There is a lot of real estate between Singapore and France! Perhaps, that is why it was so easy for J.F. to write his dissent on the PEN dissenters?
Or is it very easy to see that Charlie Hebdo’s attack on Muslims and the Prophet was/is a politically motivated attack on an un-assimilated, vulnerable minority population inside the French nation? Made up of former inhabitants and their children, of their former colonies. How many generations will full assimilation take? You could easily view Hebdo as a retrograde defense of France’s civilizing mission, of it’s cultural hubris. The Hebdo methodology riffs on demonization and defamation: the demeaning cartoons of the Prophet acting as stand-in for that vulnerable population, and in a politically perverse way echoing the Le Pen’s! Or does that thought strain irony to the point of fracture?  All this as the prelude to politically charged violence against the ‘other’ in our midst? Or have we learned nothing from the last bloody Century worthy of inconvenient recall?

Political Observer