You would have at least thought the fire bombings a couple of years back may have acted as a 'warning' ?
Wouldn't you have any concern for the safety of innocent people whilst you were being so gung-ho about your own skin ? Maybe not all us want to become martyrs for the sake of a cartoon !
Lisa, my OH worried endlessly when I went to various countries working. However, well before I knew her she worked in Peru as I had some years earlier. She was once held for a couple of days as part of a group Sendero Luminoso detained. That never happened to me. When we say to people that we do child research we get all the usual sympathy sighs. As soon as we mention street children, refugees, child soldiers, trafficking, prostitution and other things we simply work with then people tend to get excited and want to know the gory details. Once they are gory they tend to turn their minds away and want to talk about something else. Somebody always does these jobs. In this case we do and through that work we met. Is it fair on our daughters? Probably not. The problem is in part that when you do what you do it always seems to escalate, so that what might be initially a bit adventurous becomes a bit routine, which is when it becomes far more dangerous in a way because you tend to drop your guard to get on with work. I went to do work with street children projects in the civil war in Ethiopia, scary, the two trips to Lebanon were very, very scary, Kurdish Iraq was a misery because the front line was so far away but there were some badly mentally damaged people there who would have cut our throats if we had not been very careful. My Dutch war photographer friend has been properly on the front line many times, he says vaguely the same but from a more vulnerable position in his time.
The CH people had had experience of attacks. Charb was seen raising his middle finger in the seconds before he was shot. He knew the risks, the others too, it is part of a vocation that comes of the choice of going into it and how far one goes. The people who stay true to what they do have to accept that they could come to a sticky end. We have our families' support because they know. For all of that, it does not stop them worrying and hoping it will never happen.
There is no perfect answer. I think we could all debate this forever and a day. My stance is that we are all entitled to a view, there is no actual right or wrong and nobody should be shouted down for either extreme. I would (not willingly, not happily) give my life for what I believe in and am neither a hero nor a martyr, others just simply will or can not. The CH people were, whoever becomes modern police officer is, therefore it is perhaps more important to find the way to end these situations peacefully rather than investing more lost lives in conflicts. In a perverse way that is the bottom line for many of us.
It does seem to be a high price to pay purely for entertainment, though.
After the event the question can never be answered by those who did it, knowing the risk involved. In the same situation I believe I would stand by my colleagues, since they always did things as a collective and discussed such things. Unanimity was, still is, their way of deciding. I would be prepared to take the risk and pay the price, many others would not.
I wish I had been able to write this - it exactly matches my feelings on the subject!
@Brian. I do take your point & I thank you for your explanation but it still goes back to my original post - was the descision to publish a wise one?
Brian, strangely enough, living in France I didn't read any UK newspapers last week, I rarely do save an occasional peruse at the english speaking rags in France like Connexion etc. I abandoned my PE subscription a few years back when I seemed to be reading the same old same old...
I have no idea if the UK is changing or not but I do know I believe very strongly in freedom of speech but cannot buy into this frenzied freedom to incite & provoke attitude currently sweeping across the Hexagon.
Very interesting view.
Heh. Agree about the north side birds, David :)
Another biker place was that caff on the North Circular, open all night, a fierce bacon & eggs was to be got there!
Ian- later I moved to Batter-see-ya, London SW1 one, sarf Chelsea as we called it. Apart from a few sarf of the river still did most of my drinking norf as you got better birds there! Sopped for a cuppa with the bikers on Chelsea Bridge quite often!
Peter, then you did not read a single UK newspaper last week when Cameron was demanding banning data encryption. Each paper's comments page was full of people saying just that, plus people with business interests that would be damaged were howling it. Freedom of speech in the UK is being gradually undermined and people are protesting.
Mark, it is not that I disagree or anything else. The fact that one has things in constitutional and legal systems does not mean we cannot question them, but what it does mean is that until they are changed we have to obey them (well we don't, ask any mugger who happens to bop us on the head). I think it is confusing for people from outside a legal system to come into it and not sometimes think that it is better, here we have people thinking Sharia is better. The majority do not, and so for us the laïcité is what we have. If we do not like it then we are free to go somewhere else.
I am not questioning your point of view, I am simply pointing out that that is all it is. The questions you ask are hypothetical because we just do not have answers. One event does not mean a major conflict between religions and legal cultures.
In the tradition of the French satirical cartoon, as I mentioned before, way back during the revolution, that genre of cartoon already existed and the English cartoonist James Gillray drew images as hard as, if not harder than, any of the CH ones. It is thus a tradition deeply ingrained in French satire. If they can have a go at presidents, the Pope and everybody else the logic is that there are no exceptions. People may not like it but actually they are acting perfectly normally.
Where you and I differ, is that I understand the stance they are adopting here in France which is they will not be cowed by threats and murders like this will be met with retribution. As for fanatics, well it is not that they have no reality, they appear to have another and, in our terms, not nice one. Compromise is surrender for them and that is all the CH people are doing on their side, a sizeable majority of the French population with them.
Got it. Didn't know that side as well as the south side.
I lived in Elm Park Gardens in Chelsea. My main locals (and there plenty) were the Cross Keys (closed), Anglesey, Duke of Boots, Chesham Arms (closed), Antelope, Grenadier, Phene, Scarsdale, Australian, Admiral Cod etc etc many others I can't remember the names of!
I'll drink to that ....hic !
Quite. Going along the new "Quotes" thread, here are several reasons why :
“There are times, however, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless drinking. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat s*** and die.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the '80's
Once a piss-head, always a piss-head.....hic !
Ah don't be starting there...was all round that area one time, though I did tend to use the Six Bells in the King's Road as a regular local. Used to sweep up for a pint, a plate of something, and whatever loose change you found on the floor and down the back of the moleskine benches - you wouldn't believe the amount of coins you'd pick up!
"Was it worth it ? "
Well if you believe, like the majority of posters on here in complete freedom of speech then yes, it obviously was worth telives of 17 people. If you believe like me and a few others in preventing unnecessary loss of life by not provoking an already difficult situation then no, it wasn't worth it. The UK system seems to work if rather tentatively at times and I don't hear british people screaming about supression of their freedom of speech !
Knew it well! Bought a nice bright red (but lethal!) TR3A (152 ANP!) in Lexham Mews once! Many a pub crawl in the area!