I'm glad to learn from our U.S. posters that the real legacy of Wolinski and Cabu is thoughtful discussion of the deeper social patterns underlying this attack (, I'd have thought their legacy was mainly 'épater les bourgeois',) but surely the main question you'd have to ask hasn't anything to do with 'freedom of speech' or 'islamofascism', but with why this sort of thing just keeps happening in France and not, for example, in Germany? Could it be that there's something awry with French society and its utter failure to achieve some degree of intergration for its sizeable North African minority? Could it be that laicité isn't the soundest foundation for a multi-ethnic society? If this attack is about anything other than some ridiculous losers donning a balaclava and a kalashnikov and yelling the takbir in a Paris street, it's surely about that.
The explanation could also be the group of immigrants, Turks/Kurds versus Arabs/Arabised Africans. There's a lot of problems with Turkish immigrants, but in general their relationship with Islam is more ethno-religious than the Arabs embrace of Islamic universalism.
It is sometimes noted that Germany lacks the banlieue-style "ghettoization" you can witness in France. Immigrant populations are not so much concentrated in the suburbs, but in downtown areas. Take the borough of Kreuzberg in Berlin, for example. Traditionally, it has a extremely large share of residents of Turkish descent. It the same time however, the borough is subject to a process of gentrification with rising rents and an influx of somewhat wealthier citizens who move to the area. So, I'd say there's generally less
segregation than in France.
Germany also lacks a party like the Front National, who frequently reaches double-digit results in national elections (or at least it did until the arrival of the AfD). This is probably due to a somewhat different political culture as a result of World War II. Maybe this contributed to a less polarized and more consensus-oriented immigration debate, and generated a climate where immigrants tended to be embraced by society rather than to be excluded (relatively speaking compared to France, of course).
Also, I'm not sure to what extent people of Muslim origin are integrated in the higher levels of society and politics in France. The SPD's secretary-general is partly of Iranian descent, the parents of the German Green Party's national co-chairman came from Turkey etc.
