Not just France was under siege, it was the entire world. The attack on the office of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly was an attack on civilization, liberty and freedom of expression. It was an attack on the heart of humanity. Journalists armed with pen are faced in cross fire with terrorists with automatic weapon, its senseless bloodletting-an unjustified carnage.
From Africa to Asia, Australia to the United States, Europe and all nooks and crannies of the world, people watch with rapt attention as the ugly drama in Paris came to a closure yesterday. The 3 militants were killed by French Forces but 17 innocent lives were also lost including Charlie Hebdo journalists, hostages at the Kosher supermarket and 3 police officers.
The dramatic police actions began in the town of Dammartin-en-Goele, where the two brothers who touched off the crisis on Wednesday in a bloody rampage on the offices of a satirical newspaper were holed up in a printing plant. As night fell, they emerged from a crack in the door of the plant, guns blazing in an apparent death pact. Police responded with stun grenades before they killed the men, who were still firing as they fell to the floor.
Twenty-six miles south, a third man, connected with the brothers and was suspected of gunning down a police officer on Thursday, brought terrorism to a corner of multicultural east Paris on Friday. He sprayed a kosher grocery with bullets, killing four people, before taking 16 hostages.
The man, Amedy Coulibaly, 32, a French citizen of Senegalese descent, later died in the police raid to free the hostages, staged only minutes after the confrontation ended with the brothers, Said Kouachi, 34, and Cherif Kouachi, 32. A fourth suspect — Coulibaly’s girlfriend, Hayat Boumeddiene, 26 — remained at large.
While the horrific drama in Paris unfolds, journalists around the world show solidarity with Charlie Hebdo. Germany’s biggest-selling daily, Bild, filled the top half of its front page with the headline “Cowardly Murderers!” and printed a black back page with the words “Je suis Charlie.” “The only thing we can do against this is to live fearlessly,” Editor-in-chief Kai Diekmann said in an editorial. “Our colleagues in Paris have paid the ultimate price for freedom. We bow before them.”
Peter Neumann, a security expert at King’s College London, said the attack has won widespread attention on the Internet because it reflects an assault on values — unlike other recent terror incidents, such as those at a cafe in Sydney or outside parliament in Ottawa, which were seen as attacks directed at local targets. Many people are stepping forward to defend their principles because they see their basic rights threatened. “It has been framed as an attack on a principle, rather than a specific target,” said Neumann, director of the university’s International Center for the Study of Radicalization.
In Tunisia, the birthplace of one of the slain cartoonists, Georges Wolinski, dozens paid homage to Charlie Hebdo in a candlelight vigil outside the French ambassador’s residence. “These people were executed at point-blank range just because of drawings — drawings that didn’t please everyone and provoked anger and controversy but still were just drawings,” said journalist Marouen Achouri.
Editors at newspapers around the world expressed support by featuring subversive cartoons or reprinting some of the Paris weekly’s provocative covers. Dozens declared “We are Charlie Hebdo” on their front pages.
The Danish paper Jyllands-Posten, which has faced numerous threats and foiled attacks for publishing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in 2005, issued a black front page with a caption that said the free world has a responsibility to protect democracy against “religious frenzy.”
In Spain, the Madrid suburb of Rivas Vaciamadrid announced Thursday it planned to name a street, plaza or public space “Charlie Hebdo” in honor of the victims and the freedom of expression.
The weekly performed a public service because “a society without satire and criticism is a society in a vegetative state,” Mayor Pedro del Cura said.
