The discussion of these images *in context* has for years included at least the following competing and antagonistic claims
(a) They are progressive because of the satirical tradition they lay claim to (which is not historical analysis, that’s merely an ideological claim)
(b) they are anti-racist because CH is not racist and can therefore freely employ imagery generated in the colonial past for satirical use in the postcolonial present
(c) these images are blasphemous and that is good/bad
(d) the choice to employ imagery from the colonial past for satirical ends is lazy and tone-deaf because this has been critiqued by people who do not float free of the associations of that imagery in social context
(e) that to continue to assume that caricatures of Muslims are merely and solely functioning on the plane of satirical critique of religion in a national and international political context of anti-Muslim animus is naive at best and republican elitism at worst
(f) that the former process is precisely how secular republicanism generates racialisation while denying it
(g) that CH had financially benefited in recent years from hewing closely to liberal forms of anti-Muslim racism.
So the sudden fixation on the relativity of context in defence of secular universalism manages to neglect a critique by many French people in part made because they are never fully regarded as belonging to France…