The most idiotic responses to the Charlie Hebdo shooting

There were plenty of ways to respond to the Charlie Hebdo shooting - rage, sorrow, art, or this striking show of defiance in Nice on Wednesday evening. Then there were these:

Britain First

In a move Hope Not Hate called "sickeningly vulgar", Britain First used the opportunity to try to sell merchandise by including a link an online shop selling its branded merchandise named the "Patriot Store", in a post about the shootings on its Facebook page.

Anjem Choudhary

For some unfathomable reason, USA Today gave hate preacher Anjem Choudhary a platform to discuss the killings. In an op-ed for the paper Choudhary said the "punishment" for those who insult the Prophet Mohamed is death, adding:

Why in this case did the French government allow the magazine Charlie Hebdo to continue to provoke Muslims, thereby placing the sanctity of its citizens at risk?

Fox News Part I

The channel had the same, semi-Pavlovian response it has to all tragedies: it used the massacre as an excuse to call for more guns.

The channel's Eric Bolling called for the police to "militarise", adding: "It's not a police state, it's a safe state."

There's been a very serious push from the left saying 'let's not over-militarise our cops.' That [the Paris massacre] should put an end to that discussion. We should over-militarise.

Fox News Part II:

In the wake of the massacre, Fox's Gretchen Carlson knew who was really at fault: Barack Obama. She criticised the US administration for not called the attack "terrorism" quickly enough, ignoring the fact that Obama had released a statement calling the killings a "terrorist attack" on the day of the shooting.

Watch the full clip below, if you can bear to.

Donald Trump

If Fox News distilled all their values into human form, that person would probably be Donald Trump. In a series of tweets responding to the attack, Trump managed to both criticise Obama and blame the extent of terror on France's gun laws, writing: "Remember, when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns!".

Marine Le Pen

This morning the leader of the right-wing National Front party tweeted that, if elected her party would impose a referendum on the return of the death penalty in France. “Personally , I think that possibility should exist," she wrote on Twitter.

Nigel Farage

The UKip leader has found another thing to blame on immigration: the massacre. Speaking to LBC he blamed a "fifth column" in our society for the killings, saying:

I don't think anyone can pretend there is a quick fix to this. We have I'm afraid, and mercifully it's small, but we do have a "Fifth Column" within our countries. On a cultural level, what price anybody who is a stand-up comic, a cartoonist, a newspaper columnist, who wants to say something critical about Islam at all.

WikiLeaks

No, this tragedy is not about Julian Assange:

Don Lemon

This is the moment that Don Lemon - last seen on i100.co.uk offering a woman who alleged she was forced to give Bill Cosby a blow job tips on how “not to perform oral sex” - asked Arsalan Iftikhar, a human rights lawyer and senior editor of the Islamic Monthly, if he supported Isis.

From what we can gather there was no reason for the question apart from the fact he was talking to a Muslim.

Geert Wilders

In a YouTube message Dutch politician Geert Wilders - who is facing trial for inciting racial hatred - called for the end of "immigration from Islamic countries" and said it was time for his country to "de-Islamicise".

More: Charlie Hebdo attack latest : What we do and do not know