Who is Charlie?

On January 11, 2015, in the wake of Charlie Hebdo killings which left 17 people dead including even 4 persons at a Jewish grocery and a Muslim policeman, some four million people, and fifty heads of states, took to the streets of Paris and in other major cities of France. It was as solemnly depicted as a defining moment, a sacrosanct manifestation of grief and rage in the life of the secular Republic. With this symbolic demonstration, it was claimed, the French reaffirmed their commitment not only to the values of liberty, equality and fraternity but also to tolerance. ‘Not quite!’ retorts the author of this angry and pugnacious work and then validates his claim with all the stringency of an academic argument and all the anguish of a moral conscience! In his opinion, France in 2015 shamefully succumbed to an attack of Islamophobic hysteria. Compared to 2005 at the time of the youth uprising in the banlieues of Paris when the French people behaved admirably, when neither the government, nor journalists, nor society as a whole was gripped by panic, 2015 was an orgy in xenophobia.