Jeannette Bougrab, The Girlfriend Of Stephane Charbonnier

And she is, I gather, an apostate from Islam. She – Jeanette – Bougrab.

Apostate from Islam. A woman, with Muslim parents or perhaps grandparents, who not only defected from Islam, but took as her lover a nonreligious Infidel Frenchman who poked fun at everything; and who ‘blasphemed’ against Mohammed.

This woman understands France better than many, because she has *chosen* France over the pit of darkness, ignorance and barbarism in which her forebears were trapped, or trapped themselves, for centuries.

In another article, she speaks of Charb having chosen not to have children – fearing, perhaps, what might be done to those children, in order to ‘get at’ himself. but between the lines I sense a flavour of regret. Did *she* want children, a child? As Ayaan has voted with her womb – the most fundamental gesture of affirmation a woman can make – did this woman also, who seems still of an age to have children, desire a child with her French Infidel lover, to defy the Enemy, to affirm Life, to raise in freedom, as a free Frenchman or woman?

I wonder, too, about that other Charlie Hebdo employee who was murdered; the Tunisian proofreader, an apprentice cartoonist, who is described as an ‘autodidact’. Was he, too, an apostate? – one who, instead of choosing the path of resentment, and jihad, and the Void that is Islam, turned outward and away, seized upon books, and art, and ideas, the path of questioning and Ridicule. If he was such a one, then he died as a true son of France, a free man and no longer a slave of the infernal allah.