The Sword Is Mightier Than the Pen?

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a cartoonist.  I drew or attempted to draw all sorts of cartoons - comic, political, even an adventure cartoon - but I was never very good at it.  My caricatures were pedestrian, and my ideas (not all of which actually got on paper) were neither clever or funny, except for the odd current-events reference.  I even remember the last cartoon I ever drew - a multi-panel  cartoon of Ronald Reagan "explaining" the Iran-contra affair in the style of Joe Isuzu, which I'd been planning to submit to my college paper but changed my mind about and tossed out.  So I have respect for anyone who can summarize an idea in a cartoon, particularly one that uses only a single panel and one line. 

This is why I was so horrified at the the attack on the French magazine Charlie Hebdo by Islamic extremists for publishing cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed.  The murders in Paris and the killings of hostages in the manhunts that have followed are an attack on the right of people to live in a free society and question accepted beliefs and ideas.  This was something Charlie Hedbo has done for decades and Spy magazine did in America for a few years.  (Spy magazine offended many famous people.  Noted rhymes-with-glass-poles Liz Smith and Donald Trump famously detested Spy, and Smith was apparently pleased when it folded for the first of two times, but no one at Spy ever lost their lives for their satire.)   This assault has shaken France to the core, and it's fed into an already extremist climate in which right-wingers are calling the very idea of sustaining a Muslim population within French borders into question.  France is bound to go through some deep soul-searching as a result, particularly when Arab and black French citizens are probably more frustrated with their impoverished lives than at any time since the 2005 riots in the country, and its overall economy is bad enough to make François Hollande its least popular president since the Fifth Republic was established in 1958.  However far France has fallen in recent years, though, the French ought to stand up for free speech but also remember that most Muslims are moderate, peaceful people and deserve to be bestowed with liberty, equality and fraternity too.

In the meantime . . .