Free Speech Paid in Blood

A Tunisian shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ fatally stabbed three people at a church in Nice.

It’s not difficult to surmise a motive, as it is very likely in response to French President Macron’s defense of secularism as a French value. That, in turn, was in response to the beheading of the teacher who showed his class the 2012 Charlie Hebdo cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

I'm struggling to think of what a sustainable equilibrium would be and wonder whether this issue might act as a fissure. Acquiescing to the Heckler's Veto is usually a fool's errand, especially if the institutions are on your side. But how sturdy do the institutions have to be when you potentially have a never-ending number of candidates willing to crash themselves on the rocks and exchange their lives for a beheading or two? The Charlie Hebdo massacre involved two people who managed to get machine guns and a grenade/rocket launcher, and instead of targeting basically anything else, they directed that effort towards a cartoon newspaper. I think non-Muslims probably have a difficult time understanding just how utterly enraging depictions of their dear prophet is, let alone ridiculing ones. My Muslim dad, mild-mannered public school teacher by day, was throwing spittle at the very idea that anything like this could even be legal under US law.

I want to be able to say "fuck your feelings" and remind anyone pissed off of the importance of the principle of free expression. But even as early as 2015, the Hebdo attack garnered little sympathy from the (typically left-leaning) intelligentsia, and it fell into the hands of buffoons like Pamela Geller to hold up the mantle.

I'm curious to see where this goes. I want France to be able to stand on the matter of principle, but I wonder how salient that appetite will remain if this form of barbaric retribution becomes anything like a norm.