Charlie Hebdo co-founder claims editor 'dragged his team to their deaths'

In a fairly controversial statement, one of the founding members of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, Henri Roussel has blamed slain editor Stéphane Charbonnier, better known as Charb, for “dragging his team to their deaths.” According to a Telegraph report, Roussel wrote a column in the Left-leaning French magazine Nouvel Obs, noting “I really hold it against you.” He said Charb dragged the team into “overdoing it” in a reference to he cartoons against Prophet Muhammed, notes the report. Roussel wrote, “He shouldn’t have done it, but Charb did it again a year later, in September 2012.” In November 2011 the magazine was firebombed over depicting cartoons of Prophet Muhammed. The magazine had also attracted the wrath of Islamist fundamentalists when back in 2006, they published Mohammed cartoons by a Danish artist that lamented fundamentalist violence. Roussel’s statement however has not gone down well with Richard Malka, the magazine’s lawyer. He wrote to the owners of Nouvel Obs saying, " Charb has not yet even been buried and Obs finds nothing better to do that to publish a polemical and venomous piece on him." This is the first time that Charlie Hebdo and their cartoons have faced criticism. Even after the attack, several publications noted that the issue wasn’t about freedom of speech and the cartoons deliberately sought to provoke and insult the religious beliefs of many. [caption id=“attachment_2037639” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] People hold pictures of late French cartoonist Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier during a rally near the French embassy in Tbilisi. AFP[/caption] For instance, as this piece in the New Statesman points out Charlie Hebdo’s strategy of “lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic.” The piece also points out how in 2013, Olivier Cyran, a former journalist with the magazine had noted how post 9/11, “Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over” the magazine. More recently Cyran added to his piece that the 2013 article must not be seen as a validation of the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo team. Cyran wrote in his 2013 piece, critiquing the magazine’s culture, “The wholesale denunciation of ‘beards, veiled women and their imaginary accomplices became a central axis of your journalistic and satirical production…Whoever could not see themselves in a worldview which opposed the civilized (Europeans) to obscurantists (Muslims) saw themselves quickly slapped with the label of ‘useful idiots’ or ‘Islamo-leftists’.” The fact that the magazine sacked cartoonist Maurice Sinet over anti-semitisicm charges was also seen as proof of the double standards from the magazine. The recent attack on the magazine left 12 people dead, including  Charlie Hebdo’s 47-year-old editor-in-chief, Stephane “Charb” Charbonnier, along with the police bodyguard assigned to him following death threats after the paper had published cartoons mocking Islam. Four other cartoonists — Jean “Cabu” Cabut, Georges Wolinski, Bernard “Tignous” Verlhac, and Philippe Honore, — were also slain, as were three other employees, including a well-known economist, Bernard Maris.