Charlie Hebdo's idea to fight back by publishing new issue is dumb

Cartoons — normally a diversion — have become serious news.

Not only have 12 innocent people been silenced by murder, but a consensus has been reached — mostly among European and North American white people — that a game is starting to silence us all. 

The battleground is the funny pages.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, cartoonist group the First Responders allowed us to laugh again.

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It was the first sign of a return to normalcy, the first hint we had been spiritually restored.

The first flood of 9/11 drawings were symbolic and sad, thoughtful and tasteful. And then, in those autumn days that followed, a new set of cartoons came along.

They were filled with a healthy dose of anger. We would not be bowed. NYC would build a new WTC.

Years before the Freedom Tower rose from the rubble, an online cartoonist offered a pen and ink sketch of a new World Trade Centre: A gargantuan tower twice the size of the old.

This new tower had an enormous hand on the roof, and it was giving those who hate our freedom the finger. 

Next week, despite the loss of its founder and core staff, Charlie Hebdo will publish a new issue.

Financed by Google, the magazine returns with a circulation 20 times the size of the usual estimated 50,000.

The aim of this environmentally-obscene stunt is to give a finger to the terrorists who planned the Jan. 7 attack.  

It`s a dumb idea.

There are many clever ways to respond to the enemy. Doing their bidding is not one of them. 

Twelve muckraking journalists were not murdered so Muslims in France and throughout the Muslim world never see these contemptuous anti-Islamic cartoons, but so they would. 

Many of the four million Muslims who make up the 66 million people who live in France spend very little part of their day thinking about Charlie Hebdo.

But now, many, mostly assimilated French Muslim youth, many born in France with few ties to their parents` homeland or religion, many whom might have never even heard of Charlie Hebdo, can see every one of its grubby cartoons for his or herself. 

Perhaps, a tiny trickle of these youth, a significant number of whom identify as French and secular, might then be ripe for radicalization.

This was likely the terrorists’ and their masters’ naive hope as they and similar jihadists lose ground daily throughout Europe.  

Still, those French Muslims who would only roll their eyes and shrug in disbelief at the sight of racist cartoons might still come over to the terrorist`s side if the dominant population reacted to the attacks with enough of an anti-Muslim backlash. 

This outcome was and is also unlikely if events in Australia are an omen. 

Following the horrific Sydney attack, in which gunmen held a number of hostages in a cafe, a quarter million non-Muslim Australians launched an online grassroots campaign volunteering to escort and protect Muslims from racists who might be out for blood.  

What would those who financed and ordered the attack in Paris have likely done next if no one had taken their bait? Other than move on to the next murder plot, that is.  

Well, if the Danish cartoon fiasco of 2005 is a bellwether, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons would have been circulated widely by jihadists or sympathizers (and also, by default, by those Western newspapers who felt freedom’s tug and ran the cartoons as an act of self-important courageousness).

The cartoons from this minor publication would make their way through the Middle East and Africa where even more racist and virulent cartoons might then be added to the mix in an attempt at old-school agitprop.

This is exactly what happened when riots flared in the Muslim world months after the Jyllands-Posten cartoons had first appeared in Holland. This was the unfortunate but direct result of a concerted effort by Danish imams to drum up outrage in the Middle East when local attempts at satisfaction failed.

It was an effort that was at least naive, definitely stupid, and for which the organizers later expressed regret.  

Similar stage managed riots occurred in 2012 when an offensive and laughably bad movie about the Prophet Mohammad popped up on YouTube.

Demonstrating to an elusive "them" that we will not be intimidated through the act of turning the lights back on at the Charlie Hebdo office and felling a forest, is a theatrical gesture that borders on narcissism.  

Our ability to say what we think is eroded daily by our own government and multinational corporations in a million more subtle and sinister ways.  

To think this empty gesture will do anything but amuse those who orchestrated this attack is to see them as villainous cartoon characters.  What a bitter irony that the victims died at the hands of men whose behaviour confirmed their every prejudice but whose outrage was likely a performance. 

It seems unlikely the gunmens’ well-planned operation was confounded by their rage at the countless infidel blasphemies they encountered in the office.

If what they saw offended them so much, they would have burned the place down and slashed the work the cartoonists were doing to bits.  But if that was the aim of international jihadists they would be the boy with his finger in the dike. 

When you do a Google image search of the Prophet Mohammad your computer will not explode, but provide you with hundreds of images, most benign, some obscene and most in art from the Muslim world. 

No matter how many bombs explode, those pictures of Mohammed keep popping up, as do the hundreds of copies of The Satanic Verses on sale right now on amazon.com. They’re not selling that briskly, so there’s no need at this point to print a million more.

This terrible attack in Paris may have been planned for Wednesday to coincide with the publication of Soumission, the new novel by French novelist Michel Houellebecq, whose picture graced the cover of this week`s Charlie Hebdo.

The novel, set in the near future, imagines a France under the yoke of Sharia law and is already a runaway bestseller.

Houellebecq is criticized as being virulently hostile to Islam. But getting people riled up over a novel requires much more effort. Cartoons are also worth a thousand words. And now a million times more. 

These murders were sterile and cold blooded.

Nobody picked up a magazine and started foaming at the mouth while loading a gun. But our response is hot-blooded and hysterical, the very way we often view the other side.   

This million magazine march will be looked back on with embarrassment. I’m already blushing. Copies of the next issue of Charlie Hebdo are already being bid on for thousands of dollars on eBay.

Charlie may have been murdered, but Capitalism at least, has not been brought to its knees.

Al Rae is an award-winning comedian, comedy writer and producer. He is the co-founder and artistic director of the Winnipeg Comedy Festival.