This from Belfast emigre Robert McLiam Wilson, via Henry McDonald:
“I am feeling a touch of shame today. Cancelling such an event in the face of putative menace in a city that endured a 30-year torture of self-immolation seems worse than pusillanimous. Belfast? Seriously? This is not the city I remember. This cancellation says, with trumpeting clarity, that there is no debate because there can be no debate. There is a big boat that can’t be rocked.”
He added: “Charlie Hebdo is ‘anti’ plenty of things. But it is not anti-Arab or anti-Israeli or anti-immigrant. No one gets more grief than Front National leader Marine Le Pen and loopy rightwinger Nicolas Sarkozy. If you speak French, it’s pretty hard to deny what Charlie really is. It is, monotonously, rigorously and sometimes unamusingly anti-arsehole. I am beyond proud to write for Charlie. And not, today, so proud of the city of my birth.”
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
