Je suis Charlie ou Je suis Ahmed ou Je ne suis Charlie! Qui suis-je?

The shooting in Paris last week that shook the world, resurfaced the modern day debate on Islam and its follower. The twitter world was flooded with the hash tag #JeSuisCharlie subsequently followed by #JeNeSuisCharlie and then finally yielding to #JeSuisAhmed.

It is one of those incidents that shake you up completely. In a world probably immune to the atrocities carried out by the likes of ISIS & BOKO HARAM in bulk, shooting a few cartoonists by some loony extremists shouldn't surprise us. Even if it doesn't surprise us, it should shock us. This didn't happen in a conflict zone or in a politically unstable region. The attack wasn't carried out by an organized militant/terrorist foreign group. It is scary that in a crowded, lively city of a stable country with a decent judicial system, 3 of its citizens just decided that a certain group of people doesn’t deserve to live. What is even more worrisome is that these 3 are like the Hydra of Lerna; they are no more that fringe group fighting from the caves. They are in our cities poisoning the minds of our young. They are in our lives. They are in our backyards. This is not Islamophobia talking; I live in an Islamic country and to be honest feel the safest here in terms of life security. This is the right in your face fact; that is unless you want to bury your face in the ground.

#NotInMyName is the stand taken by most of the Muslim population, but these terrorist aren’t carrying out these killings in your name, they are doing it in the name of your Lord. They don’t claim to do anything for the Muslim world. So unfortunately how much ever you denounce these killings they are not for you or your kids. There is a unanimous voice from within the Muslim population, that they don’t need to apologize for every terror attack carried out by some extremist, and rightly so. Since it is #NotInYourName. But these guys aren’t just terrorists who happen to be Muslims. One might argue this is not true Islam, but dear you are truly trying to convince the wrong audience here. You don’t have to convince me of the peaceful teachings of Islam; I am an easy sell. The onus is on you to push the hateful preaching back to oblivion. Till then please don’t accuse the rest of us for Islamophobia. 

Edit 01/16/2015
After reading this article by Mehdi Hasan,
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/charlie-hebdo-free-speech_b_6462584.html,
I was compelled to add my comments in BLUE and append it to this post.

Dear liberal pundit,

You and I didn't like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubya's slogan: either you are with free speech... or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo... or you're a freedom-hating fanatic.

It is pretty much that, either you are for free speech or you aren’t. No Ifs and Buts. Je suis Charlie didn’t really mean I endorse or approve of their cartoons. But it meant I stand with them for their right to question and express it. Actually it is either you are pro life or not.

I'm writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you're defying the terrorists when, in reality, you're playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it "a war declared on civilisation". So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a "clash of civilisations" and referred to "Europe's belief in freedom of expression".

In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a "bid to assassinate" free speech (ITV's Mark Austin), to "desecrate" our ideas of "free thought" (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime - not an act of war - perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.

Hmm, so if I understand this correctly:

• Young men can be radicalized by US torture in Iraq a decade back.
• It is a legitimate reason for their extremism. 
• But when you see men blowing themselves and others up in the name of the God,don't react to it, because that's Islamophobia. That will legitimise the terrorists?

Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.

This is probably one of the hardest concepts to grasp. Let me break it down for you. You have the freedom to express your thoughts. I have the right to question your view(s) and method(s) of expression legally. And If I happen to win the legal battle, that’s where the line is drawn. That is where the State comes in. The rest of the imaginary lines of decency and taste are well about your own tastes.

Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn't think so (and I am glad it hasn't). Consider also the "thought experiment" offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the "unity rally" in Paris on 11 January "wearing a badge that said 'Je suis Chérif'" - the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. "How would the crowd have reacted?... Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?" Do you disagree with Klug's conclusion that the man "would have been lucky to get away with his life"?

Why does everyone love to draw false parallels? So if you mock Holocaust you are literally mocking all those innocent lives lost. So if a person happens to wear a I love Hitler T-Shirt and roam around, people will take offence, but I am most certain they will not kill him. In some countries as you point out later it might just be illegal. That’s where the state draws the line. Similarly, if someone comes out with an I am Chérif badge, (s)he is openly supporting the killers of these cartoonists. I still believe he will come out of it alive. The right parallel would be; are there cartoons running on other religions? Yes there are! Do people take offence; sure hell some do! Should we sanitize our world so as not to offend anyone or just not to offend misguided non-war trodden youth born and brought up in civilized societies?

Let's be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.

When you say "Je suis Charlie", is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo's depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?

Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an "Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over" the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on "members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power".

It's for these reasons that I can't "be", don't want to "be", Charlie - if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine's right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, "It is possible to defend the right to obscene... speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech."

Because you are trying to make the people at Charlie Hebdo look like dicks here are some of their works. 
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/11/1357057/-The-Charlie-Hebdo-cartoons-no-one-is-showing-you#

This is on the controversial Christiane Taubira.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/11/1356945/-On-not-understanding-Charlie-Why-many-smart-people-are-getting-it-wrong

I feel safer to know you want to be Ahmed that officer who happened to be Muslim while you rant away in your cubicle, using your freedom of speech without carrying out sufficient research to defame the late cartoonist who cannot rise from his grave to defend himself and his work.

Oh, and also, if you want to be someone brave, be Raif Badawi.

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark?

This says a lot more about the man and also unfortunately you. Nowhere in this article do you exactly point out if you were offended by the caricatures of the Prophet. And if you were can u exactly point out why. You keep calling them racist based on a few cartoons, which as it turns out they weren’t. So if you can come out in the open and spell it out exactly what was the problem with their cartoons in context of the Muslim world? Ignoring the fact that you want to label all the Muslims as one race, racist much? If you can point out one that paints Muslims in the wrong light. That is unless you consider extremist also beyond critique. And if your only problem is with the depiction of Prophet, then I don’t have anything to say to you.

Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would "provoke an outcry" and proudly declared it would "in no circumstances... publish Holocaust cartoons"?

Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life - especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.

I guess the rest of us infidels are expected to have titanium bodies that can protect us from these attacks. Our fears of the extremism in Islam are unfound but your fears of vilification of Islam are real? Handful of extremists you say, I say look towards the Middle East. Look at the number of youth joining ISIS from Europe. They are most certainly not a handful.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/foreign-fighters-flow-to-syria/2014/10/11/3d2549fa-5195-11e4-8c24-487e92bc997b_graphic.html

Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama - who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye behind bars, after he was convicted on "terrorism-related charges" in a kangaroo court - jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren't you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the "unity rally" in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent "extremists" committed to the "overthrow of democracy" from appearing on television.

If you walk around with blinkers on your eyes don’t include the rest of us. There were plenty of protest all around.

Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82% of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.

Apparently, it isn't just Muslims who get offended.

But apparently the only ones killing are ?

Yours faithfully,

Mehdi