Jan 8, 2015 4 min read

We live in an age of unprecedented free expression.

Want to show everyone what you’re having for supper? You can snap a photo of it with your phone and share it with world before you’ve even taken the first bite. Opinions can be served up like salad on social media, blogs, the comments sections on sites maintained by media outlets, or in videos on YouTube. You can spend hours debating topics with fellow obsessives that are both high-flown and mundane – whether Brahms is superior to Beethoven, on the one hand, or if a Norwegian Forest cat is better than a British Shorthair cat, on the other.

The world is our town square, and everyone has his own soapbox.

But against this geyser of free speech there is a powerful counter-reaction by tyrants, zealots and reactionaries who would stamp out dissent and suppress debate. This came to fruition last month when threats of violence were leveled against Sony Pictures if it released the comedy “The Interview,” which depicts the assassination of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and emerged yet again, and in vastly more horrific fashion, Wednesday in Paris, when gunmen with suspected sympathies for radical Islam burst into the office of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine, and killed 10 staffers, and then two police officers – one of whom some reports suggest was Muslim – as they made their getaway.

As the world learned in the last 48 hours or so, Charlie Hebdo is a provocateur of long standing on French newsstands. Some compared it to the Onion, the American satirical website, but Charlie Hebdo is more closely related to Britain’s Private Eye magazine, which savagely skewers celebrities, politicians and institutions, whether it be monarchy or religion. Have some of their stories or cartoons been over the top or juvenile, more interested in provoking reaction than shedding light? From the sound of it, yes. But civilized people don’t greet ideas they abhor with gunfire – they put their own ideas into the marketplace, and let others determine if they are persuasive.

Ultimately, threatening violence against those who offend you isn’t a marker of strength, but of cowardice and weakness.

As with other acts of terror committed by adherents of radical Islam, the killings in Paris will undoubtedly fuel Islamophobia and xenophobia, particularly within France and across Europe, where there are many more immigrants from the Middle East. Just as reasonable people are appalled by the acts of those who killed the writers and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, they must resist the temptation to assume Islam in and of itself is a breeding ground for nihilistic violence and is divorced from the norms of enlightened, 21st century society. There are millions of Muslims across the globe who have no interest whatsoever in engaging in terrorism. They occupy all kinds of professions and live in many different places and, like their neighbors of other faiths, go about the business of living without causing a ripple. In fact, many Muslims were quick to condemn the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices, as they were quick to condemn other terrorist acts.

Juan Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, pointed out in the wake of the carnage in Paris that discrimination against Muslims is something al-Qaeda and its brethren would welcome because it would create a common political identity and “sharpen the contradictions” between Muslims and the rest of society – a strategy used by “sociopaths and totalitarians,” according to Cole.

He added, “Extremism thrives on other people’s extremism, and is inexorably defeated by tolerance.”

Those are words we all must heed.