Garry Trudeau: Charlie Hebdo Is ‘Hate Speech’

Garry Trudeau, the Pulitzer Prize-winning satirical cartoonist behind Doonesbury, says his fellow satirists at Charlie Hebdo “wandered into the realm of hate speech.” Trudeau made the remark during his acceptance speech of the George Polk Awards in Journalism, according to Peter Bale, the head of the Center for Public Integrity. “Free speech... becomes its own kind of fanaticism,” Trudeau also reportedly said, adding that the job of satirists is to punch up, not punch down. Trudeau was presumably talking about Hebdo’s mocking of Islam, which of course led two terrorists to assassinate the editor in chief and several other cartoonists. Trudeau is the first cartoonist to ever receive a Polk award.