A recent graduate of the University of Illinois Springfield who grew up 20 minutes from the Paris neighborhood where Friday’s shoot-out claimed the life of an extremist gunman and four hostages at a kosher supermarket says that the satire that precipitated the violence still has a place in French society.
Fanny Lomingo’s parents and a younger brother still live in the neighborhood south east of Paris. The area was popular, Lomingo said, because a Paris Metro stop, Porte de Vincennes, was situated near the market.
Lomingo, who graduated in December with a degree in public administration and has a noprofit management certificate, said she’s familiar with the publication Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine that two gunmen attacked on Wednesday, leaving 12 people dead.
She said Friday that she hadn’t seen the cartoons — caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad — that stoked the most recent violence. Lomingo said she was aware of past threats against Charlie Hebdo, whose cartoonists also skewered politicians as well as a number of other religions.
The story was reported by The State Journal-Register on January 11, 2015.
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