By now I'm sure that everybody is aware of the terrorist attacks in Paris that, at the time of writing, have killed more than a dozen people in and around France's capital city. Once again, we're having to face the shocking level of violence and evil that some people are willing to inflict on others in the name of religion.
The attacks began when two gunmen burst into the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. They killed 12 journalists and cops on their rampage, and then fled into the French countryside. They also injured 11 others.
Not long after that, a compatriot of theirs killed five more people and injured 10 others on a rampage of his own. By the end of the weekend, all of the terrorists were dead, which is not at all a surprise.
I'm not going to go on and on about this. We've lived through so many terrorist attacks in this modern era that we all know the standard platitudes, tropes and clichés about strength, unity, courage, mourning, etc. What I will say is that this particular terrorist attack has really hit me hard. Harder than I would have thought it would.
The people murdered in the Charlie Hebdo offices were men and women in the same business that I've spent all of my professional life. They were in an editorial meeting when they were shot down — the kind of meeting that I've so often attended. They were in their place of work — a place that, I'm sure, all of them expected to be reasonably safe.
Because I can identify so closely with the kinds of lives that these people led — maybe not the details, but certainly the broad strokes — I can't help but empathise with them. I can imagine what it would be like to be in the middle of something that I do and have done so often — something so mundane — and to be suddenly faced with such unimaginable terror.
I'm sure that not one of those journalists, as they walked into their workplace that morning, ever expected that they'd never walk back out again. Just thinking about it fills me with profound sadness.
What it doesn't fill me with is fear.
Terrorists do unimaginably evil and violent things in order to fill other people with terror. It's right there in the name. But I refuse to be terrified by these people.
The Charlie Hebdo staff were murdered in cold blood because they believed that the open and free expression of ideas was important. And it is. The people who murdered them had no comprehension of what that kind of freedom means. The terrorists murdered those innocent people because they had different ideas than the gunmen thought their religion allowed.
In the end, what manifested itself on that bloody couple of days was just another shot in an ongoing war. A war that in this case pitted the belief that open expression of ideas is vital to a civilised society against a couple of people whose dogma and ignorance led them to believe that an appropriate response to something they found offensive was murder.
It's easy to be scared by things like this. But I encourage everybody reading this not to give in to fear or even anger.
It's OK to feel sad though. Sad isn't terrified.
Sean Vale
Editor
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