In Paris on January 7 at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, a mass shooting took place leaving 12 people dead including head editor, Stephané Charbonnier. The terrorist attack quickly gained international attention due to its nature and its attack on freedom of speech.
This attack was in response to a comic Charlie Hebdo published depicting Muhammad. In islamic faith, it is illegal for any Muslim to portray or show this image. The comic was used in a satirical nature, but these terrorists and others took it offensively. Some took it so personally, that they turned to violence to display their outrage.
I understand both sides of this story. As humans we have to learn to accept others beliefs and act respectively towards them. Charlie Hebdo offended many people when they published this comic, but they probably knew the response they were going to get. Maybe not predicting the deathly level it got too, but having some sort of idea of the controversy it would create. And I think the magazine thrived on the controversy. Being a satirical magazine, they lived off provocative articles and graphics. This was not out of the ordinary for them; they published things like this in every issue. The point of this magazine is to provoke some sort of thought within the reader's mind. They want to make people think and they need to print something that will invoke that thought, and they don't really care how. This time they published something offensive, and it made people talk, which was their goal. They were doing their job and there is absolutely no logical reason that by publishing this comic, they should have been sentenced to death.
There is a saying: violence is not the answer. This statement couldn't be more true. There are so many more productive and safe ways for these people to display their displeasure with this comic. The drastic lengths they went to are crazy and they directly contradict what they are fighting for. The terrorists killed in the name of their religion. They thought that the killing was justified because of Muhammad's picture being shown, but Muslims don't condone killing either. Their religion doesn't say that killing is okay. By "protecting" their religion, they directly defied it at the same time.
I understand their displeasure and how disrespected they felt, but I can't rap my head around why they felt they needed to kill people over it. If anything, they made people support the magazine even more, and they attracted even more attention to the disrespectful image.
They created a situation where they aimed to dismantle and attack freedom of speech if it didn't complement their views. But that is the whole idea of freedom of speech. People are meant to have different opinions and different views. You can't try to subdue the views and opinions of other people because they will only grow stronger. The only opinions you will alter by committing terrorist acts are the opinions of other people on you and those similar to you. The only thing these terrorists did was tarnish the reputation of other muslims around the world. Sure, it was offensive for Charlie Hebdo to publish that comic that those writers thought was funny, but it was even more offensive for someone else to try and condemn those thoughts by killing those involved.
People can have different opinions, but no one has the right to make you think that your opinion is unvalidated or morally wrong.
#jesuischarlie
Kendall
