The commentators                    08-01-15

...on Charlie Hebdo

We who don’t publish what may offend Muslims but would offend no one else act in effect to abnormalise what should be normal — we help to make peculiar that which should be banal. We have operated a Muslim double standard and in so doing we have gently connived in turning Charlie Hebdo and others like them into targets. Paris says we must stop.
- David Aaronovitch, The Times
If one way of stopping obscenities is providing the security services a bit more access to our e-mails, we must give it to them. If it means internet providers handing over their records, the records must be handed over. If it means newspapers showing restraint the next time an Edward Snowden knocks on their door, then restraint will have to be shown. Because look who came knocking at the door yesterday.
- Dan Hodges, Daily Telegraph
Simon Jenkins
These acts are crimes and should be treated as such. They are for assiduous policing, at which Britain has so far been reasonably successful. They are not for constitutional deterioration. Only weakened and failing states treat these crimes as acts of war. Only they send their leaders diving into bunkers and summoning up ever darker arts of civil control, now even the crudities of revived torture.
- Simon Jenkins, The Guardian_
David Cameron told the House of Commons that the terrorists will never win. But in small fragments they already have. Harris wagers not a single national newspaper will reprint any Charlie Hebdo front cover featuring either the Prophet Muhammad or radical Islamists.
- Mike Harris, The Independent
Europe is staring into an abyss of oppression, violence and fear. The very existence of free speech, one of the foundations of our civilisation, is now under unprecedented threat from Islamic extremism.
- Leo McKinstrey, Daily Express
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