3 students at Hamid Abdelaali’s high school class in the heavily Muslim suburb of Paris staged an informal protest, speaking loudly throughout the 60 second moment of silence.
Across France, they were not alone. In one school in Normandy, some Muslim students yelled “God is great!” in Arabic during that same moment. In a Paris middle school, another group of young Muslims politely asked not to respect the minute, arguing to their teacher, “You reap what you sow,” According to the Washington Post.
Abdelaali, a 17-year-old high school senior said he feels disgusted by a newspaper whose provocative cartoons had used the image of the prophet Muhammad for satire — and which continued to do so in its tragicomic first edition hitting newsstands Wednesday morning. “I know some kids who agreed with the attack,” he said. “I did not, but I also cannot say that I support what Charlie Hebdo is doing.”
On 7 January 2015, two Islamist gunmen forced their way into and opened fire in the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, killing twelve, including staff cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Honoré, Tignous and Wolinski, economist Bernard Maris and two police officers, and wounding eleven, four of them seriously.
During the attack, the gunmen shouted “Allahu akbar” (“God is great” in Arabic) and also “the Prophet is avenged”. To Sigolène Vinson, a female visitor to the offices, one of the attackers said “I’m not killing you because you are a woman and we don’t kill women but you have to convert to Islam, read the Qu’ran and wear a veil”. President François Hollande described it as a “terrorist attack of the most extreme barbarity”. The two gunmen were identified as Saïd Kouachi and Chérif Kouachi, French Muslim brothers of Algerian descent.
