The attacks on the Charlie
Hebdo office and kosher market in Paris that left 17 dead this week defy human language:
words like unthinkable, unconscionable, inhuman, and barbarous simply don’t go
far enough to describe the shock and sorrow felt by people all over the world. Thankfully,
it is unimaginable to most people to commit such heinous acts of violence
against a group of people simply for drawing a cartoon or writing an article.
Whatever your opinion of the “offensive” work of Charlie Hebdo, most voices seem to be in agreement that no one
deserves to die for causing offense. (Most.)
Yet as shocking as the attack is, it is not all that surprising.
That it occurred in the middle of Paris, a Western city in a Western country, is
slightly out of the ordinary for a contemporary terrorist attack. Much more
often, we read about attacks from the supposed safety of Western communities as
Islamabad, Baghdad, Kabul, Aleppo (and on and on) burn and bleed. This type of terrorist attack (akin to small-scale urban warfare) is growing more commonplace
nonetheless, and attacks like the ones in Paris this week and the Boston Marathon bombings show that the West is far from immune from extremist violence. The growing pains (to put it mildly) felt by European nations
as they struggle to forge common bonds among citizens from diverse backgrounds speak to similar
struggles in the Muslim-majority world to bridge communal divides. Regardless
of their vastly different political landscapes, efforts at integration and
harmonization have similar effects in both regions: usually division, sometimes
violence.