Charlie Hebdo - The Equal Opportunity Offender

"Is there any group I haven't offended?"

The "sick" comics of the late 50's and early 60's used to pride themselves on being equal opportunity satirists. My pal Mort Sahl used to say, "whoever the President is, I will attack him...I'm a boat-rocker, that's all I do."

It's important to note, regarding today's outrage, that Charlie Hebdo was just that: an Equal Opportunity Offender.

Like Bill Maher here in America, they delighted in the "religulous," and making fun of ALL religions.

One of their covers showed a stereotypical Arab, Jew and Christian all raging that the magazine should be stopped:

It was, perhaps, ONLY on the front page of Charlie Hebdo that both a Jew and a Muslim could be united...by being vilified.

Compare this to the shrill world of Tweets and Facebook posts from D-list celebrities and plain ol' crackpots, who only rage that the Palestinians are persecuted and Israel should be wiped off the map.

Charlie Hebdo made a point of showing that nothing was sacred, from pedophile priests to the birth of the baby Jesus:

The common threads at Charlie Hebdo? Attack all religions, and come off like a 3rd rate version of Mad magazine. Even SCREW had better cartoonists. An added tragedy is that these guys at the magazine were slaughtered for the most ridiculous nose-thumbing type of comedy there is. It wasn't biting wit, was it? It wasn't hilariously true or acidic, as we've grown to appreciate in everybody from R. Crumb to Tomi Ungerer. The lowest level of goofy humor was destroyed by the lowest level of angry psychopath. One group had a ridiculous sense of humor, the other, none at all.

The French have risen to mark this outrage with massive protests.

The cartoon covers from Charlie Hebdo aren't much compared to this picture:

Were all these people subscribers to Charlie Hebdo? Did even 1% of them even chuckle or laugh out loud over the impudent religious cartoons that the magazine ran? No, but they cry and they rage over the injustice here, and the dark contrast between the world of joy, chiding and having a laugh and the misery, fear, hatred and murder that mark the world of the religious fanatic.