Less than four months after Islamic fanatics stormed the Paris offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and butchered 12, while accepting the George Polk career award Friday, left-wing cartoonist Garry Trudeau blasted the dead with the claim that they had “wandered into the realm of hate speech.” He also added that “free speech… becomes its own kind of fanaticism.”

Without irony, after punching 12 of his dead colleagues, the creator of “Doonesbury” said that a cartoonist’s job is to “punch up” not down.

What Trudeau fails or chooses not to understand is that rebellion is not hate speech. Charlie Hebdo was not gratuitously mocking Mohammed or Jesus Christ or the Pope. For the cause of free speech, Charlie Hebdo was pushing back against what it rightly saw as creeping fascism, especially Islamic fascism, in the most blatant and in-your-face way possible.

As a devout Catholic, I take no pleasure in seeing my faith debased. Context matters, though, and while I may have winced at times, I understood and appreciated Charlie Hebdo’s intentions. That’s what makes Trudeau’s comments so sinister. To accuse Charlie Hebdo of Hate Speech is to attack their intentions. It is obvious this far-left outlet was furthering the righteous cause of free speech.

As a vehicle to tell a bigger moral story, the Bible itself uses countless disturbing tales of sex and violence. It is the cause that matters, not the vehicle used to further that cause.

It is also obvious that Charlie Hebdo was fighting for this cause in a way Trudeau never would: bravely, and in the face of legitimate threats.

There’s a saying that if you scratch a liberal, underneath you will reveal a fascist. With Trudeau, you will also find a coward, a hack decades past his prime, surviving on the affirmative action of the same left-wing mainstream media editorial pages he would never challenge or provoke, for fear it might ding his vast fortune.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC