I was no longer part of Charlie Hebdo when the suicide planes made their impact on your editorial line, but the Islamophobic neurosis which bit by bit took over your pages from that day on affected me personally, as it ruined the memory of the good moments I spent on the magazine during the 1990s… And yet, I never called your magazine racist. But since today you are proclaiming, high and loud, your stainless and irreproachable anti-racism, maybe it’s now the right moment to seriously consider the question.


Racist? Charlie Hebdo was certainly no such thing at the time when I worked there. In any case, the idea that the mag would expose itself to such an accusation would have never occurred to me.
[…]
The obsessive pounding on Muslims to which your weekly has devoted itself for more than a decade has had very real effects. It has powerfully contributed to popularising, among “left-wing” opinion, the idea that Islam is a major “problem” in French society. That belittling Muslims is no longer the sole privilege of the extreme right, but a “right to offend” which is sanctified by secularism, the Republic, by “co-existence”. And even - let’s not be stingy with the alibis! - by the rights of women. It’s widely believed today that the exclusion of a veiled girl is a sign, not of stupid discrimination, but of solid, respectable feminism, which consists of pestering those whom one claims to be liberating
[…]
You have the nerve to accuse your detractors of “essentialism”, and without doubt the numbskulls who worship you will applaud your acrobatics. But this isn’t a circus. You wallow in your essentialism every week - or nearly - by racializing Muslims, constantly depicting them as grotesque or hideous creatures. What defines the dominant image of the victim of racialization “is that it is entirely contained in what racializes it; its culture, its religion, its skin colour. It is seen as incapable of escaping it, incapable of seeing further than its melanin ratio or the cloth it wears on its head,” observes the blog of Valérie CG, a feminist who won’t interest you very much because she hasn’t shown you her tits. Muslim has become a sort of new skin colour, from which it is impossible to detach oneself.

Olivier Cyran, former Charlie Hebdo employee.

[He worked there from 1992 to 2001, before walking out, angered by “the dictatorial behaviour and corrupt promotion practices” of a certain Philippe Val [former CH editor - trans.] Since then, Olivier Cyran has been an observer from a distance, outside the walls, of the evolution of Charlie Hebdo and its growing obsession with Islam.] (via verkur)