It´s Only Words: WILLEM

They can sell our ideas – they can stick a label on a hairdryer and call it ‘Je Suis Charlie’ – but they can’t steal them. Politicians and pedagogues who either claim or attack us don’t understand us. They are people saying je suis Charlie who’d never seen Charlie Hebdo. There are people attacking us who have never seen it, or think it’s only concerned with Islam. The fact is they don’t know how to read cartoons. There are people who, even if they are illiterate, know how to view a cartoon. And there are clever people with an agenda who just don’t have the culture to understand our laughter. And among the second group are these people like your prime minister and all the others calling themselves Charlie. It’s completely ridiculous, first because in the end they don’t want us, and they don’t want to be Charlie – how could they be? They hate us! And second because they are pretentious, and all pretention is false. When the king employed a fool to laugh at him, the fool was the only one allowed. Now they want no one to laugh at them, but we are free and we do.

- WILLEM