Last month, Renald “Luz” Luzier announced that he would no longer draw Mohammed for the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, saying “it no longer interests me.” Allahpundit found this declaration curious, especially Luz’ contention at the time that “the terrorists did not win,” and Luz’ focus on nationalist exploitation of the attacks rather than the attacks themselves.

It looks like the terrorists did win after all:

Cartoonist Renald Luzier, who drew the newspaper’s first cover after the Jan. 7 attack killed 12 people, said in an interview Tuesday in the daily Liberation that each issue is “torture, because the others are no longer there.” He will leave in September.

“The time came when it was just all too much to bear. There was next to nobody to draw the cartoons… Every print-run was torture because the others are no longer there,” said the cartoonist, who is known widely in France as Luz.

The CBS report also includes a tidbit that might have contributed to Luz’ despair. In the aftermath of the attacks, the magazine got €4.3 million in donations, and there appears to be dissension between staff and management on how to spend it. The publisher has announced that they will have a special commission make that decision, which seems pretty dysfunctional for a relatively small operation that one would expect to have been united in tragedy.

The terrorists got what they wanted out of the attacks, and are still getting what they want. They slaughtered the magazine’s staff and got worldwide attention to their depravity. They got one of the survivors to publicly announce he would no longer draw the cartoons that they dislike, and now they got him to quit altogether.

I don’t blame Luzier a bit for hanging up his pen at Charlie Hebdo, nor for feeling so much pain while trying to continue working with so many of his colleagues gone. But perhaps Luzier would have found it more palatable had he gotten more support from his colleagues and the cognoscenti on the Left, instead of having them rip Luzier and his dead colleagues for having brought it on themselves for the “crime” of offending others. That’s the victory won by terrorists; Charlie Hebdo was the battlefield on which they won it.