‘You have insulted the prophet – we are al-Qaida Yemen.’ These words, terrifying yet clichéd, were spat at a female cartoonist just moments before the massacre of 12 people in and around the offices of the magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015. Their crime? Drawing.
The trial of those accused of abetting the slaughter continues in Paris this week. We should all be following. That this harmless activity, favoured mainly by schoolchildren, architects and retirees, now carries a death sentence to be meted out by any degenerate with a warped adherence to seventh century religious texts is a societal evolution not to be ignored. Of course, it’s only the alleged secondary culprits who made it this far. The killers, two brothers, named Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, chose suicide by cop just 48 hours after the murders.
The Kouachis were banal in their inadequacies: broken home, urban alienation, crime and the inevitable radicalisation in prison.
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