What should be our reaction to Charlie Hebdo attacks?

After the highly condemnable attack on the Charlie Hebdo staff on Wednesday, as Paris faces another day of security threat we are flooded with various opinions on the internet and newspapers. And Frankly speaking, i am quite shocked to see that opinions solely against terrorists (the kind we witnessed during the Peshawar school attack) are totally absent this time around. Articles straight out against terrorism and their lethal ways are in minority. Going by the articles I am coming across, if we were to categorize them, we would come to a conclusion that majorly they deal with the freedom pertaining to the art of cartooning and practice of religion in general.

pic credits-en.wikipedia.org

("100 lashes if you don’t die laughing")

 The very important issue raised by Ravish Kumar on ‘primetime’ (ndtv 8th january) is one that must be given a thought-why does religion immediately gets attached to terrorists? Now, though it may seem quite an easy parallel to draw given that these terror and violent outfits through self-proclamation identify and represent themselves with a religion like Islam or Hinduism. We are perhaps too eager to believe them. With such accusations on a single religion, followers of the same quickly use the holy books to defend themselves, to acquit the charges that they face due to the bad fish in the sea. Similarly immediately after the shootings at the Charlie Hebdo office as with vandalizing of the theatres with the movie Pk, liberalists and secularists have been defending the art of lampooning and the freedom related there of .

In both these defenses, I believe that the spotlight gets deferred from the prime issue. The fact that the shooters were terrorists. Extremists and intolerant folks who hide behind the guns. The thugs who believe that terrorizing is the only solution to get their way. The questions about religion and freedom, in my opinion will forever remain unresolved as these are relative concepts and each earthling will have his own views and therefore a consensus will never be reached.  

We might be secular and believe in satirizing religion to avoid making it a ‘self-sanctifying institution’ (Sirnate.the hindu ) . We might be believers and question the extremists’ interpretations and ignorance. We might even be orthodox and condemn any attacks or questions whatsoever on what we hold sacred (like any representation of the prophet).

But we should all be on the same page and deny terrorists any agency. Violence reflects intolerance and that must most supremely be condemned. Not agreeing or even being hurt does not give license to kill.The culprits are the terrorists and they are the one at whom our angers must be directed towards.