The new movement, dubbed “Je Suis Charlie” (“I am Charlie”), was a response to a Muslim extremist attack on the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. 12 employees were killed, including an Algerian copy editor and a Tunisian-Polish Jewish cartoonist.
The motive for the attack was retaliation for cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.
Nearly a decade earlier, Muslims protested worldwide against a similar transgression by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, for publishing caricatures of the prophet wearing a bomb instead of a turban.
These cartoons were reprinted by Charlie Hebdo in 2006, triggering a similar reaction. The French publication reprinted them again, in 2020, at the start of the trial for the 2015 attack.
President Francois Hollande marched alongside his fellow leaders from Germany, the UK and Italy. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas marched with them at the front of the crowd. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko were also present.
The march signalled a cataclysmic response to the Clash of Civilisations worldview that had defined the post-9/11 era.
Here in the West, we uphold values of free speech, freedom of religion, open lifestyles (the right to be as pious or hedonistic as one chooses) and the right to offend others, as long as no one is harmed beyond hurt feelings. And Charlie Hebdo knows how to offend people.
A year later, it mocked a three-year-old Syrian Kurdish child who drowned fleeing his country’s civil war. Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body had washed up on a Turkish beach. A cellphone photo of his corpse featured in the news and on social media for weeks.
For Westerners, defending offensive speech was the test of true democracy, while others maintained that the magazine isn’t racist, but that its multifaceted French irony is too sophisticated for liberal Anglophone critics and aggrieved Muslims.
Fast-forward another decade, and Rima Hassan, a French member of the European Parliament from the left-wing La France Insoumise and an outspoken Syrian-Palestinian activist against the Gaza genocide, is facing a trial this summer.
Her crime was posting a quote (later deleted) on her X account from Japanese communist Kōzō Okomoto, a participant in the deadly 1972 Lod Airport attack by the Japanese Red Army group, in which 26 people were killed and 80 wounded.
Okamoto wrote: “I dedicated my youth to the Palestinian cause. As long as oppression exists, resistance will not only be a right, but a duty.”
According to Italian newswire Adnkronos, Matthias Renault, a French National Assembly member of the far-right Rassemblement National, who had alerted prosecutors about Hassan’s post, said that since she failed to condemn the quote, she is offering it for “inspirational purposes, and associates [Okomoto] with a normative justification of resistance presented as a duty”.
Perhaps Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, who has defended Hassan’s prosecution, should have been a tad sceptical of his far-right source: Renault is famous for attempting to defund a music festival because he saw the word “trans” in the title.
As it turned out, the inspiration for the festival’s use of the word “trans” is Trans-Musiques – Concert à Paris, a free jazz LP released in 1978. But, Laurent insisted it was an organisation using public funds to promote transgender artists.
Nevertheless, French authorities believe it’s enough to try the leftist MEP on charges of outwardly supporting terrorism. Rima Hassan faces up to seven years in prison and a hefty fine if convicted.
In the stuffy world of Brussels politics, the devilishly photogenic 33-year-old attorney-cum-lawmaker stands apart in sunglasses and a keffiyeh, a sort of next-generation Leila Khaled for the populist press.
Hassan was detained in Israel for her participation in the June 2025 Global Sumud flotilla to Gaza (and later expelled) and was the victim of cyberbullying. French authorities have reportedly investigated her 16 times for online speech offences.
In December 2024, several French Jewish leaders accused the lawmaker of “suggesting French citizens should be free to join proscribed terrorist organisations such as Hamas”, according to the UK’s far-right Jewish Chronicle.
This trial is not about the Okomoto post but about Hassan: her political rock-star status emboldens the pro-Palestine left in France and beyond.
A loss in court could mean jail time and financial hardship, and if she wins, her parliamentary work will have been needlessly distracted. Anyone advocating for Gazans in France is walking on eggshells as a result.
What happened to the free-speech fervour of Je Suis Charlie?
It’s a mistake to think it ever went away. The gleeful defence of insulting the marginalised is now central to the anti-democratic propaganda going after not just Muslim immigrants but all non-white migrants to Europe and the United States.
The imperial embrace of free speech is not a universal ideal to be shared by all, but rather a hallmark of the metropole, deployed against colonial subjects.
Hassan was born a refugee in Aleppo, Syria, once part of the French empire, while her cause for Palestine triggers France’s trauma over defeat in Algeria. It’s not her place to punch up at people in power.
Free speech is not about a constitutional guarantee of openness. It is about preserving the in-group’s dominance. In context, the Je Suis Charlie declaration affirms that armed thugs can’t dictate the limits of expression; only the state can.
Space is shrinking in the West to use so-called “free speech” to defend Palestine. The UK has criminalised the group Palestine Action; Germany has moved to deport Palestinian solidarity activists; and the US has moved to deport non-citizens for criticising Israel.
This is all chilling. But a nation going after one of its own lawmakers escalates this clampdown.
The wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French military officer accused of treason, more than a century ago, brought to the world’s attention how the colonial arrogance of the French state shoved its problems onto an innocent Jew.
Today, the main enemy of the colonial state is Muslims. As Rima Hassan prepares for her trial, she will not simply be fighting for her own freedom, but for the defence of anticolonial politics in Europe.
Photograph courtesy of The Left. Published under a Creative Commons license.
