"Je Suis Charlie" Anniversary

Not a jolly one, but we can hardly ignore it. The first week of January 2015, a dozen people were killed in the Paris editorial offices of Charlie Hebdomadaire.

Of late, it seems that every time a couple of my liberal friends assemble, we get onto this issue. As I am perhaps the farthest left of the lot of us—a European-style democratic socialist—I am not insensitive to the eyebrow-raising the apparent glitch of my insisting Muslim women should not be allowed in public wearing headscarves constitutes, but Europe provides us a very useful illustration of how democracy fares on this question.

To “celebrate” the anniversary, watch (on Netflix) a documentary called Je Suis Charlie, which tells the story of the shooting. At the end of the film, one of the intended cartoonist-victims who lived asks this provocative question: “Who is going to risk doing a drawing, if the penalty is death?”

Read the news out of Koeln (Cologne) Germany. It appears that on New Year’s Eve there were informal, unorganized attacks on women by immigrant men, who apparently felt women shouldn’t be out and about celebrating New Years or not.  

What we need to ask ourselves is not simply: Who is going to risk going out, if you might be raped or beaten up? but what should you expect when you offer democracy to people who do not believe in it?  What choices does this leave us—and every other democracy in the world?