Parent Service Commitment Saint Michael School 2011-2012: Fill & Download for Free

Q. Is it really possible to get a scholarship in the 6th grade?A.You're never too young for scholarships!There are also ample opportunities for elementary and middle school students? Unfortunately, due to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), online scholarship search services are not available to students under the age of 13. These are some of the programs open for younger students.1. Kohl's Kids Who Care ProgramEach year, Kohl’s provides several prizes and scholarships to students (ages 6 through 18) who have volunteered within the past year. One winner at each store receives a $50 gift card and advances to the regional level, where he/she competes for a $1,000 scholarship. Ten regional winners will be selected to receive an additional $10,000 national award. Deadline: March 15.2. Nicholas A. Virgilio Memorial Haiku CompetitionStudents in grades 7 through 12 may compete in this creative writing contest. Students may submit up to three haikus, as long as the work has not been previously published or submitted in any other contest. Six winners will each receive $50. Deadline: March 25.3. “I Want to Go to College” Writing ContestThis contest is open to Nebraska seventh and eighth graders. Winners will receive a contribution to their state-sponsored 529 college savings plan, ranging between $500 and $2,000 each. Deadline: March 28.4. Doodle4GoogleAny student in elementary, middle, or high school may submit their artwork for consideration. Students simply need to take the Google name and turn it into something creative that reflects this year’s theme. National finalists will each receive a $5,000 scholarship. The Grand Prize winner will receive a $30,000 scholarship and his/her school will also receive a $50,000 technology grant. Deadline: March (TBA).5. The Gloria Barron Prize for Young HeroesEach year, the Barron Prize honors 25 outstanding students between the ages of 8 and 18. Students are recognized for their contributions to their community and the environment. The top 10 students will each receive a $5,000 scholarship. Deadline: April 15.6. The Healers Trilogy ContestStudents in grades 6 through 12 may submit a billboard, video, speech, essay, poem, song, or commercial based on Donna Labermeier’s book, The Healers, which is free to contestants. There are six scholarships, ranging in value from $500 to $2,500 each. Deadline: May 16.7. Courage in Student Journalism AwardsMiddle school and high school students who have exercised their First Amendment rights, despite difficulty or resistance, may be eligible to win a$5,000 scholarship through this contest sponsored by the Student Press Law Center, the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University, and the National Scholastic Press Association. Deadline: June 8.8. Patriot’s Pen Writing ContestThis program, sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), is open to students in grades 6 through 8. Students must submit an essay addressing this year’s topic, ‘Why I Appreciate America’s Veterans.” Prizes are given to the top 40 students, ranging between $500 and $5,000 each. Deadline: Nov. 1.9. Jif™ Most Creative Sandwich ContestEach fall, Jif™ sponsors a cooking contest for children between the ages of 6 and 12. Students must creative a main dish, side item, appetizer, or dessert using peanut butter as one of the ingredients. The contest typically opens in late August, so students can start working on their recipes now. One lucky winner will receive a $25,000 scholarship and four runners-up will each receive $4,000 for college. Deadline: November (TBA).10. Angela AwardFemale students in grades 5 through 8, who have an interest in science, may apply for this program. One winner will receive a $1,000 savings bond. Deadline: Nov. 30.11. Scholastic Art & Writing AwardsEach September, students in grades 7 through 12 can compete in 28 different categories, including, but not limited to: comic art, fashion, painting, photography, poetry, short story, journalism, and video games. More than $250,000 in scholarships is awarded annually. Deadline: Varies by region.It’s never too early to start searching and applying for scholarships. Keep an eye out in your local paper or parenting magazines for writing contests and other opportunities, and don’t forget to check out Google and Facebookpages that offer advice for parents of younger children. These forums often post photo and essay contests that can help build your child’s college nest egg.4 Scholarships to Apply to Before Senior Year (usnews.com)1. Best Buy @15: Best Buy Children's Foundation will award up to 1,200 scholarships of $1,000 each to students in grades 9-12 who are planning to attend college after high school. Scholarship recipients are selected based on academic achievement, volunteering efforts, and work experience.2. Kohl's Cares Scholarship Program: Kids ages 6 to 18 are eligible for the Kohl's Cares Scholarship Program—provided they have contributed to their community in a meaningful way in the past 12 months by performing volunteer service that helped a non-family member. Students must be nominated for this award, and nominators must be age 21 or older. Parents: Yes, you can nominate your own children for this award.[Find out more about turning your community service into college cash.]3. Raytheon Math Moves U: Raytheon has a middle school scholarship focused on students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grades only, who submit an answer to the question, "How does math put the action in your passion?" Submissions may be multimedia or paper, and awards of $1,000 can be used for "camperships" at a science, technology, engineering, or math-related summer camp—or set aside for the students' freshman year of college.4. Discover Scholarship Program: The Discover Scholarship Program is aimed specifically at high school juniors who have at least a 2.75 cumulative GPA on a 4.0 scale for their 9th and 10th grades. Up to 10 scholarships of $25,000 are awarded each year and may be used for any type of post-high school education or training, certification, etc. at a two- or four-year school. The 2012 program year will open for applications in late 2011.Janine Fugate joined Scholarship America in 2002. She is an alumna of the College of Saint Benedict, Saint Joseph, Minn., and is currently pursuing a Master of Public Affairs at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Fugate is the recipient of numerous scholarships at both the undergraduate and graduate level.Committing to Play for a College, Then Starting 9th GradeHaley Berg, 15, at home with her sister in Celina, Tex. She accepted a soccer scholarship to Texas four years in advance. CreditCooper Neill for The New York TimesSANFORD, Fla. — Before Haley Berg was done with middle school, she had the numbers for 16 college soccer coaches programmed into the iPhone she protected with a Justin Bieber case.She was all of 14, but Hales, as her friends call her, was already weighing offers to attend the University of Colorado, Texas A&M and the University of Texas, free of charge.Haley is not a once-in-a-generation talent like LeBron James. She just happens to be a very good soccer player, and that is now valuable enough to set off a frenzy among college coaches, even when — or especially when — the athlete in question has not attended a day of high school. For Haley, the process ended last summer, a few weeks before ninth grade began, when she called the coach at Texas to accept her offer of a scholarship four years later.“When I started in seventh grade, I didn’t think they would talk to me that early,” Haley, now 15, said after a tournament late last month in Central Florida, where Texas coaches showed up to watch her juke past defenders, blond ponytail bouncing behind.“Even the coaches told me, ‘Wow, we’re recruiting an eighth grader,’ ” she said.In today’s sports world, students are offered full scholarships before they have taken their first College Boards, or even the Preliminary SAT exams. Coaches at colleges large and small flock to watch 13- and 14-year-old girls who they hope will fill out their future rosters. This is happening despite N.C.A.A. rules that appear to explicitly prohibit it.The heated race to recruit ever younger players has drastically accelerated over the last five years, according to the coaches involved. It is generally traced back to the professionalization of college and youth sports, a shift that has transformed soccer and other recreational sports from after-school activities into regimens requiring strength coaches and managers.The practice has attracted little public notice, except when it has occasionally happened in football and in basketball. But a review of recruiting data and interviews with coaches indicate that it is actually occurring much more frequently in sports that never make a dime for their colleges.Early scouting has also become more prevalent in women’s sports than men’s, in part because girls mature sooner than boys. But coaches say it is also an unintended consequence of Title IX, the federal law that requires equal spending on men’s and women’s sports. Colleges have sharply increased the number of women’s sports scholarships they offer, leading to a growing number of coaches chasing talent pools that have not expanded as quickly. In soccer, for instance, there are 322 women’s soccer teams in the highest division, up from 82 in 1990. There are now 204 men’s soccer teams.“In women’s soccer, there are more scholarships than there are good players,” said Peter Albright, the coach at Richmond and a regular critic of early recruiting. “In men’s sports, it’s the opposite.”While women’s soccer is generally viewed as having led the way in early recruiting, lacrosse, volleyball and field hockey have been following and occasionally surpassing it, and other women’s and men’s sports are becoming involved each year when coaches realize a possibility of getting an edge.Precise numbers are difficult to come by, but an analysis done for by the National Collegiate Scouting Association, a company that consults with families on the recruiting process, shows that while only 5 percent of men’s basketball players and 4 percent of football players who use the company commit to colleges early — before the official recruiting process begins — the numbers are 36 percent in women’s lacrosse and 24 percent in women’s soccer.Berg at a recent tournament.CreditSarah Beth licksteen for The New York TimesAt universities with elite teams like North Carolina and Texas, the rosters are almost entirely filled by the time official recruiting begins.While the fierce competition for good female players encourages the pursuit of younger recruits, men’s soccer has retained a comparably relaxed rhythm — only 8 percent of N.C.S.A.’s male soccer athletes commit early.For girls and boys, the trend is gaining steam despite the unhappiness of many of the coaches and parents who are most heavily involved, many of whom worry about the psychological and physical toll it is taking on youngsters.“It’s detrimental to the whole development of the sport, and to the girls,” Haley’s future coach at Texas, Angela Kelly, said at the Florida tournament.The difficulty, according to Ms. Kelly and many other coaches, is that if they do not do it, other coaches will, and will snap up all of the best players. Many parents and girls say that committing early ensures they do not miss out on scholarship money.After the weekend in Florida, the coach at Virginia, Steve Swanson, said, “To me, it’s the singular biggest problem in college athletics.”The N.C.A.A. rules designed to prevent all of this indicate that coaches cannot call players until July after their junior year of high school. Players are not supposed to commit to a college until signing a letter of intent in the spring of their senior year.But these rules have enormous and widely understood loopholes. The easiest way for coaches to circumvent the rules is by contacting the students through their high school or club coaches. Once the students are alerted, they can reach out to the college coaches themselves with few limits on what they can talk about or how often they can call.Haley said she was having phone conversations with college coaches nearly every night during the eighth grade.‘It’s Killing All of Us’The early recruiting machine was on display during the Florida tournament, where Haley played alongside hundreds of other teenage girls at a sprawling complex of perfectly mowed fields.A Sunday afternoon game between 14-year-olds from Texas and Ohio drew coaches from Miami, Arizona, Texas and U.C.L.A. — the most recent Division I national champion. Milling among them was the most storied coach in women’s soccer, Anson Dorrance of North Carolina, who wore a dark hat and sunglasses that made him look like a poker player as he scanned the field.Mr. Dorrance, who has won 22 national championships as a coach, said he was spending his entire weekend focusing on the youngest girls at the tournament, those in the eighth and ninth grades. Mr. Dorrance is credited with being one of the first coaches to look at younger players, but he says he is not happy about the way the practice has evolved.Libby Bassett, an assistant at South Carolina, was among hundreds of college soccer coaches at a recent tournament in Sanford, Fla. Many were scouting eighth and ninth graders.CreditSarah Beth Glicksteen for The New York Times“It’s killing all of us,” he said.Mr. Dorrance’s biggest complaint is that he is increasingly making early offers to players who do not pan out years later.“If you can’t make a decision on one or two looks, they go to your competitor, and they make an offer,” he said. “You are under this huge pressure to make a scholarship offer on their first visit.”The result has been a growing number of girls who come to play for him at North Carolina and end up sitting on the bench.“It’s killing the kids that go places and don’t play,” he said. “It’s killing the schools that have all the scholarships tied up in kids who can’t play at their level. It’s just, well, it’s actually rather destructive.”The organizer of the Florida event, the Elite Clubs National League, was set up a few years ago to help bring together the best girls’ soccer teams from around the country, largely for the sake of recruiters. At the recent event, in an Orlando suburb, an estimated 600 college coaches attended as 158 teams played on 17 fields over the course of three days.Scouts were given a hospitality tent as well as a special area next to the team benches, not accessible to parents, to set up their folding chairs. Nearly every youth club had a pamphlet — handed out by a parent during the games — with a head shot, academic records, soccer achievements and personal contact information for each player.While the older teams, for girls in their final two years of high school, drew crowds of recruiters, they were generally from smaller and less competitive universities. Coaches from colleges vying for national championships, like Mr. Dorrance, spent most of their weekend watching the youngest age group.Despite the rush, there is a growing desire among many coaching groups to push back. At a meeting of women’s lacrosse coaches in December, nearly every group session was dedicated to complaints about how quickly the trend was moving and discussions about how it might be reversed. In 2012, the Intercollegiate Men’s Lacrosse Coaches Association proposed rule changes to the N.C.A.A. to curtail early recruiting. But the N.C.A.A. declined to take them up, pointing to a moratorium on new recruiting rules. (At the same time, though, the N.C.A.A. passed new rules allowing unlimited texting and calls to basketball recruits at an earlier age.)Marc Stein's NewsletterHe's covered Jordan. He's covered Kobe. And LeBron vs. the Warriors. Go behind the N.B.A.'s curtain with the league's foremost expert.“The most frustrating piece is that we haven’t been able to get any traction with the N.C.A.A.,” said Dom Starsia, the men’s lacrosse coach at Virginia. “There’s a sense that the N.C.A.A. doesn’t want to address this topic at all.”In an interview, Steve Mallonee, the managing director of academic and membership affairs for the N.C.A.A., reiterated his organization’s moratorium on new recruiting rules. He said the new rules on texting and calling were allowed because they were a “presidential initiative.”Mr. Mallonee said the N.C.A.A. did not track early recruiting because it happened outside of official channels. He added that new rules trying to restrict the practice would be hard to enforce because of the unofficial nature of the commitments.“We are trying to be practical and realistic and not adopt a bunch of rules that are unenforceable and too difficult to monitor,” he said.Early CommitmentsThe National Collegiate Scouting Association helps athletes navigate the recruiting process. Here is the percentage of N.C.S.A. clients in each sport who received and accepted a scholarship offer before the official recruiting process began.Club Coaches in Key RoleThe early recruiting system has given significant power to club coaches, who serve as gatekeepers and agents for their players.One of the most outspoken critics of this process is Rory Dames, the coach of one of the most successful youth club teams, the Chicago Eclipse. In Florida, Mr. Dames kept a watchful eye on his players between games, at the pool at the Marriott where they were staying. As the 14- and 15-year-old girls went down the water slide, he listed the colleges that had called him to express interest in each one.“Notre Dame, North Carolina and Florida State have called about her,” he said as one ninth grader barreled down the slide.Another slid down behind her. “U.N.C., U.C.L.A. and I can’t even remember who else called me about her,” he said.Mr. Dames said that he kept a good relationship with those programs but that he generally refused to connect colleges with girls before their sophomore year in high school, when he thinks they are too young to be making decisions about what college to attend.Some colleges, though, do not take no for an answer and try to get to his players through team managers or other parents. After one such email was forwarded to him, Mr. Dames shot back his own message to the coach: “How you think this reflects positively on your university I would love to hear.”He did not hear back. Mr. Dames said that when his players wait, they find scholarship money is still available.Most club coaches, though, are more cooperative than Mr. Dames and view it as their job to help facilitate the process, even if they think it is happening too early.Michael O’Neill, the director of coaching at one of the top clubs in New Jersey, Players Development Academy, said that he and his staff helped set up phone calls so his players did not miss out on opportunities. They also tutor the players on handling the process.“You almost have to,” Mr. O’Neill said. “If you don’t, you can get left behind.”Once the colleges manage to connect with a player, they have to deal with the prohibition on making a formal scholarship offer before a player’s final year of high school. But there is now a well-evolved process that is informal but considered essentially binding by all sides. Most sports have popular websites where commitments are tallied, and coaches can keep up with who is on and off the market.Either side can make a different decision after an informal commitment, but this happens infrequently because players are expected to stop talking with coaches from other programs and can lose offers if they are spotted shopping around. For their part, coaches usually stop recruiting other players.“You play this goofy game of musical chairs,” said Alfred Yen, a law professor at Boston College who has written a scholarly article on the topic and also saw it up close when his son was being recruited to play soccer. “Only in this game, if you are sitting in a chair, someone can pull it out from under you.”Girls from the Players Development Academy, a New Jersey club, at the three-day event.CreditSarah Beth Glicksteen for The New York TimesMr. Yen said that colleges withdrew their offers to two boys his son played with, one of whom ended up in junior college and the other at a significantly less prestigious university. Other players who made early decisions went to colleges where they were unhappy, leading them to transfer.The process can be particularly tricky for universities with high academic standards.Ivy League colleges, which generally have the toughest standards for admission, generally avoid recruiting high school freshmen, but the programs do not stay out of the process altogether, according to coaches at the colleges, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the topic.Two Ivy League coaches said they were generally able to look at players with a grade-point average above 3.7 and a score above 2,000 on the College Boards — out of 2,400 — much lower than the standard for nonathlete applicants. Ivy League coaches can put their recruits on a list of preferred candidates given to admissions officers, who in turn help the process along by telling coaches in the summer after an athlete’s junior year whether the player is likely to be admitted — months before other applicants find out.Fearing a Toll on MindsAt the Florida tournament, many players said they had given up all other recreational sports in middle school to play soccer year round.A growing body of academic studies has suggested that this sort of specialization can take a toll on young bodies, leading to higher rates of injury.For many parents, though, the biggest worry is the psychological pressure falling on adolescents, who are often ill equipped to determine what they will want to study in college, and where.These issues were evident on the last morning of the Florida event, on the sidelines of a game involving the Dallas Sting. Scott Lewis, the father of a high school sophomore, said his daughter switched to play for the Sting before this season because her old team was not helping steer the recruiting process enough. He watched scholarship offers snapped up by girls on other teams, he said.“Is it a little bit sick? Yeah,” he said. “You are a little young to do this, but if you don’t, the other kids are going to.”A parent standing next to Mr. Lewis, Tami McKeon, said, “It’s caused this downward spiral for everybody.” The spiral is moving much faster, she said, than when her older daughter went through the recruiting process three years ago.Ms. McKeon’s younger daughter, Kyla, was one of four players on the Sting who committed to colleges last season as freshmen. Kyla spent almost 30 minutes a day writing emails to coaches and setting up phone calls. The coaches at two programs wanted to talk every week to track her progress. Throughout the year, Kyla said, she “would have these little breakdowns.”“You are making this big life decision when you are a freshman in high school,” she said. “You know what you want in a week, but it’s hard to predict what you’ll want in four years.”Kyla said that when she told Arkansas that she was accepting its offer, she was happy about her choice, but it was as if a burden had been lifted from her.“I love just being done with it,” she said.A version of this article appears in print on January 27, 2014, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Committing to Play for a College, Then Starting 9th Grade. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe10 Great Ways to Win a College Scholarship (cbsnews.com)Last Updated Jan 31, 2011 11:29 AM ESTEvery year organizations award more than 1.5 million private college scholarships to students that are worth in excess of $3.5 billion.Want to increase your chances of winning some of this college scholarship money? Here are 10 ways to increase the odds that you'll win a scholarship for college students.1. Give the scholarship sponsor what it wants.A scholarship application often contains the sponsor's scholarship selection criteria, but dig deeper. Research the scholarship sponsor on the web. Look for the organization's mission statement, which you'll often find in the "About Us" section of its website.2. Get involved with your community.Students who volunteer enjoy a huge advantage with scholarship sponsors, says Marianne Ragins, who was featured on the cover of Parade Magazine in 1991, one of the most popular issues in the magazine's history, after winning more than $400,000 in college scholarships. Ragins, who conducts presentations on winning scholarships, says scholarship sponsors are looking for a long-time commitment to volunteering. This bias towards volunteering makes sense since many scholarship providers are nonprofits committed to helping others.3. Look professional.Google your name to make sure that you have a professional online presence, advises Mark Kantrowitz, the publisher of FastWeb and the author of the new book Secrets to Winning a Scholarship. Remove any inappropriate material from Facebook. And don't use a risqué email account. Keep it boring.4. Use a scholarship search engine.Using scholarship search engines will make your job easier. Here are some to check out:FastwebKaarme.comScholarships.comCollege BoardCOLLEGEData5. Don't ignore the optional questions.When supplying your background on scholarship search engines, answer the optional questions. Addressing these questions can generate about twice as many scholarship matches, Kantrowitz says.6. Learn more about scholarship odds.Read this post from CollegeStats.org: Which College Scholarships are Easy to Get? We Have the Data.7. Apply to every eligible scholarship.It's a numbers game and even among the most accomplished students, luck is a factor. Don't ignore the small stuff. Some scholarships worth $1,000 or less may only have 15 or 20 students applying, Ragins says.8. Look for essay contests.Students can be lazy and many will skip scholarship contests that require an essay. Applying for these scholarships could increase your odds of success.9. Be passionate.When you're writing a scholarship essay let your personal voice come through. Include lots of details in your essay that helps reveal who you are. It's usually a good idea to focus on a problem and how you solved it or overcame adversity.10. Think local.Ask your high school guidance counselors about local scholarships. Also check bulletin boards at libraries and outside financial aid offices. Local scholarships are going to be easier to win than regional and national ones.More on CBS MoneyWatch: 10 Most Prestigious Scholarships in America,How Rare Are Full-Ride Scholarships? Lynn O'Shaughnessy is the author of The College Solution and she also writes for TheCollegeSolutionBlog.Scholarships for college students image by Johnny Vulkan. CC 2.0.© 2011 CBS Interactive Inc.. All Rights Reserved.10 Easy Scholarships - College GreenlightNicholas A. Virgilio Memorial Haiku CompetitionThis competition is for students in grades 7 through 12 who are enrolled in school as of September 2014. To enter, applicants must submit up to three haiku poems. All haiku must be previously unpublished, original work, and not entered in any other contest or submitted elsewhere for publication.Odenza Marketing Group ScholarshipTo apply for this scholarship, applicants must submit two small essays, one related to travel, and the other on why they deserve a scholarship.ERCA Community Contribution ScholarshipThis scholarship is for high school students who are legal residents of the United States. To qualify for this scholarship, applicants must have recognized a need or problem in their community, have determined a way to address this need or solve the problem, have developed an action plan, and have worked to put the action plan in place so as to address the need or solve the problem. The action plan must be a unique project developed by the student, not a project developed by an established group of which the student is a member.Potential Magazine Countdown to College ChampionshipThis scholarship is for college-bound teens. Upon signing up for Potential Magazine’s free weekly eNewsletter, students will be entered to win an $1,000 scholarship.National Achievement Scholarship ProgramThis scholarship is for African American high school students. To apply for this scholarship, applicants must complete the PSAT/NMSQT exam and indicate on the test answer sheet that they wish to compete for the Achievement Scholarship.Elizabeth ChereskinHow I Became a Straight-A Student By Following These 7 Rules

This answer may contain sensitive images. Click on an image to unblur it.JACOBINSUBSCRIBEOUR NEW ISSUE – LOOKING AT WHAT THE BERNIE CAMPAIGNS ACCOMPLISHED – IS OUT NOW. SUBSCRIBE IN PRINT TODAY!01.07.2017FRANCEMEDIARELIGIONARTCharlie Hebdo: The Poverty of SatireBYMANUS MCGROGANTwo years after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, we consider the origin and trajectory of the publication.Emeline Broussard / FlickrOur new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today!Following the murderous attack on Charlie Hebdo two years ago today, the satirical paper was catapulted to global celebrity. The French state claimed Charlie as one of its own, President François Hollande equating the killings to an attack on all French. While hypocritically linking arms with tyrants and dictators, Hollande fronted “republican” marches that drew millions onto streets across France, under the Je Suis Charlie slogan. Charlie became a byword for freedom of expression. Once a thorn in the side of the French elites, it was now the incarnation of traditional republican values.Whether Charlie liked it or not, it had also become an avatar of Western antagonism to Islam. Its writers have refuted this cooptation, insisting that they target Islamism rather than ordinary Muslims. They further deny that their caricatures of Muhammad and other Islamic figures constitute Islamophobia (indeed they deny Islamophobia per se), simply stating that they act in their longstanding anticlerical tradition and France’s strong secular laïcité convention.As lead cartoonist and victim Cabu himself stated not long before the attack:I’m a republican. I’m often called an anarchist but not at all; I believe in the rule of law. We are a secular country and secularism has to be respected. That’s it.Ironically this came in a television interview titled: “Cabu, ‘I respect nothing.’”Charlie, Hara-Kiri, and 1968Cabu’s adherence to republican legality stands in marked contrast to the government-baiting attitude of 1970, when Charlie Hebdo was born in defiance of a state ban on its progenitor Hara-Kiri Hebdo. The writers had penned a sarcastic funeral notice at Charles de Gaulle’s death in November of that year. Chief writer Cavanna then tore into state censorship:There’s no censorship in France. France is a great country, a civilized country, a democratic country. Anyone can publish what they want . . . without prior consent of a state official.At that time, liberty of expression was last in the minds of the powers that be. Charlie’s sulphuric, anti-authoritarian output was anathema to the republican state, paranoid that leftist, anarchic provocations might trigger a re-run of May 1968’s social explosion. Repression of the subversive left was the order of the day.Back in 1969, Hara-Kiri Hebdo (Hebdo meaning weekly) had emerged as a mixture of the profane and the political, a blend of the scatological absurdity of 1960s monthly adult comic Hara-Kiri, and the anarcho-leftism of 1968 “movement” journals Action and L’Enragé. The poster-style covers of Hara-Kiri, still in evidence in the Charlie of today, aped those of Action and the famous posters of the Paris Beaux-Arts.While Cavanna applauded the youth-inspired revolt of ‘68, his markedly less political co-founder Choron joked that the rebellion had been the upshot of Hara Kiri’s decade-long derision of traditional and commercial French values. Actually, Hara Kiri Hebdo was a product of its time, one of a slew of new leftist and cultural underground publications that flourished in the aftermath of 1968: La Cause du Peuple, Rouge, Tout!, Actuel, and many more.Indeed in May 1970, hardline interior minister Raymond Marcellin banned the Maoist Gauche Prolétarienne, and jailed the editors of its paper La Cause du Peuple for incitement to murder. It led Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Luc Godard, and other cultural luminaries to hawk the journal on the Parisian boulevards, in defense of free speech.In spite of the distinctly left-wing tone of Hara-Kiri Hebdo, the paper was essentially libertarian and followed no political “line.” Cavanna and Choron let the diverse team of artists and writers pour forth on all manner of political and social questions. If anything, the journal veered towards the newfound ecological movement, while joyfully skewering politicians and patriots. Bad taste was de rigueur. There were no sacred cows.And if Hara-Kiri/Charlie Hebdo contributors got too “militant,” for instance in siding with the embattled leftist groupuscules of ‘68, Cavanna and Choron could put their foot down. Film footage shows them berating anarchist cartoonist Siné when he offered a caricature of Marcellin as a fascist police biker.There was another, questionable, side to the paper, inherited from its parent publication Hara-Kiri: the porn-like images of young women. It was according to Cavanna, deliberate, second-degree humor. The idea was to ridicule reactionary representations — by showing them. “We did it to show how stupid they were.” Ostensibly, Charlie was deliberately sending up the prejudices of the average Frenchman — or the beauf, as Cabu baptized him. This, after all, was satire, a wink to the knowing leftist.Yet Charlie seemed at times to indulge the beauf and his franchouillard narrow-mindedness. No more so than in their portrayal of naked, buxom, and horny young women. It eventually led one of the few women editorialists of the 1970s Charlie, Sylvie Caster, to denounce the crude sexism of the political commentary. Wolinksi, who considered himself a soixante-huitard, was probably the biggest exponent of salacious female caricatures, by his own admission, “a dirty phallocrat.”Similarly, Charlie’s graphic depictions of blacks, Arabs, and other embattled minorities in the early days tended to follow narrow conventional stereotyping. When Malian workers died in a fire in a rundown immigrant hostel on New Year’s Day 1970, Hara-Kiri Hebdo filled its front cover with the grotesque image of a childlike African entranced by the “bidonville lumière” (“shantytown of lights” — a play on “Paris, ville lumière”). The Northern Irish conflict at the time was portrayed as a tussle between drunken Protestant and Catholic thickos, while the beleaguered Palestinian refugees were seen as helpless and embittered.“No sacred cows” meant that while prime targets of Charlie’s iconoclastic satire were the high and mighty, the victims of power and abuse could also be sent up, and sometimes in ways that sided with the beauf. This ambiguous and at times reactionary side to Charlie reflected the fact that there was (and still is) also a right-wing libertarian satirical tradition in France, embodied by journals such as Le Crapouillot.When it came to religion, the early Charlie Hebdo stood in the longstanding anticlerical tradition of French satire and caricature of journals such as Le Père Peinard and La Calotte. But it was not until the appearance of the saintly Pope Jean-Paul II in the late seventies, then the Iranian Revolution, that the journal truly let rip.You don’t need a crystal ball to see that the big losers of that revolution will be those who have to wear its veil. Told to cover up. And those who refuse will be mercilessly punished.This was already an early marker of future attacks on Muslim dress codes, a salvo of anti-Islamist feminism presaging the twenty-first century Charlie. The sense of pessimism also derived from the paper’s plummeting sales at this time — Cavanna and company shut up shop in December 1981, blaming the Left’s newfound complacency with the presidential election of socialist Francois Mitterrand.Charlie 2.0The paper relaunched in 1992, in a France now dominated by economic crisis, mass unemployment, the demonization of immigrants, periods of left-right political cohabitation, and the rise of the far-right National Front. Cavanna set the tone of the new version with this mini-manifesto:Fight for a real democracy, and against all forms of absolutism, dictatorship and their consequences: racism; xenophobia; sexism; exclusion; religious, political or chauvinistic fanaticism; war; militarism; incitation to hatred in all its forms; cult of the leader, and attacks on public freedoms.Clearly, Charlie was still broadly left-wing, or at least libertarian. But the editorial reins had been passed to Val, a former cabaret singer, with mainstream, center-left positions on key questions, somewhat at odds with the hard anarchistic attitudes of the 1970s Charlie. He was seen as being soft on the “plural left” governing coalition of Lionel Jospin; he drew criticism from within and without the journal when he called for NATO intervention in Kosovo; in 2005, he advocated a “Yes” vote in the referendum on the European constitution. Val defended Israel when it came to the Middle Eastern conflict; as such he was at variance with a proportion of the team, supporters of the Palestinian cause.In practice, getting published in Charlie increasingly meant marching in step with Val’s editorial “line.” Those who did not conform to the new regime — such as writers Cyran, Arthur, and Mona Chollet found themselves sidelined. Cyran, in particular, resented this revamp, quitting in 2001 over Val’s “despotic” behavior. He further holds that after 9/11 Charlie developed a virulent Islamophobia, one that handicapped the Left in the face of a growing racism in society at large.Charlie has always countered such charges, stating that it was attacking Islamism, not Islam, and that freedom to criticize religion was in any case a hallmark of democracy and laïcité, values the Left should defend. True to the anticlerical tradition in French satire, Charlie often lampooned the clergy of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in an reactionary alliances against secular education and sexual rights.But it is telling of the critical blind spot that has opened up on the Left in France over Islam that Charlie glossed over the vital contextual distinction between religions in France. It goes without saying that Catholicism is the dominant religion, whereas Islam is the faith of a marginalized population “come from immigration” (to use the questionable French parlance). Moreover, the other longstanding minority religion, Judaism, has had nowhere near the same critical coverage as Islam in Charlie.For the past thirty-five years politicians and media, both left and right, and in the face of a rising populist racism spearheaded by the National Front, have directed a patronizing republican discourse towards immigrants — particularly Muslims of France’s former Magrebi colonies — on the need to “integrate” French society.That first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants are excluded, and therefore largely cannot “integrate” — due to the higher relative poverty, unemployment and discrimination, is all too easily ignored by the power-brokers. And when the poor suburbs explode with rage at police harassment the authorities’ knee-jerk “solution” is to repress. Any reforms that follow barely paper over the social and political cracks. To the disadvantaged position of the four to five million Muslims living in France one can add the stigmatization of Islamic cultural practices: women’s dress, street prayers, and halal meat.While right-wing politicians such as Nicolas Sarkozy treat suburban rioters, many of them young second- and third-generation immigrants, as “scum,” mainstream left leaders such as Valls and Hollande, and even the far left Mélenchon decry “communitarianism” that threatens to break the cohesion of their holy republic. Needless to say the fascist National Front has turned Islam into its ultimate social pariah. The upshot of this very public scapegoating is that — if opinion polls are to be believed — over half of all French believe that Islam constitutes a threat to French identity.Charlie Hebdo has done more than just reflect this hostile sentiment. Even in the months prior to 9/11, the writers were on the offensive against the burqa, the Taliban, and the grisly punishment of lapidation. Cabu in particular loved to set up and knock down religious stereotypes, often blurring the line between Islam and Islamism. For example, in 2002, he dubbed Allah “Nobel War Prize” winner. He then sketched an incendiary cartoon of a demonic, degenerate Muhammad judging a beauty pageant of veiled women (“Miss Sack ‘O Spuds Election”).This earned him death threats that were rapidly denounced in the next issue; Charlie was not going to let up. Indeed, Val stated that “if we retreat, it’ll be like Munich [1938],” one of a number of World War II references he would use in respect to Charlie’s expanding conflict with Islam(ism).When Charlie republished the Danish caricatures of Muhammad — one as a terrorist — in 2006, it did so under the same pretext of freedom of expression. Charges of Islamophobia, if not racism, were dismissed by Val who defended the publication with the rationale that the caricature was simply a mockery of the jihadists’ distorted view of the prophet. Never mind that the original publisher, the right-wing Jyllands Posten, had previously rejected offending images of Christ. Charlie upped the ante with a cover showing Muhammad complaining that “It’s hard to be worshiped by idiots.” Once again the paper saw down death threats, and indeed a won a long, high-profile court case on charges of racism brought by Muslim associations.It was not simply a question of defending the right to criticize religion or its more fanatical aspects. Before long Val had published in Charlie a declaration of war, the “manifesto against Islamist totalitarianism.” Other signatories included writer Salman Rushdie and dandy media philosopher Bernard Henri-Levy, and it was written in a language not dissimilar to that of the “clash of civilizations” and “war on terror” voiced by Western neoconservatives in previous years:Having vanquished fascism, Nazism and Stalinism, the world now faces a new type of global threat: Islamism.Val’s association with the French neoconservative group Cercle de l’Oratoire and its journal Le Meilleur des Mondes (Brave New World) may go some way to explaining this stance.But it was the Siné affair in 2008 that truly exposed how far the paper had shifted under Val. The veteran anarchist — and militant atheist — Siné had “congratulated” then president Sarkozy’s son for allegedly wanting to convert to Judaism in order to marry a rich Jewish heiress, stating that “he’d go far in life.” Following an individual complaint of antisemitism, Siné was told to apologize in the paper, alongside a statement that would dissociate Charlie Hebdo from his comments. When he refused he was sacked. Val then justified the dismissal in his editorial stating that Siné had made an unacceptable (i.e. antisemitic) link between Judaism and “social success.”A tenuous claim to say the least, and Siné’s departure certainly did not meet with unanimous approval in the team or the public at large. Furthermore, the affair further reflected the disproportionate focus on Islamic stereotypes in Charlie (incidentally, its new rival Siné Hebdo was equally Islamophobic). Val left the paper later that year after Sarkozy invited him to take the helm at the France Inter public service radio, an appointment that left a bitter aftertaste both at Charlie and among its readership.However, under new chief editor Charb, there would be no letup in Charlie’s output of Islamophobic caricatures. Already in 2004, Charlie had defended the ban on religious symbols in schools, a move that was commonly understood as targeting the hijab. And the paper did not hesitate to ridicule Muslim women who defended their wearing of Muslim scarves as slaves to false consciousness (and enemies of women’s liberation).In the runup to the ban of the burqa and niqab in 2011, the paper published a regular column dubbed “Burqa of the Week,” in which the garment and its wearers were mercilessly lampooned. There was little sense of leftist irony at Charlie focused on Sarkozy, who was driving through the legislation under the pretext that it demeaned women and violated the allegedly French values of equality and tolerance. But it hardly takes a genius to see that Sarkozy’s “feminist” motives were utterly bogus, the electoral battle with the National Front paramount in his thinking.Charlie returned to depictions of Muhammad in late 2011 with the special issue of Charia Hebdo, where a smiling prophet threatened readers with “one hundred lashes, if you don’t die of laughter.” At that moment the paper’s offices were firebombed and they were forced to relocate. Muslim sensibilities were further pricked in a 2012 issue that further defiled their aniconic tradition, showing Muhammad in pornographic poses — a riff off a provocative anti-Muslim film that had enraged Muslims across the world.After the AttackIn the ten years or so prior to the attack, Charlie saw its sales steadily fall. By late 2014, they were at an estimated 30,000 a week, down from the 120,000 high of the paper’s 1970s heyday. No doubt the general decline in sales of newspapers and magazines partly accounts for this drop. But in spite of Charlie’s unflinching will to provoke, and persistently high media profile, it seems that people just did not find the jokes funny anymore.What had attracted readers was the knowledge that the satirical weekly could boldly cut down the figures of power, prejudice, and hypocrisy, whether through guttural bad taste or radical political humor (or a judicious combination of both). Moreover, one could find the caricatures of Cabu and Wolinski, its two best known cartoonists, in any number of conventional publications (Cabu, in particular, in France’s other major satirical Le Canard Enchainé). Their bawdy and provocative humor had gone shallow. In truth the jokes had become clichés, the left critique formulaic, the offensiveness infantile rather than audacious. Charlie was now more mainstream than underground satirical.And so in the wake of the killings, Charlie Hebdo found itself feted by the political and media leaders d’opinion. The enormous wave of support coupled with generous donations emanating from news groups and the public have guaranteed its survival, resulting in record print runs, and a renewed, extensive base of subscribers. Despite the loss of some of France’s most talented satirists, Charlie Hebdo bounced back. Yet it remains to be seen whether its latest incarnation can ever really recapture its role as establishment bugbear.The first issue to emerge after the killings was a mostly poignant tribute to its dead, yet stubbornly chose to satirize Muhammad again. Gérard Biard’s editorial attacked critics of the paper and cemented its flagship role as a defender of laïcité, lining up with government figures and Charlie readers alike. Another column put aside derision and simply quoted demonstrators extolling the virtues of the French Republic. And in a July 2015 issue Charlie sought further intellectual endorsement of its contribution to the grand tradition of French republicanism from historian Patrick Weil.Perhaps stung by the continued cries of Islamophobia, Charlie (and new chief editor Riss in particular) calibrated its critique of religious cultures during the ongoing, desperate Syrian refugee crisis. One “alternative cover” showed Jesus walking on water while Muslim children drowned in the Mediterranean, underlining the hostility towards (and vulnerability of) Islam in Christian-dominated Europe.Another, more controversial sketch, “So close to the goal,” depicted the lifeless Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi face down in the surf under a McDonald’s billboard declaring: “Special offer! Two kids meals for the price of one.” The resulting furor prompted Riss to issue a “Drawing for idiots” explaining the symbolic detail of what was intended to be an attack on the consumerist West, cruelly impervious to the plight of the world’s poor and downtrodden.But more controversial was Charlie’s exploitation of the Alan Kurdi image in January 2016. Riss drew an aggressive caricature, stating bluntly that had Alan lived, he would have grown up to be an “ass-groper in Germany” — a reference to the New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne committed against German women by (among others) Middle Eastern asylum seekers. Again, the illustration provoked outrage, dividing opinion over whether it constituted a face-value racist conflation, or a deeper satire of media-induced hysteria surrounding sexism within immigrant cultures.Knowing Charlie’s left-wing sympathies and Riss’s response to previous comparable accusations, the latter could initially be assumed. However, as with the paper’s depictions of Muslims in general, the reader is invited here to laugh at a reactionary stereotype (the sexist immigrant) without challenging the prejudice inherent in such images.Unless Charlie is, in a quite extreme “second degree” manner, asking us to recognize the absurdity of Alan becoming a threat to Western women. But actually, it is not clear whether Riss at least partially shares this antagonism, given Charlie’s long-standing denunciation of misogyny in Arab and Muslim societies and communities. Ultimately, as one left critique puts it, “The [Charlie Hebdo] cartoon simply fails as satire, because it is indistinguishable from straightforward racist graffiti.” Indeed, the German far-right Pegida movement organized protests over the New Year’s incidents under the slogan “Rapefugees not welcome here.”Riss had briefly warned, in traditional left-wing fashion, against “the dangers of division” following the November 2015 Paris terror attacks, in which 130 young revelers were slaughtered by a jihadist commando linked to Islamic State. But he only did so as a brief prelude to defending the right to criticize religion and the need to uphold “our basic freedoms.” His editorial slotted into the wartime, siege-like mentality invoked by Hollande after the massacre, by likening Parisians to the Londoners of 1940 under the Blitz: “Determined not to surrender to fear, whatever the slap-in-the-face.”The Paris massacre was a trigger for the intensification of French bombing of ISIS positions in Syria. At home it involved the imposition and extension of a state of emergency, with a nationwide crackdown on “radicalized” elements in the Muslim community and beyond. One might expect critical left journalism to focus on the social causes of Islamist radicalization in France, or to situate the phenomenon of jihadism relative to the West’s geostrategic goals in the Middle East. Instead, Charlie tends to react against extremism within the discursive framework of the “war on terror” in an echo of Val’s earlier polemics against “Islamic totalitarianism.”Islamophobia has continued unabated in France. The summer of 2016 witnessed yet another assault on female Muslim dress codes, this time a burkini ban imposed by thirty Mediterranean municipalities, and endorsed by Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls. Shocking images of armed police ordering a Muslim woman to strip on a public beach did not appear to register with Charlie, whose front page response appeared to add insult to injury: Muslims were jokingly urged to “loosen up” and take to the beaches naked.A further measure of how far Charlie has slipped in its sense of humor, let alone knowing leftist provocation, was seen in September when, following the devastating earthquake in central Italy, victims’ bodies were cast as various forms of twisted pasta covered in tomato sauce. When this tactless caricature was roundly condemned in Italy, artist Coco followed with the brainless chauvinistic riposte that “It wasn’t Charlie Hebdo that built your [ramshackle] houses, it was the mafia.”Where is Charlie Hebdo coming from here? Does freedom of expression now mean gratuitous slander of the oppressed, with the fall-back excuse that it is simply-second degree humor? In this age of deepening war and austerity, surely it behooves avowedly left-wing critique to cut to the political quick instead of resorting to blundering humorless “satire.”SHARE THIS ARTICLEFacebookTwitterEmailABOUT THE AUTHORFILED UNDERFRANCEMEDIARELIGIONARTHOME-FEATUREDFREE SPEECHISLAMOPHOBIACHARLIE HEBDOSECULARISMSUBSCRIBEDONATEOUR NEW ISSUE, “AFTER BERNIE,” IS OUT NOW. OUR QUESTIONS ARE SIMPLE: WHAT DID BERNIE ACCOMPLISH, WHY DID HE FAIL, WHAT IS HIS LEGACY, AND HOW SHOULD WE CONTINUE THE STRUGGLE FOR DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM? 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