The most important breaking story right now is without doubt the mass murder at the offices of the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, yesterday.

At least 12 people, including two policemen outside the office, were murdered and another seven injured when two masked men ran in and began shooting with Kalashnikovs. They shouted "We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed", but the magazine last ran cartoons of the founder of Islam more than three years ago, following which its offices were firebombed just a day later. The attack is more likely to be related to the latest tweet on Charlie Hebdo's account, which shows a cartoon of the Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, leader of Islamic State, the terrorist organisation formerly known as ISIS.

The French president, Francois Hollande, correctly described the murders as an attack on liberty. Gunning down journalists deliberately is fundamentally different to gunning down school-teachers or clerks. In all cases you have sought to murder people and you have succeeded, but with journalists, the murder is not an end in itself but an assault on one of the most cherished European values: freedom of expression.

It is no coincidence that there are two kinds of journalists (and the newspapers and magazines they work for) who are most likely to be targeted and killed: investigative journalists and satirical journalists. When the first are murdered or targeted in other ways, it is almost always by a person or group of persons who they are investigating.

In other words, the person who organises the murder has a direct, vested interest in stopping the journalist by the direct means of murder, which also serves pour encourager les autres. When satirical journalists and magazines are hit, it is invariably by those who cannot come to terms with freedom of expression as an inalienable human right and a particular value of European society. People of a totalitarian mindset are literally unable to understand satire or its prime valuable position in freedom of expression and European life.

Any form of satirical mockery is a gross insult, an offence to honour and completely intolerable. We need not go far - certainly not all the way to Paris in search of members of Islamic State or other pseudo-religious fundamentalists. Malta is replete with such people. Their frame of mind is not far off, and while they would personally be averse to firebombing offices or murdering people, they still call for certain journalists to be 'silenced'.

They stop short of saying what form this silencing should take, or why they think silencing a journalist should be a reasonable, desirable goal in a civilised European country.

It the time I am writing this, a few minutes past evening deadline, no Maltese politician has yet commented in public about the horrendous murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, or the implications of that crime. I remember when cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed were published in Denmark to a great deal of controversy and calls for violence (with much violence actually occurring), a couple of Maltese politicians gave their views when asked. The Danes, they said, should not have published the cartoons, because they were asking for trouble, and now look what happened. I remember feeling terribly angry when reading that. It was the most unbelievably stupid thing to say.

The entire purpose of the violence and threats is precisely to condition European behaviour into non-European behaviour, through fear of the consequences. In European culture, nothing is beyond satire, criticism and mockery...or depiction (this latter unless it is intrinsically a crime, like child pornography). And now there are Europeans who would tell us that it would be best if we avoided being satirical or mocking about certain people or subjects because we will of course be murdered or firebombed.

Then there are other Europeans, who with a catastrophic failure of imagination say that it is wrong to make fun of the Prophet Mohammed, to depict him when Islam does not allow this, or to joke about Islam because joking about religion isn't acceptable, any religion.

But European freedom of worship comes with the concomitant right and duty to criticise where we see fit, and this includes mockery. For years, Europeans were frightened and nervous of any such thing, because of what happened in the Nazi era with Jews, but that was not mockery. Those were not jokes. None of it was satire. 

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