Islamic terrorists strike at journalists because the terrorists fear the pen. They know it is mightier than the sword.
As the IJN prepared to go to press this week, details of the terrorist attack on Wednesday against a French satirical magazine remained mostly unfocused. Speculation was rife as to whether the perpetrators were native French citizens, whether they actually belong to al-Qaida, whether the cold-blooded murder of 12 Charlie Hebdo staff members and police officers represents a new tactical direction for Islamist terror in Europe and elsewhere.
Despite the uncertainties endemic to breaking stories of this magnitude, it is clear that the killers in Paris were Islamist terrorists, adding yet another atrocity to the long litany of such acts already committed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, al-Qaida, ISIS, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram and any number of other terror groups.
This week’s attack is but the latest theater in the long jihad that Islamists are committed to waging against an ever-growing list of foes they see as worthy of summary execution, an abridged version of which would include Europeans, Americans, Israelis, Jews, Christians and Muslims who disagree with them.
The attack also escalates the Islamists’ already bloody war against journalists all over the world. In specifically targeting editorial cartoonists, writers and publishers, the killers were eliminating practitioners of free expression and press freedom, much as American journalist Daniel Pearl, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and the recent victims of ISIS beheadings were singled out.
This determined pattern of targeted murder says a great deal about the terrorists who carry it out. It shows that not only do they detest, but deeply fear, free expression. They fear the sort of satire that Charlie Hebdo in Paris regularly published, the straight news reporting that Pearl practiced, the documentary cinema at which van Gogh excelled, even the fiction that novelist Salman Rushdie wrote.
Terrorists dread the pen — or the computer, or the camera, or the artist’s pencil. They dread that the pen will ultimately prove mightier than their sword; that the falsehood and emptiness of their own ideological darkness can, and ultimately will, be vanquished by the light of day.
Terrorists live in mortal fear of the truth. It is their worst enemy. We must never allow ourselves to forget that.
Copyright © 2015 by the Intermountain Jewish News
