10 Years Ago: Jews and Cartoonists Slaughtered in Paris

A decade since Islamic terrorists murdered cartoonists one day and then Jews another, the jihad has only become more ominous

On January 7, 2015, two French-born Algerian Muslim brothers entered the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo — a satirical, leftist, atheist illustrated weekly — and shot 23 people, murdering 12. Their victims’ crime was that they had published cartoons of Muhammad.

Two days later, on January 9, a Muslim immigrant from Mali took staff and patrons of the Hypercasher Jewish grocery store hostage and laid siege to the building for four and a half hours. He took 19 Jews hostage at gun-point and murdered four before being killed by police.

These two massacres of innocent men and women — some for being free spirits, others for being Jews — rocked not only France but the world.

It was the heyday of ISIS. But those who read and wrote for Le Monde, The Guardian, and The New York Times quickly learned to reject the reality of jihad, and the fact that unvetted migrants brought it with them.

The people who committed this act of evil, they wrote, were “radicals” and “extremists,” and their presence in both Europe and America did not constitute an extistential problem. So, too, their threat to Jews was ignored.

And so, for a while, people flooded Twitter with the hashtag “#JeSuisCharlie” and wore amusing pencil-shaped brooches, and acted as if such gestures were the same thing as defending freedom of speech and religion — the very things which were attacked.

Even worse, the Western media, which was ideologically aligned with the dead cartoonists on almost all matters, began looking at any source other than jihad to blame and found the victims. They smeared Charlie Hebdo as “right-wing” — their way of saying the murdered deserved to die for drawing Muhammad. TIME even ran a story entitled “Charlie Hebdo Tragedy Creates Momentum for German Right Wing.”

Then, in the ensuing months, Europe opened its borders to further migration from the Muslim world, and the number of jihad attacks only grew while the E.U.’s Jewish population shrank.

Today, a decade later, Western leaders are still largely in denial. Much of Europe, many in America, and the vast majority of Jews in community leadership positions still cling to fantasies of “multi-cultural” utopia while innocents from Berlin to San Bernardino — and, most recently, in New Orleans — die because of their delusions, their cowardice, and their perfidy.

Today, there are only a few points of hope:

• The incoming Trump administration’s promises to secure America’s borders, vet immigrants, punish anti-Semites, and protect Israel.

• Some European politicians, like Geert Wilders in Holland and Giorgia Meloni in Italy, who claim to understand their continent’s peril.

• Some American Jewish leaders, perhaps even including the ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt, seem to be awakening to the threat from the left and Islam. (What on earth will he do with his woke staff?)

• And embattled, undaunted Israel itself — braving the world’s hatred, curses, and missiles alone but bereft of so many delusions.

On this sobering anniversary, we invite you to read the heroic Douglas Murray’s latest column, memorializing Charlie Hebdo’s martyrs to free speech, “He Died Standing Up.”