A murder in Paris

Last Friday Samuel Paty, a French middle-school teacher, was murdered in a suburb of Paris.  He is the latest victim of religious bigotry and hate and of the fanatics' determination to impose their ridiculous and barbaric taboos on entire societies.

A few days earlier, Paty had been teaching a regular class on freedom of expression as part of the standard French school curriculum.  As part of the class he showed his students two of the now-famous Muhammad cartoons which were published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005 and reprinted in Charlie Hebdo in 2015, leading to murderous violence by Islamist thugs in both cases.  The Muslim father of one student complained to the school and on Facebook.  A local mosque posted a video on the internet containing threats against Paty.  Finally, last Friday, a Muslim fanatic murdered him outside the gates of the school and sawed his head off with a knife.

If there is any positive side to this sickening story, it's the vigor with which French society and the French leadership have responded, upholding the values of free expression and secularism.  Thousands turned out at rallies in cities across the country in honor of Paty and in defiance of the Islamists.  President Macron posthumously awarded Paty the Légion d'honneur, describing him as "the face of the Republic" and those involved in his murder as "cowards" and "barbarians".  The government has closed down the mosque which posted threats against Paty, and has arrested about a dozen people, including students who identified him to the murderer (the murderer himself was shot and killed by police minutes after he killed Paty).

Most Muslims in Europe are assimilating into mainstream European culture and becoming more secular, but there remains a minority of true believers who are Europe's nearest equivalent of the bigoted, dominionist fundamentalist Christians of the US.  Their numbers in Europe are too small to hope for political power, but they are more willing to resort to violence to terrorize people who don't kowtow to their taboos.  And don't forget that the same mentality holds sway, to varying degrees, over the vast belt of territory from Pakistan to Morocco, using force and fear to impose medieval rules and restrictions on hundreds of millions of people, growing numbers of whom are themselves secular and even non-religious but know all too well how dangerous it is to speak or act in ways that the devout bigots and thugs might disapprove.

This is war.  Freedom of expression, an essential part of democracy and the free way of life, is under threat, and all of us must be ready to stand up for it as the French are doing, without any "but, however, on the other hand" or any compromise with the apologists for murder and terror.  Anyone who uses violence to suppress a dissenting opinion is evil, and anyone who tries to justify or legitimize doing so is evil.  And that's all they are.