The silence roars

As I mentioned yesterday, the Internet pretty much exploded with cartoons expressing the sorrow and outrage of the civilized world at the atrocity at Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday.

But there was also response from newspapers—actual publications mixing ink on paper, just as the satirical weekly did to such great effect—which went straight to the heart of the matter. Because the hooded and masked thugs who gunned down 12 people in the course of “avenging the Prophet” evidently thought that ending those particular lives would end the sort of commentary they’d been making.

And again and again, publishers and editors made it clear on their front pages that this was a fundamentally baseless expectation. I’ll give you two examples, first from The Independent (UK):

And  what has to be the extremists’ worst nightmare, from B.Z. (Germany):