Even though it has always been known for its irreverent treatment of cultural taboos, the co-founder of the satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, which lost eight staff members in last week’s deadly terrorist attack in Paris, says the paper’s editor was “pig-headed” about satirizing Islam and blamed him for the deaths of his colleagues.
The Daily Mail is reporting on a controversial column appearing in Nouvel Obs magazine in which Charlie Hebdo co-founder, Henri Roussel, blames editor Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier for insisting that they malign the prophet the way they malign the leaders of all other major religions.
Calling Charb a “brilliant bloke”, Roussel says the editor is guilty of “dragging the team” to their deaths by overdoing their coverage of Mohammad, such as printing a picture of the prophet on the front page in 2011. The action sparked fury across the Muslim world and led to the firebombing of the magazine’s Paris offices.
“He shouldn’t have done it,” Roussel wrote, “but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.”
In fact, the paper decided to again run a caricature of Mohammad on the front cover in this weeks’ issue which has come to be known as the “survivor’s edition”.
Roussel goes on to admit that one of the staffers who was killed in the attack, cartoonist Georges Wolinski, had reservations about what they were doing and told him after the 2011 incident, “I think we are thoughtless imbeciles who have taken a useless risk.”
Staffers of the magazine weren’t the only ones with reservations. Charb’s live-in girlfriend, Jeanette Bougrab said he believed he would one day be assassinated.
“I begged him to leave France but he wouldn’t,” she said. “My companion is dead because he drew in a newspaper.”
Bougrab, who lived with Charb along with her adopted daughter for three years, added: “He never had children because he knew he was going to die. He lived without fear, but he knew he would die.”
Roussel obviously shares her regrets. “We think we’re invulnerable. For years, decades even, we stir things up and then one day all our stirring blows up in our face. We shouldn’t have done it,” he wrote.
The column is sparking controversy throughout France with the magazine’s lawyer, Richard Malka, reacting furiously to the comments.
“Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs . . . finds nothing better to do than to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him,” the lawyer said.
Meanwhile, Nouvel Obs editor Matthieu Croissandeau defended his decision to publish the piece, calling it freedom of expression: “We received this text and after a debate I decided to publish it in an edition on freedom of expression, it would have seemed to me worrisome to have censored his voice, even if it is discordant. Particularly as this is the voice of one of the pioneers of the gang.”
The survivor’s edition has already sold an unprecedented three million copies with another two million expected to be sold in the days to come.
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