2023-11-05 15:22:38
After his controversial joke about the Israeli Prime Minister, Guillaume Meurice claimed to be in the Charlie spirit. The newspaper’s editorial director reacts.
Guillaume Meurice may be Charlie, but the converse is not necessarily true. Riss, cartoonist and director of Charlie Hebdo, is very critical of the joke of the France Inter columnist, in turmoil since he compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a “Nazi without a foreskin” last Sunday on the air .
The comparison, made in the context of the Israeli counter-offensive on Gaza after the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, triggered a wave of indignation on social networks. In response, the columnist simply tweeted #JeSuisCharlie, a slogan promoting freedom of expression, which appeared in 2015 in the wake of the Islamist attack which left 12 dead targeting the editorial office.
Asked by La Tribune Sunday to the columnist’s joke, Riss offers an unequivocal response:
“How can we still use such childish terms…” laments the one who survived the January 7, 2015 attack on the satirical newspaper. “These are shortcuts. Of course you can laugh at everything, but there is a way to do it.”
“Since the Israeli offensive on Gaza, there has been a surge of comments aimed at reversing things,” he continues. “We almost come to forget what happened on October 7. To say that the massacres of Hamas are comparable to those of the Nazis during the war, it becomes inaudible (…) The propaganda works in favor of the Palestinian terrorists. “
“The Charlie mind is not trash”
On the fact that Guillaume Meurice claimed to be the Charlie spirit after the criticism of his joke, Riss dissociates himself. “Charlie’s spirit has a good back,” he denounces, before continuing:
“The Charlie spirit is not a trash can that you take out of the closet when it suits you, to throw your own junk in.”
And to recall that Charlie Hebdo itself dedicated its cover of the week to Netanyahu: “We did not need to say that he was a Nazi or to specify that he was circumcised to make readers understand what “We thought so. That’s the Charlie spirit. It’s more subtle and more difficult to master than it seems.”
Remonstrances in high places
Guillaume Meurice’s joke earned him a reprimand from Adèle Van Reeth, director of France Inter, in a press release published Tuesday and addressed to listeners: “Qualifying any political representative as a ‘Nazi’ is an outrage whose comic nature can, in normal times, be questioned,” she wrote.
“When this representative, whose policies we can also disapprove of and criticize, is himself Jewish, at the head of a Jewish state, whose inhabitants have just suffered a terrorist attack having murdered more than a thousand of them for them, this humor is even more questionable” she continued. “When added to this context an increase in anti-Semitic acts within our country, this choice of words seems particularly inappropriate.” In addition, Arcom was seized and announced that it will “instruct this sequence”.
Hamas terrorists, who have controlled Gaza since 2007, managed to enter Israeli soil on October 7. At least 1,400 peopledont 39 Frenchwere killed in the massacre perpetrated that morning, described by some observers as a “pogrom”. The number of hostages held by Hamas is rated at 229. Since then, in retaliation, Israel has increased its strikes on Gaza. They did more than 9,200 dead, including 3,826 childrenaccording to the Hamas Ministry of Health relayed by AFP.
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