#jesuischarlie says if you are not Charlie, you are not ours, you are alien. It's us against them (and you know who they are). There is a close kinship between the seemingly liberal #jesuischarlie and the French right of the le Pens, père et fille. Both know who doesn't belong. Both seek a single France, unified in culture and practice. Both call for placing religious Muslims, perhaps Muslims altogether, perhaps even those of Arab descent, outside the boundaries of France, of the West.
We can see this in the photographs of the victims, photos that rarely include the two victims with Arab names; two working people: the copywriter and the policeman.
Though they disagree on the France they want, much of the French right and left concur in the demand that France be a single people, alike in their public practices, marked by no sign of religious difference. Right and Left reject the "unassimilable" and regret "the failure of integration." They seize on the ritual humiliation of those who are not like them as an occasion for solidarity. The "je suis charlie" hashtag makes unanimity compulsory: we must all be Charlie, we must all agree, we must all be one.
No. We should be able to value, and to mourn, the lives of those we disagree with.
I mourn. I am angry at an unjust and shameful attack. I grieve the lives lost -- all the lives, not least Ahmed Merabet, the policeman who was one of the first victims of the murderers. His murder is the only one seen, yet it has been rendered almost invisible. Officer Merabet was there to guard Charlie Hebdo. That is duty. That is bravery. That is the defense of free speech. He belongs to a larger France, and a better Europe.
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