It’s been a week and the dust has started to settle after the horrific acts of terror by the islamists again, this time against France. Acts of terror are no longer rare, they keep happening all over all the time most people are at a state where there reaction is like -‘Oh no, not again! How many innocent people lost their lives this time?’
By those standards the attacks at Charlie Hebdo wouldn’t be too appalling and yet these shook the world, these most certainly did shake me up. The difference in this case is that whereas most terrorist attacks target a place and the goal of the terrorists is to kill as many people as they can, this one was an assassination with surgical precision.
But just that, is not the reason the world was shaken up. We were all shaken up because this was an attack at the conscience of freedom, freedom of thought and expression. It was an attempt to kill the mocking bird and that is what shakes me.
The other thing that saddens me now that all of this is over is that this will happen again and again and again, we still haven’t learned our lessons from all these attacks. Isn’t it funny how humans are supposed to be the smart creatures whereas the machines are supposed to be one dimensional, unable to think and to learn. If you were to run these incidents through the simplest of classification algorithms, you would stare at the common denominator and know what to fix to make sure that this didn’t repeat. Political correctness however wouldn’t allow society to contemplate on the real solution for it would be too radical and too obvious.
With all that being said, let us come back to Charlie Hebdo; I must admit that I didn’t know too much about this obscure French satirical comic. I did check their work out after this and I must admit it was pretty funny and surprisingly accurate factually which is why cartoons can do what bombs can do, shake the foundation of a fickle faith. The artists who illustrated those cartoons may not live anymore but others will come and you will be an inspiration, your memory and your art will live on and a time will come when we finally win this war, it may not be in my lifetime but I will remember and thank you for your invaluable contribution in this fight and in our shared victory.
#JeSuisCharlie