https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/03/how-freedom-dies/
Islamic terrorism is a tunnel with no way out. It’s Wednesday, January 7, again. A door opens, again. Two black-clothed figures holding weapons enter, again. The balaclavas they hide behind have owl-shaped eye slits: popular knitting with motorbike riders. One hundred and nine seconds later they have fired sixty bullets into the Charlie Hebdo offices and, from religious motives, have murdered eleven people—on the floor their broken bodies lie over, on and between the wounded. Later, it will be widely accepted on the French Left that the dead and mutilated brought their fate upon themselves because the magazine had published a cartoon of Mohammed.
Line drawings are displayed on a wall in the cramped office, proposals for the current edition of the magazine. Among them is Charb’s last picture, a sketch of author Michel Houellebecq. His novel Soumission is published the morning his caricaturist is murdered. Months later the office, most of the blood stains cleaned away, is briefly unsealed to allow Riss (above), an artist and magazine editor, back into the room to collect his belongings. He notices that Houellebecq is still pinned to the wall, and then the portrait disappears. When Riss has file copies of the publication transferred to their new office some copies are seen to have been ripped by a bullet, and in an unused wooden box, one side punctuated with a clean round hole, a bullet is found resting peacefully inside.
