Qui est Charlie?

In case you've been living under a rock or say in a Montana cabin in the woods or one of the other few places left out there without access to Internet or TV or radio, around lunchtime on the 7th of January, two brothers named Cherif and Said Kouachi, armed with assault rifles, masked, and dressed all in black, entered the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people of which included 8 journalists, a visitor to the magazine, a building caretaker, and two police officers.

According to the BBC and other news sources, and what seems kind of obvious anyways given things that have happened in the past with, for example, that whole thing with the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten after they published a series of cartoons that depicted Muhammad, the attack was some kind of retribution for Charlie Hebdo's publishing satirical cartoons that depicted the prophet Muhammad. Witnesses claim they heard the shooters yell "We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad" after carrying out the attack.

In the wake of this attack, the slogan "Je suis Charlie" echoed across the Internet through social media as people declared their support for and belief in freedom of speech. Others argued that, while they clearly don't condone the attack in any way, shape, or form, Charlie Hebdo was stupid to do something just to antagonize people, and weren't they kind of playing with fire so to speak in publishing something that they knew would be frowned upon by millions, and isn't Charlie Hebdo kind of racist for printing what they print? [the answers are "maybe" and "no"].

Pemulis believes in freedom of expression not only because it's a philosophically defensible right, but especially because if he doesn't then he's pretty much just saying that he supports terrorism and saying that is illegal, or at least it should be. Nobody supports terrorism (come on!), and everyone believes in freedom of speech, so because, for example, Algerian foreign minister Ramtane Lamamra couldn't show his support strongly enough in Algeria (where public protests are banned), he had to travel all the way to Paris to participate in the 4 million-strong march for freedom of expression. This is a man who believes in freedom of speech!

And because Pemulis believes so strongly in freedom of speech, he was right there (in spirit) with Ramtane and Angela and François and all the other nearly 4 million in Paris the other day to show that we will not be intimidated and that we forcefully believe in freedom and the freedom to say what we will. He couldn't make it though because there was another protest at the same time that he had already committed to. Apparently Norman Finkelstein was going to give a talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here in Munich. But everyone knows that guy's an anti-semite. Free speech should only be protected if it's true and he's just going to take the Palestinian side. He'll incite a bunch of hatred and we need to prevent that. Right?