The killing of two women and a man at a Catholic Church in France last week — as they prayed — was an event worthy of far more outrage, sympathy and reflection than the world gave it.
The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, called it not the act of a madman but an act of terror in an ideological war. The war being waged is by radical Islam, he said, and it is a war on the West and on liberty.
The irony about defending liberty is that said defense requires not only force, but a certain loss of liberty.
Policing, patrolling, securing borders and even a certain amount of surveillance are natural responses, and finding the proper limit to these steps is not so easy when you are under attack.
This latest assault happened in Nice where there have been several terrorist attacks in recent years, including a vicious and massive one four years ago in which the killer used a truck as his weapon and killed 80 people.
In 2015, two militants shot and killed 12 people in the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, which had dared to satirize Muslim extremism.
On Oct. 16 of this year, a French schoolteacher, Samuel Paty, was beheaded in the Paris suburb where he worked, after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad during a civics class lesson on free speech.
Macron has said this is a war on liberty and that French men and women must stand together against fear and intimidation.
And, yes, liberty will win out, just as Martin Luther King Jr. used to remind us, love will win the final victory in the long arc of God’s time.
Meanwhile, these acts remind us that there is sometimes real evil in the world. And that free people sometimes have irrational and unscrupulous and determined enemies. And that cities and communities need police officers and republics need armies.
In the United States, we are at the end of a strange but important presidential campaign. But we need to take time to relearn these lessons and remember that free people need friends and allies. France has often stood with the United States in times of peril. We need to stand with France.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
