Charlie Hebdo’s journalists were murdered for doing. Now people are being attacked simply for being

After Wednesday’s attack on Charlie Hebdo, an argument doing the rounds was that it would have been better not to publish cartoons that were deliberately provocative when the magazines had already suffered violent attacks. Why should the journalists put themselves and others, including Muslim policeman Ahmed Merabet, at risk of death?

Now two people are dead in a kosher grocers in eastern Paris, perhaps those who thought that it unwise to publish aggressive cartoons can have a think again. Five or six people are believed to be being held hostage in the shop. The shop sells kosher food. Jews buy kosher food. The attackers appear to be killing people not for what they have been doing, but for who they are. Killed for being Jews.

These Islamist terrorists do not confine their rage to cartoons. They want to terrify everyone into doing, saying and believing only things that they approve of. The latest attacks are believed to have been planned by al-Qaeda in Yemen, but in Iraq, Isis have been chopping in half Christian children. Not killed for doing, but killed for being. These terrorists will try to bully and kill anyone who doesn’t fit their precise definition of how live or who to be, from satirical journalists to Christians to other Muslims to Jews. You cannot stop them from being terrorists by being dull because even a dull person who is different to them is a target unless they are also an Islamist.

Even if you are a person who selfishly only thinks about their own freedom to be a Christian or a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist, you must surely realise that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons – whether or not they were the kind of thing you liked looking at – were maintaining the limits of the freedom that you enjoy every single day. We may not all choose to produce the same sorts of artwork with the same messages as the Charlie Hebdo journalists, but they pushed the boundaries in a way that helped the rest of us enjoy the freedoms we take for granted. When we start turning our backs on those who operate at the boundaries, we are turning our own backs on our own freedom to be, to say or to draw.