Professor Bennoune Publishes Essay on Anniversary of Charlie Hebdo Attacks
Professor Karima Bennoune published an essay on the website Open Democracy regarding "The truth about Charlie: one year after the January 7 attacks." Professor Bennoune writes of the terrorist attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, the jihadist violence that continued throughout 2015, and various reactions to it.
Bennoune notes that "January 7, 2015 was one in a long line of far right attacks on creativity, and part of a history of fundamentalist assaults against artists and intellectuals who have defied them. And, sadly, it was only one of the first armed Islamist salvos of 2015 which will be remembered as the year of endless, expanding jihad."
She also argues that it is important to remember that many people of Muslim heritage have spoken up in defense of Charlie Hebdo and against fundamentalist violence, and that this is a way of fighting the racism and discrimination against Muslims which likewise burgeoned in 2015.
Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. She recently was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company. In October 2015, she was appointed UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.