Freedom of speech is more important than religious belief, for it is a basic human right concerning everyone and the very fundament of democracy.

I was planning to write an article presenting a book about Charlemagne that I recently read, but tonight I will exceptionally talk about something that has very little to do with Germany. But since I am an enthusiastic atheist before almost everything else, the guy who invented school can wait for tonight. I am sure, anyway, that most of you are not too disappointed !

You probably all heard about the violence that occured almost everywhere when in 2005 a danish caricaturist published a draw depicting Muhammad, the beloved prophet of almost a fifth of the mondial population, with a bomb going to explose on His holy head. Then you will probably be as surprised as I was this morning if I say to you that a French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, publishes this wednesday a new edition... with Muhammad in front page, friendly saying "100 whip slaps if you don't laugh until death".

So dear friends and readers, ladies and gentlemen from the whole world, let me proudly introduce to you the new "Charia Hebdo":

But what is it exactly ? As far as I can tell, since the newspaper comes out only tomorrow and that I therefore did not read it, it talks humorously about the Sharia law in Lybia and in Tunisia, and will also approach the women's condition under islamic law with an article intituled "Charia Madame". It was about time ! These subjects were all seriously treated in different medias these days, so now I don't see any problem to talk about it with humour besides of only evoking them with cold serious. I would even say that we MUST use humour to talk about such subjects, because it is the only way we have to make it a little bit less depressing. I don't know anybody that is not shocked or disappointed by the recent news about the already fading Arab Spring. Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Gadhaffi were certainly not good men, they were dictators and I certainly won't try to defend them, but they were also secularists. As far as I know Tunisia was one of the more culturally opened country in Middle-East and in Libya for instance women had the right to get divorced... What will likely not be the case anymore under the new governments.

One could even say that they have gotten rid of a civil or militaristic tyranny for a theist oneinstead of trying to build an equalitary, free society.

But anyway, what is really problematic with this Charlie Hebdo edition I'm talking about is indeed the fact that they dare to draw the prophet Muhammad and to criticize Allah's law. Both are indeed strictly forbidden by the islamic dogma, and we can fear strong reactions from some of the more fundamentalists muslims. The last time, if my memories aren't wrong, we got riots, embassies set on fire, death threats on artists and journalists as well as a certain number of related joyeusetés. And even in this case, as the provocating newspaper was not even out !, I observed on the Charlie Hebdo's Facebook official page a certain number of reactions from irritated muslims. This page is in fact, as I write this article, some kind of free for all battlefield flooded by messages from angry people, some of them in English or even in Arabic. Indeed there is some reasonable people (and among them some muslims, I salute them for showing us a good exemple and giving a desperatly needed good image of their community) trying to temperate the debate a little bit. But actually the overwhelming majority of what I can read there just freaks me out. Besides of being hit by a litteral storm of coranic quotations, someone that goes on this page right now will dive in a sea of insults (some of them are really funny, but others are horribly racist against West people), maledictions ("You will all burn in Hell !" is the typicalest one), calls for people to report the Facebook page for hainous attacks against a religion... and indeed, you probably already guessed it by now, a lot of pathetical, offended comments sounding like bad italian melodramas. To complete the portrayal of the situation, there is also some people trying to defend the Charlie Hebdo newspaper, some of them using reason and simple good sense but I must admit that in some cases the so called defenders of Free Speech were almost not better than their more unpleasant adversaries.

But why ? In which world do we live in ? A world where such a crisis can be provocated by a simple draw and where humourous expression can be a pretext to spill blood ? Indeed, I perfectly understand that religion is important for some people (even if I don't agree with their point of view), and that it is probably really offensive for most of them. But my point is that in no circumstances it allows them to be violent. In fact, this kind of reactions aliment the prejudiced opinions against Islam in general simply because the muslims that are reacting this way are showing to the world a great immaturity. Luckily, as I said, it is not the case of them all. I think that every adult and reasonable person should be able to laugh about everything including oneself, political opinions, and of course religions. And if someone laugh at you in a nasty way, just do like you should probably have learned in school's courtyard: ignore it, or at least get over it without bothering everyone around you and doing even worse than what you are blaming ! But this aspect of the question is not the most important one. Humor, and caricatures, are one of the powerfulest weapons of free speech and democracy. It allows the People to denounce something clearly and with sometimes more much efficacity than conventional ways because it is imaged and it allows everybody to catch the message easily (except, it seems, some fanatical people). In this present case, we use caricatures of Muhammad in order to denounce the darkest aspects of Islamism and of the Sharia law... Just like we did many times in the past to deal with christian obscurantism, or more recently with the scandal about the Catholic pedophile priests for instance. And it worked then, so why not now ? We must keep at least one simple thing in mind : these draws are not conceived to agress ordinary people that practice their religion peacefully, but to comment the recent news from Libya and Tunisia and also to criticize those who say that we should stone to death gay people and adultery women. And, my friends, those that we should really feel sorry for are these women that are going to be enslaved and these free thinkers that are going to be oppressed instead of being liberated by the revolution. But not the ones that are comfortably crying on Facebook or that will show violence in the streets. These people have no credibiliy and they don't deserve us to keep our opinions for us just to avoid to offense their delicate feelings.

This is why I think that we must all support Charlie Hebdo and the derision in general of everything that is related to totalitarianism.