As a middle school ELA teacher, I am saddened by the death of this man just trying to do his job.

So France in the last few days was the victim of yet another Islamist terror attack. A particularly vile execution style murder of a teacher who dared to teach freedom of expression. The instinct at such times is to decry a tiny extremist minority who do not represent the Muslim religion.

Sadly, this is not true.

The execution of people considered to have insulted Islam is not an idea unique to a handful of deranged lunatics. It is depressingly mainstream in the Muslim world, with the death penalty given for blasphemy in a dozen Muslim nations, and jail terms in many others. Even in France itself, where one would expect that a Westernised Muslim population would have adopted liberal attitudes, a disturbingly large minority is sympathetic to Islamist terrorists. An article by the committee to protect journalists found that over a quarter of French Muslims did not condemn the brutal attack and murder of the staff of Charlie Hebdo a few years ago.

https://cpj.org/2020/09/as-police-investigate-fresh-attack-amid-charlie-hebdo-trial-french-media-unify-around-free-expression/

Islam has a massive problem, and it's a problem that can be found across the globe. We must not pretend it is a tiny minority, we must not pretend we can ignore it. We must stand shoulder to shoulder with those moderate Muslims who reject utterly the barbarism that has been allowed to spread like a cancer throughout the Muslim world. We must stand behind freedom of expression and against the old world savagery that promotes outdated notions such as blasphemy.

If Muhammed were alive today, one would hope he would be very angry with those murder in his name :x

Je suis Samuel, je suis Charlie.