Cologne Finds Carnival Voice in Quiet Charlie Hebdo Nod
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Carnival participants in the German city of Cologne protested terrorist threats to free speech while honoring a decree by organizers to tone down a tribute to the satirists who died in last month’s Charlie Hebdo attack.
A float featuring a clown watering a garden of pencils with the words “freedom to joke” led the traditional Rose Monday parade through the streets of the old town on Monday. Authorities previously rejected as too provocative a motif by the Koelnische Karnevals-Gesellschaft von 1945 e.V. with the clown blocking an Islamist terrorist’s gun barrel with a pencil.