Je suis Charlie

I was searching for words to describe this morning's attempt to machinegun free speech, to silence the joke. It is shocking yet, I fear, hardly surprising in a world that daily turns the offended into victims.

As ever in this free world, I found the words. They are someone else's words - Alex Massie at the Spectator:

But what else can we do? Only, perhaps, this. We can hold the line. We can make our stand, a stand for liberalism and reason and liberty and we can hope – however flickeringly – that this will, in time, be enough to prevail.

Je suis Charlie? In truth, I don’t know about that. I hope so. But, really, I don’t know if enough of us are Charlie Hebdo just as I know too few of us were prepared, 25 years ago, to say I am Salman. But there is no longer either the time or room to hide. If you were not Charlie Hebdo yesterday it is time, today, that you were.

So I am.

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