@ Steele

<<There are those, including the gunmen...who claim we inhabit separate communities>>

And there some like your good self sir (to use a steeleism) who clearly are not of any earthly community.

dane:

"To be honest, and tasteless, at least the people murdered were mad left-wingers".

Just a shame it wasn't you and your unspeakable ilk, dane!

But what did we do to cause them so much upset to lash out? I'm sure that if the magazine had offered to sit down and talk out their disrespectful nature it could have been avoided. That and paying their jizya to the Caliphate.

Surely this can be expanded by "our" ABC?

Has the Victorian Government apologised to the two Pastors in Victoria who were charged for religous vilification when they spoke the truth about Islam? We have the Federal Government paying Islam apologist to speak fork tongued on the ABC/SBS etc and then have these fools denying the obvious and demonising anyone who speaks the truth.

Arjay,

My initial reaction to your post was the negative one of 'Conspiracy Theory' however I watched the video and as one who has seen his share of gun shot trauma, including point blank shots to the head, I must say that the video raises doubts.

The video has since been removed by Google.

http://www.thenation.com/blog/194465/whats-real-reason-al-qaeda-attacked-charlie-hebdo?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_term=email_nation&utm_campaign=Email%20Nation%20%28NEW%29%20-%20Most%20Recent%20Content%20Feed%2020150108&newsletter=email_nation contains:

“Al Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.”

One way to get the mostly tolerant French to be beastly to Muslims is to commit an atrocity against a French icon and have that atrocity identified with Islam.

The strategy may well work. One way to keep it from working is to treat individual Muslims like any other individuals.

From the article:

“The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine Le Pen and the Islamophobic French right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle-hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point Al Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes, instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this slang term). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.”

The hypothesis may be valid. Sometimes there is a real conspiracy behind a conspiracy theory.