As I write, on November 2, 2020, it is 16 years to the day since Dutch-Moroccan jihadist Mohammed Bouyeri, dressed in a djellaba and carrying a knife, a machete and a gun, shot and stabbed filmmaker-writer Theo van Gogh to death on the sun-filled streets of Amsterdam.
Less than a year later, Flemming Rose, an editor at the Danish Jyllands-Posten received death threats from Muslim radicals in his own country, while Muslims worldwide called for a boycott of Danish products, burned the Danish embassy in Damascus, and rioted across the globe.
And then in 2015, after satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo republished a selection of those same cartoons, a group of Muslim terrorists raided its Paris office, killing 12 illustrators and editors, and wounding 11 more.
The reason: Van Gogh, the Jyllands Posten, and Charlie Hebdo had all allegedly insulted Islam, had mocked – dishonored, even – the prophet Mohammed. They deserved to die.
Now here we are again.
It began in late September, when an 18-year-old Pakistani man wielding a knife stabbed two people outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo. The attack occurred as the trial for the 2015 Charlie Hebdo accomplices was beginning, and soon after Charlie Hebdo's new editors republished the cartoons – a timing officials believe was no coincidence.
The incident raised again the long-unresolved debate in France – and elsewhere in the West – over free speech, blasphemy, and censorship, and whether "blasphemous" speech should be permissible, even where free speech is enshrined into the law, as it is in the United States. France, like other European countries, does ban some forms of speech it deems "hate speech," like Holocaust denial, where America does not.
For at least one teacher in a Paris suburb, the incident made for an important lesson. Challenging his students to debate the question of free expression, Samuel Paty shared one of the Mohammed cartoons with his students, creating an uproar within the school and among the parents of many Muslim students. The fury spread. Just days later, 18-year-old Abdoullakh Anzorov, a Chechen immigrant who didn't even attend the school, slit Paty's throat and decapitated him, as he walked along a shaded street.
French officials immediately spoke out to honor the teacher and to denounce what President Emmanuel Macron called "an attempt to strike down the republic."








