What, Me Charlie?
Charlie Hebdo would be better off taking a cue from the American MAD magazine.
Yussof Condred
All the world’s sane people have condemned the murders at Charlie Hebdo. And rightly so.
But Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons have shown a lack of simple decency and good manners which the world have come to expect of a very cultured and civilized people. Why make a living out of poking fun at other people’s religions? Or are the murdered merely pawns of an unseen hand that is funding the operation to play a broader board game?
Charlie Hebdo would be better off taking a cue from the American MAD magazine.
Mad is an American humour magazine founded in 1952 by editor Harvey Kurtzman, a cartoonist, offering satire on all aspects of life and popular culture, politics, entertainment, and public figures. As far as I can remember they don’t touch religion. The image most closely associated with the magazine is that of `the boy with misaligned eyes, a gap-toothed smile and the perennial motto “What, me worry?“. The mascot of MAD magazine is called Alfred E. Neuman.
So in the aftermath of the Paris rally Alfred E. Neuman would have said, “What, Me Charlie?“. Is he Charlie or not?
He is Charlie if the rally was meant solely to condemn the killings. He is not if it was meant as a vow to continue the insults to Muslims.
