The night was bitter cold as the frigid weather from the Midwest began to barrel into the Northeast. Outside the cottage, the wind blew and you could hear the wind swooshing through the barren branches of the trees. It was a good night to be snuggled in the cottage, watching episodes of Netflix’s Marco Polo series.
When I woke this morning, I did, as I usually do, check what emails have come in while having my first cup of coffee. There was one from CNN Breaking News that announced that three masked men had entered the offices of France’s satiric magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and killed ten. The number would later rise to twelve, including two policemen.
Eleven more staff were wounded, four seriously.
It was an operation carried out with military precision, happening on the one day a week that all staff would be at the office for the weekly staff meeting. As I write this, the three killers are still on the loose. America and the UK have pledged assistance. It is presumed the masked men were Islamic radicals offended by Charlie Hebdo’s unrelenting satire of Islamic Radicalism.
While constantly shocked by mass killings on our home ground, we are unaccustomed to stories like this from Paris, which has not suffered an attack like this since 1961.
Fear of all kinds walks the streets and boulevards of the City of Light tonight. Parisians are afraid. French Muslims are afraid; worried that this will accelerate the anti-Muslim sentiment sweeping secular France and give more wind to the sails of the Far Right.
Interestingly enough, even as anti-Muslim sentiment rises so has anti-Semitism. Not just in France but across Europe.
Thousands gathered in Germany to protest the presence of Muslims within that country’s borders. The Cathedral in Cologne turned off its lights in protest of the protest.
There will be a national day of mourning in France tomorrow and, for a while, at least, the shock of what has happened will hold the country together. Thousands have gathered in Paris to hold their pens in the air as a sign of solidarity with the dead journalists. The same is happening in Trafalgar Square in London.
Everywhere, people are holding signs that pronounce: Je Suis Charlie. I am Charlie.
Charlie Hebdo was raucous, outrageous and often controversial. It was firebombed three years ago after it published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed, a thing forbidden in Islam. So, today, there was no sign that let the attackers know which offices belonged to Charlie Hebdo. They forced that out of a woman at gunpoint.
Among those who were killed was Stephane Charbonnier “Charb”, the editor, one of two who had a police officer assigned to him after previous death threats. Also dead is an eighty-year-old cartoonist, Georges Wolinski, considered one of the world’s great cartoonists and one with a wicked sense of humor.
Really, an eighty year old?
While what Charlie Hebdo does is often outrageous and perhaps a bit profane, it exists in a country where free press and free speech are constitutional rights. And that is why so many are carrying signs that say Je Suis Charlie. I am Charlie.
They are supporting the right to free speech, not just in France but around the world where there are those, including these three masked men, who would extinguish that right. They pronounced themselves Al Qaeda when they stormed the building.
They wanted to turn out the lights at one establishment in hopes it would cause fear in others – as it probably will – but against that are the thousands standing in the cold in London and Paris and other places saying, Je Suis Charlie.
Je Suis Charlie.
Letter from the Vineyard 
Letter From New York 01 08 15 Starting with the Magna Carta…
January 8, 2015To the left of me, the Hudson River is steel grey, ice clinging to its shores. The sun is just beginning to set to the West. I’m headed north after a day in the city, going home to see if my pipes have frozen.
It is bitterly cold here; not as cold as the Midwest but nearly so. I don’t remember a time when the wind chill was predicted to reach minus thirty-five in Claverack, not in the fourteen years I have been here.
It is beautiful, this ride up the Hudson, good for thinking and pulling together one’s thoughts or to just absorb the beauty. In the clear channel of the river, barges plow their way through the frigid waters.
In France, the hunt for the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo killings is focused on northern France. In New York, at Penn Station, squads of State Police were present as security throughout the city has been heightened. Extra police are stationed at various news outlets today in case anyone in New York should decide to play copycat.
For a moment today, distracted by the cold, I had forgotten about the massacre in Paris and the ramifications it would have in New York. Whenever there is violence in a western city, New York beefs up security reflexively. We go about our business but never forget we feel like a bull’s-eye is on our back.
Mayor DeBlasio phoned the Mayor of Paris and offered his condolences.
There has been much written today about freedom of the press and Charlie Hedbo, including a very moving one from a journalist from Wired, reporting from the Consumer Electronics Show happening in Vegas. I tweeted his article out today.
In Yemen, thirty-seven were killed in a car bomb attack. In Nigeria, two thousand have died in the latest onslaught of the Boko Haram. But those two events have not captured the world’s attention in the way that the Charlie Hedbo killings have. The articles I’ve read today have speculated it was because they were journalists and freedom of the press is one of the sacred tenets of the West.
800 years ago in 1215, a group of rebel Barons coerced the Magna Carta out of King John, beginning the ongoing process that resulted in our Constitution. 800 years of growing freedom and a few masked men want to roll it all back.
It may be that this assault on journalists has forced us all to think about the freedoms we have as evidenced by Charlie Hedbo exerting its privilege to be provocative, profane, rebellious, etc. It is a privilege that has been earned over generations from the Barons of England to our rebellious Founding Fathers to the peasants who stormed the Bastille in Paris to those who are fighting today in various parts of the world to hold back the darkness.
And that is why, I think, Charlie Hedbo has been so deeply felt by so many. The killings were designed to kill something greater than the poor souls who died; it was an assault of our Western sense of freedom.
Tags:Boko Haram, Charlie Hedbo, Founding Fathers, King John, Magna Carta, Mathew Tombers, Mayor DeBlasio
Posted in Mathew Tombers, Social Commentary | 1 Comment »