The Aftermath of the Cartoonists’ Murders in France

There is a door-to-door manhunt seeking the murderers of the cartoonists’ and editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo being conducted in the north of France:

PARIS — Thousands of heavily armed French police conducted house-to-house searches Thursday in a heavily forested area north of Paris where two suspects wanted for the terrorist killings at a satirical newspaper were reported seen and may have robbed a gas station.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls put the Picardy region, which stretches to the English Channel, on the highest alert level, on par with the alert in effect for the entire Ile-de-France region that includes Paris.

France’s Interior Ministry said 88,000 people have been deployed in the massive manhunt for Said Kouachi, 34, and Cherif Kouachi, 32, who are suspected of killing 12 people in the assault on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have all produced editorials on the murders.

New York Times:

There are some who will say that Charlie Hebdo tempted the ire of Islamists one too many times, as if coldblooded murder is the price to pay for putting out a magazine. The massacre was motivated by hate. It is absurd to suggest that the way to avoid terrorist attacks is to let the terrorists dictate standards in a democracy.

This is also no time for peddlers of xenophobia to try to smear all Muslims with a terrorist brush. It is a shame that Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Front party, which has made political gains stoking anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim fears, immediately sought political advantage with talk of “denial and hypocrisy” about “Islamic fundamentalism.”

It’s being widely ignored here but Muslim leaders in France have roundly condemned the murders.

Washington Post:

In the aftermath of its worst terrorist attack in decades, France will need to reexamine its policies for protecting journalists and other vulnerable targets on its territory; the measures taken to guard Mr. Charbonnier proved inadequate. The threat the country faces from Islamic extremists is likely to get worse: Hundreds of its citizens have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. President François Hollande, who said that other terrorist attacks inside France had recently been foiled, appropriately raised the country’s alert status to its highest level.

Equally important is that media across the West refuse to be cowed by violence. The attack in Paris comes after a year in which two U.S. journalists who traveled to Syria were beheaded by the Islamic State and theaters across the country refused to screen a movie lampooning North Korea because of the threat of violence. Such acts cannot be allowed to inspire more self-censorship — or restrict robust coverage and criticism of Islamic extremism.

Wall Street Journal:

Western leaders also need to be more forthright in defense of liberal values. They have a lot of ground to make up. Jacques Chirac, then the President of France, denounced Charlie Hebdo’s decision to reprint the Danish Muhammad cartoons in 2006. The Obama Administration made a similar mistake in September 2012 when it denounced the so-called Prophet Muhammad movie and blamed it for the attacks in Benghazi.

This is exactly the wrong signal, since it implicitly legitimizes illiberal offense-taking and sends mixed messages about the West’s commitment to its core values. Islamists gain confidence in their violent means when they see this lack of self-confidence in the West. It may be necessary to warn against “Islamophobia,” as German Chancellor Angela Merkel recently did. The West needs Muslim allies. But more Islamophobia is inevitable unless Muslim leaders police their own fanatics and Western leaders stop apologizing for Western principles like free speech.

There is more reaction to be found at memeorandum.

I cannot predict what the political consequences of the murders will be although I think it’s certain that it will have them. I’m afraid that little good will come of them. Juan Cole speculates:

Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination.
This tactic is similar to the one used by Stalinists in the early 20th century. Decades ago I read an account by the philosopher Karl Popper of how he flirted with Marxism for about 6 months in 1919 when he was auditing classes at the University of Vienna. He left the group in disgust when he discovered that they were attempting to use false flag operations to provoke militant confrontations. In one of them police killed 8 socialist youth at Hörlgasse on 15 June 1919. For the unscrupulous among Bolsheviks–who would later be Stalinists– the fact that most students and workers don’t want to overthrow the business class is inconvenient, and so it seemed desirable to some of them to “sharpen the contradictions” between labor and capital.
The operatives who carried out this attack exhibit signs of professional training. They spoke unaccented French, and so certainly know that they are playing into the hands of Marine LePen and the Islamophobic French Right wing. They may have been French, but they appear to have been battle hardened. This horrific murder was not a pious protest against the defamation of a religious icon. It was an attempt to provoke European society into pogroms against French Muslims, at which point al-Qaeda recruitment would suddenly exhibit some successes instead of faltering in the face of lively Beur youth culture (French Arabs playfully call themselves by this anagram). Ironically, there are reports that one of the two policemen they killed was a Muslim.