Kathy Sheridan – Nous sommes Charlie Hebdo: souls in need of searching

Nuance. It was going to be my watchword for 2015. The one by which every utterance would be measured. Life is too short to muster up the pretence of polite curiosity required to deal with all the sweeping statements and assumptions of bad faith that many of us encounter on any day.

Then I found myself chanting Je suis Charlie Hebdo, standing up for a journal that is the opposite of nuanced.

To accept the Charlie cartoonists' avowed mission – that nothing and no one is too powerful to be beyond satire – means having to accept crude, adolescent humour, distasteful stereotyping and bad art.

It also means much soul-searching about the limits of freedom of speech, about the nonsense of blasphemy laws (banned in the French revolution of 1789) and that delicate juncture where tolerance morphs into appeasement.

This week, Charlie Hebdo makes its defiant appearance featuring an image of the Prophet Muhammad on the cover. It could hardly have done otherwise. But by Charlie's standards, it is an unusually tender portrayal; a tear trickles down the face under the line "All is forgiven".

The use of the image will offend millions of Muslims; the hope is that many will also see it as a fierce will to seek the best in humanity. It speaks to a universal yearning to find meaning in barbarity.

Is there anything more barbaric than ordering people at gunpoint to identify themselves to be murdered, as the Kouachis did in the offices of Charlie Hebdo?

40 years since Kingsmill

Those events evoked memories of another time, when targets were ordered to identify themselves, also in the name of religion. 2016 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Kingsmill Massacre, when a minibus carrying 12 textile workers home from work in Co Armagh was stopped by a man in a British Army uniform.

Eleven masked gunmen appeared from the hedges as a man with an English accent ordered the workers to line up beside the bus. He asked: “Who is the Catholic?” Other Catholics had already been dropped off; the one remaining was Richard Hughes. His Protestant workmates, fearing he was about to be killed by what they assumed to be loyalists, tried to stop him. But Hughes stepped forward.

He was ordered to run and not to look back. Then the gunmen opened fire on the 11 who remained. Those not killed in the fusillade were shot in the head, as they lay on the ground. There was only one survivor. This slaughter occurred hardly an hour up the road from these offices.

Atrocities such as these can never be expunged from a conscience or explained away. All the whataboutery in the world can never remove personal responsibility for such calculated acts of violence, which, in the case of Kingsmill, were done by members of the Provisional IRA.

The victims of Paris and Kingsmill were not accidental. The question is, how much – if any – responsibility does a wider society hold for creating the conditions that produce such perpetrators? Is there any room for nuance here?

In the other Charlie, the trilogy about Charles Haughey now running on RTÉ, we see Haughey's mother, portrayed as an angry, embittered old woman, urging him to avenge himself on his political enemies for the humiliation of the Arms Trial.

This was the criminal prosecution against Haughey and others following the discovery of a plot to smuggle arms into the Republic for use in the North; acts to which Haughey’s mother appeared to give her purse-lipped blessing, acts that at the very least encouraged paramilitary activity in the tinderbox of the North.

Mrs Haughey is a caricature, of course, a dramatic device; she is the old woman of the Four Green Fields made flesh, the old crone on the sidelines, destroying generations of young men. Her modern equivalent may be found among the well-funded old men on the internet, stoking the alienation, idealism and testosterone-fuelled anger of the young men in the banlieues, the Muslim ghettos of urban France.

En eye for an eye

This is the nuance. Once such forces are unleashed, once it is deemed acceptable to take an eye for an eye, where does responsibility begin?

With religion? If God is love, why have millions been killed in his name through the ages? On the other hand, religion has been a vehicle for countless selfless acts, organisations and well-lived lives.

Still, even within religions there are nuances. We do not see waves of young, Kalashnikov-wielding Catholics abandoning home and family to defend their religious compatriots among the persecuted Christians of northeastern Iraq or Ukraine. Yet it is now accepted that the fate of Muslims in foreign conflicts has played a role in radicalism young men in the West.

Cherif Kouachi, the younger of the al-Qaida-affiliated brothers who carried out the murders in Charlie Hebdo, said in a court deposition in 2007 that he had been radicalised by "the injustices shown by television on what was going on over there. I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have inflicted on the Iraqis."

The kosher supermarket gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, claimed in a video published after his death to have joined Islamic State to avenge Muslims.

It makes no sense. For one thing, France famously opposed the Iraq invasion and suffered for it, becoming in the US the butt of such terms as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

For another, as has been pointed out frequently, Muslims themselves have suffered greatly at the hands of Muslims.

Not least is the image of a shackled Raif Badawi, sentenced in Saudi Arabia to 1,000 lashes, delivered at 50 a time over 20 weeks (50 more to come on Friday), and a fine of £175,000, for setting up a website to encourage debate on religious and politics. Yet the Saudi foreign minister was in Paris on Sunday, a witness to the outpouring of emotion and resolve.

For most, there was hope, best expressed in the slogan, “Je suis Charlie, je suis flic, je suis Juif”. To which at least one marcher added : “Je suis Raif Badawi”.