[2] Since the killings, she has become a prominent secularist and campaigner for universal human rights,[3] speaking publicly around the world about Islam and free speech.
She left Charlie Hebdo on 3 January 2017, citing the magazine's adoption of an "editorial line demanded by Islamists" as one of the reasons for her departure.
However, in December 2023, she was stripped of the title after she reposted a statement on Twitter mounting a Palestinian genocide accusation against Israel in light of the 2023 Israel–Hamas war and also likening Zionism to Nazism.
She later said that she "wanted to understand how they first could put out the enormous intellectual effort that it takes to escape from one form of brainwashing, only to voluntarily join another religion.
One of the crimes for which she was arrested was at a protest picnic in 2009, which then involved her eating lunch in a public park in defiance of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.
At a lunch, editors Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier and Laurent "Riss" Sourisseau invited her to join an editorial meeting on the coming Wednesday.
In order for the magazine to be able to afford to employ her, cartoonist Rénald "Luz" Luzier offered to take a pay cut.
[1][2][8] She wrote the text for the 2013 special issue of Charlie Hebdo, a comic-strip retelling of the life of Muhammed, which intensified the harassments and death threats directed at the magazine.
"[2] In a 9 January article for Le Monde, she recalled her massacred colleagues and praised Charlie Hebdo as an "edgy newspaper" but one that "never takes itself seriously."
They tweeted under a hashtag translated as #MustKillZinebElRhazouiInRetaliationForTheProphet and posted her personal details, pictures of her husband and sister, and a map showing places she had visited, along with photographs of ISIS beheadings.
[2][11] Her visit to Chicago, sponsored by the university's French Club, marked the first time a Charlie Hebdo journalist had spoken in the United States since the attack.
[13] She formalized her departure on January 3,[14] and criticized the magazine three days later, on the eve of the massacre's second anniversary, for following the "editorial line demanded by Islamists" and for no longer being motivated to draw Muhammad.
[15] She became the subject of a documentary titled Rien n'est pardonné ("Nothing is Forgiven"), directed by Vincent Coen and Guillaume Vandenberghe and co-produced by Belgium's Francophone RTBF network.
[14] In November 2019, she was awarded the Simone Veil Prize by the Conseil régional d'Île-de-France for her defense of secularism in France and fight against Islamism.
This award was revoked by Valérie Pécresse in December 2023 after the grandson of Simone Veil accused Rhazoui of abusing and relativizing the memory of the Holocaust, this was in response to Rhazoui retweeting a post accusing Israel of Palestinian genocide during the 2023 Israel–Hamas war, and which compared Zionism to Nazism and the Holocaust.
[18] In November 2019, on a televised broadcast on CNews, she triggered a polemic, by saying during a debate on urban violence: "The police must shoot real bullets in these cases."
She had her Simone Veil Prize revoked after she shared a thread -originally posted by journalist Benjamin Rubinstein- on the X social media platform comparing the unfolding Israeli war on Gaza to Nazi Germany's holocaust.