The death of artists is deplorable. There is nothing that justifies this crime.
 
Yet, there is much need to put it into context before fascists and warmongers do.
All of us – and especially liberals and leftists under shock – must understand that we do not live in a peaceful world where suddenly some lunatics decide to go on a killing spree.

Three brief points on this:  
 
First, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in the Mediterranean, in the streets of European cities, the Western elites have declared a global war against poor people who happen to escape not only the wars that the US and their European allies created, but also the fundamentalists like ISIS, whom the US and their global allies supported.

If for Europeans the Mediterranean is a sea of leisure, for Muslim migrants it is a space of death.
 
Second, there is a crucial political and ethical difference between ridiculing your own religion at home and someone else's, whose countries have been invaded by your armies and your colonial arrogance for the last 200 years. Liberals (and atheist artists for that matter) must stop considering ALL religions equally open to ridicule.

You can't ridicule someone's religion while at the same time the soldiers of your country are invading his country. When the cartoonists of one country ridicule the religion of those whose country is being invaded by the armies of the same country, their “art” can be interpreted as part of the invasion, and NOT as satire or freedom of expression. In other words, they are considered as part of the war. This is not a matter of right or wrong, of agreement or moral judgment, it is how it is.

Artists and intellectuals do not live in parallel worlds, no matter how much they would like to.
 
Third, there is no such thing like “freedom of expression” when a global war is already underway. Artists and intellectuals should be the first to deconstruct the hollow idea of “our freedom” as useless (and hypocritical) when Others are being bombed, detained, murdered and humiliated both home and abroad.
 
One way to begin is to attack the liberal hypocrisy. Most of the time, liberal hypocrisy is based on two moves:
 
On one hand, it constructs a unified world within which 'expression' is considered everybody's right. However, this excludes all those who can't have access to the liberal public space, either because they are in Guantanamos, or are drowning at the Mediterranean borders, or are bombed in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, or because they are silenced by mainstream media etc.
 
On the other hand, it constructs a fragmented world in which some expressions are considered religiously untouchable in the name of freedom of expression – “art” being one of them.

When those privileged (artists for example) are faced with the unintended and perilous consequences of the common space of liberalism they claim to belong in a different world where other rules apply.
 
All in all, liberalism is the space that allows for its own Others to be killed, excluded and humiliated albeit humanely and within its own laws.

Indeed, “Enlightenment” is the religion of the West in the name of which the biggest crimes (colonialism, slavery, genocides of indigenous people in Africa, Asia, Americas) have been committed. If we want to blame religion we shall start from our own, liberal friends.
 
PS.
 
Most of these thoughts were first posted on facebook in the aftermath of the attack. The posts were reproduced widely by friends, academics or not, who are from, work in or have visited the Middle East.

On the other hand, the same posts were attacked and criticized by other friends, academics or not, who have almost no relation to the region.

Hence my suggestion to these latter friends attached.