Eight months after it suffered one of the worst terrorist attacks in French history, the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo continues to provoke wrongheaded, confused and even cowardly analysis that disregards the facts and betrays a failure to understand â?? or a refusal to recognize â?? the stakes we in the West all have in what the publication stands for: freedom of expression.
Lest we forget those facts: on Jan. 7, the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi burst into the Paris headquarters of Charlie Hebdo, and, shouting â??Allahu akbar!â? systematically gunned down staff members and others present. After doing so, they announced â??We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad! We have killed Charlie Hebdo!â? Their motive: the cartoonists had satirized, on many occasions, the Prophet Muhammad, whose depiction Islam forbids. Put succinctly: inspired by their religion, the Kouachi brothers murdered cartoonists for drawing cartoons. They murdered for Islam.
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