun of the untouchable made it quite notorious.\u00a0To understand what happened in January, we need to go back in time a little bit.<\/p>\n

In 2005, Charlie Hebdo published a Danish cartoon from the newspaper Jyllands-Posten,\u00a0depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a bomb-wielding terrorist. A couple of months\u00a0later, a Norwegian newspaper republished the cartoon as well. Anger quickly spread\u00a0throughout the Middle East. Even though the Danish newspaper apologized, its embassies and the Norwegian embassies were attacked throughout the Middle East. In the\u00a0months and years that followed, many European countries managed to thwart attempts to attack these newspapers.<\/p>\n

In February 2007, Charlie Hebdo was sued by Muslim groups for publicly \u201cinsulting\u201d Islam. A month later the newspaper was cleared of these accusations.<\/p>\n

In 2011, Charlie Hebdo offices had already been the target of an arson attack after they\u00a0published an issue depicting Muhammad as the \u201ceditor-in-chief \u201c saying \u201c100 lashes if\u00a0you don\u2019t die of laughter.\u201d A year later, they published an issue about the Prophet again.<\/p>\n

Finally, in 2013, they published a full edition of an illustrated biography of the Prophet.<\/p>\n

Why it matters?<\/strong><\/p>\n

To be clear, not everyone agreed with this. And Charlie Hebdo was never fully supported\u00a0by the population, especially after this controversy. And yet, when the terrorist attack\u00a0happened, everyone had the same feeling: being French.<\/p>\n

For the majority of the population it was an attack on our freedom. I personally thought\u00a0that Charlie Hebdo tended to go too far sometimes. But no one deserves to be killed for\u00a0that. Several of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists had been protected 24\/7 by police officers\u00a0since the first controversies. As Philippe Val, former Charlie Hebdo publication director,\u00a0said it in a interview with FranceInfo, no police protection should be necessary, they\u00a0should have been able to do their job without that.<\/p>\n

And throughout the world, many showed their compassion and support.<\/p>\n

It matters because I wish it would never happen again, and not only in France but\u00a0anywhere. It was like a war was going on. For some reason, we never expected that it\u00a0could happen to us. But now that it did, everything has changed.<\/p>\n

It is important to care because they targeted a value of our Republic that should not be threatened: our freedom of expression and\u00a0speech.<\/p>\n

*Caroline Pain is an exchange student from France studying at the University at Albany. The views expressed in this editorial\u00a0do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Albany Student Press Editorial Staff.<\/em><\/p>\n

.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


\nThe Albany Student Press<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Caroline Pain Staff Writer theaspnews@gmail.com March 25, 2015 Several hundred people had gathered in front of the City Hall of Rouen, in the north of France.\u00a0It was about 8 p.m. and the cold wind of January made the atmosphere even gloomier. There were\u00a0so many people, some were holding signs with Charlie Hebdo front-pages, others […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kadence_starter_templates_imported_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[983],"tags":[4087,4088,291],"class_list":["post-13769","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-albany-student-press","tag-bringing","tag-charlie","tag-home"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13769"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13769"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13769\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13769"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13769"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.techiteens.com\/review\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13769"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}