Edit: Damn, did not expect this to turn into today’s struggle sesh.
Here’s my both sides/both sides take. Should people be executed for drawing, publishing or showing hateful cartoons? Probably not.
What grosses me out is how Enlightened Secular France has spent centuries colonizing and brutalizing muslims and continues to oppress them with discriminatory laws while acting like the entire point of Free Speech TM is the right to degrade a profoundly marginalized minority.
As someone brought up in this thread, the whole Mohammad cartoon controversy reminds me of the perennial debate “why would a black person get violent if you call them the n-word, it’s just a word.” Context matters, when you purposely provoke an oppressed minority by shoving the thing they find most offensive in their face, you may get a violent reaction.
I don’t think this guy deserves to die at all, but Charlie Hebdo is very racist and it’s gross how people rally around it like it’s this bastion of free speech.
That said, death to A Wyatt Mann. Inshallah.
I don't know anything about France and I haven't seen anything approaching a leftist analysis of the situation either here or on reddit. When the news of beheading were discussed on news subs the only leftist voices among the right-wing bullshit were going "well, that's what France gets for centuries of colonialism and imperialism" which doesn't seem like a useful take.
The correct leftist take is:
The murder was wrong. Respect religious minorities and their beliefs. These cartoons are an outgrowth of French Islamaphobia, rooted in centuries of racism and imperialism. The murderer got what he deserved. The government should not be promoting propaganda against minority religions, especially if it has a long history of oppressing them.