'The Assassin Is Still at Large'

One year after the attacks, Charlie Hebdo:

After what the staff of Charlie Hebdo has been through, it’s difficult to criticize them. But that cover is a dodge, isn’t it? It wasn’t some undifferentiated “God” who was responsible for the murders of 12 people last year, and the Kouachi brothers were not Buddhists or Sikhs or Huguenots. Similarly, it wasn’t an Episcopalian who shot up a kosher supermarket in Porte de Vincennes the next day, it wasn’t French Catholics who slaughtered 89 people at the Bataclan in November, and the knife-wielding man shot and killed outside a Paris police station this morning wasn’t toting the flag of Charles Martel.​

If Charlie Hebdo were never to lampoon anyone ever again, I’m not sure I could blame them. But there is a specific, nameable threat facing the West — and this cover only obscures it.