Saturday, January 10, 2015

We Like This Guy

"Get this fuck that I don't owe you fuckers anything & all I've got to say is fuck you!"
A prominent Dutch cartoonist at Charlie Hebdo heaped scorn on the French satirical weekly's "new friends" since the massacre at its Paris offices on Wednesday.

"We have a lot of new friends, like the pope, Queen Elizabeth and (Russian President Vladimir) Putin. It really makes me laugh," Bernard Holtrop, whose pen name is Willem, told the Dutch centre-left daily Volkskrant in an interview published Saturday.

France's far-right National Front leader "Marine Le Pen is delighted when the Islamists start shooting all over the place," said Willem, 73, a longtime Paris resident who also draws for the French leftist daily Liberation.

He added: "We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our friends."

Commenting on the global outpouring of support for the weekly, Willem scoffed: "They've never seen Charlie Hebdo."

"A few years ago, thousands of people took to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo. They didn't know what it was. Now it's the opposite, but if people are protesting to defend freedom of speech, naturally that's a good thing."

Willem was on a train between northwestern Lorient and Paris when he learned of Wednesday's attack by two Islamist gunmen as the paper was holding its weekly editorial meeting.

He told Liberation: "I never come to the editorial meetings because I don't like them. I guess that saved my life."

Willem stressed that Charlie Hebdo must continue to publish. "Otherwise, (the Islamists) have won."
In the long run ...

2 comments:

mikey said...

The problem is that us lefties don't seem to understand the difference between content and concept. We don't have to agree with their horseshit in order to defend their right to publish that horseshit.

The thing about speech is that it's EASY to defend speech we agree with - the important part of the argument is defending speech we find offensive. And the clergy defending the butthurt deity can eat my ass...

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

"I never come to the editorial meetings because I don't like them. I guess that saved my life."

Similarly, people who were late to work on 9/11/2001 weren't in the towers during the attack. I guess the takeaway is that being an eager beaver is dangerous.